For the ancient Greeks, it was the shapely buttocks of the famous statue of Aphrodite kallipygos – literally “Aphrodite of the beautiful arse.” The female ideal also included small, pert breasts, pale skin indicative of leisure indoors, away from the sun, and fair reddish or blonde hair.
The male ideal, by contrast, was that of the athlete, the body shaped by training in the gymnasium and the wrestling school (palaestra) for competition and, ultimately, war. Defined but not excessive musculature; broad shoulders and narrow waist; tanned skin glistening with olive oil and exfoliated by the scraping of a bronze strigil. And we know the Greeks preferred dainty genitals too – at least in art – as a sign of masculine continence and self-control.
In our own time, one of the more enduring and coveted signs of health and beauty has been “six-pack abs” – visible, taut musculature of the core – and bulging biceps. But of course fashions change, and now we’re on our own callipygian bent – and it’s not just the women with their endless “booty workouts” and BBLs stuffed into tight Lululemon yoga pants like obscene Christmas hams.
Eating living foods is something the average person simply doesn’t do much of, if at all, today
Just the other week I opened the lifestyle section of a newspaper magazine and was told powerful glutes are now the “must-have” physical status symbol for men, too.
We seem to be going much further than the ancient Greeks and their love of the perfectly rounded posterior. If the latest news from the White House is anything to go by, we’re actually regressing to a much deeper, more primitive state, something like Freud’s anal stage writ large, when the child is fascinated and thrilled by what comes out of its body in solid form. According to the New York Times, some of the most powerful men in the world now want, more than anything else, a bottom that doesn’t need to be wiped.
Apologies if you’re reading this over breakfast, lunch, dinner. You might want to save the rest of this article for later.
This strange new fad is the work of one man, a 63-year-old doctor called Sean O’Mara. O’Mara has introduced to the White House a new way of eating that he’s dubbed the “Living Diet,” and it’s being credited with miraculous results. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, claims the diet has reduced his visceral fat by 40 percent. Donald Trump is said to have complimented the Vice President on his new trim physique. And yes, looking at J.D. Vance, he does look like he’s in significantly better shape. Howard Lutnick and Sean Duffy are on the diet, too.
The Living Diet involves eating only meat from grass-fed ruminants – cows, bison, elk, venison, sheep – and as many different kinds of fermented food as possible, such as raw milk, kimchi, blue cheese, kefir, kvass (fermented rye beer), live yogurt and sauerkraut. The real aim of the diet is to populate the gut with a wide a variety of beneficial bacteria, which ramp up the body’s metabolism, burning more calories and helping the dieter lose weight effortlessly.
The New York Times sent a reporter to meet O’Mara, who swiftly pulled out a copy of the famous Bristol Stool Chart, which grades human excrement according to its shape and consistency, from 1 to 7. O’Mara brags that he can consistently deliver the perfect Type 4 for adherents of his diet: “smooth, soft like a snake.” Indeed, when things are going really well, the dieter reaches a kind of Zen phase, a sort of pooing-without-pooing. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus,” O’Mara tells the reporter, before describing the ideal expulsion: “odorless, wipe-free, over in three to five seconds and ‘nearly orgasmic.’” O’Mara claims his own are so perfect, he could “have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room and nobody would know.”
The so-called “no-wiper” has been something of a joke fixture of the esoteric health side of X, the strange little corner of social media I inhabit, for some time now. An Australian influencer I’m friends with regularly posts about his “elite no-wipers,” but I think he only does that when he doesn’t have anything else to say. It’s an occupational hazard once you’ve tweeted enough times about seed oils, organ meat, raw milk, raw eggs, grounding, going to sleep at dusk, turning off your phone, getting sunlight on your balls… O’Mara, though, is deadly earnest. He means it.
The New York Times reporter tried the “Living Diet,” as it’s called, for a week. He didn’t fare well. After a first “invigorating” breakfast of steak and kimchi, he soon got horribly bored and embarrassed as he tried to hide wedges of Roquefort cheese and honking jars of fizzing veg from his co-workers. He concludes that the diet probably works because people lose interest in food and just, well, stop eating. This is how some diets actually work, by being too revolting or plain dull. The immutable laws of thermodynamics do the rest. Calories in, calories out. Simple.
I think there really is something to the Living Diet if you can stick to it. There’s an ever-expanding abundance of literature on the tremendous benefits of eating living foods, and it’s something the average person simply doesn’t do much of, if at all, today. Reams of studies associate consumption of foods such as kimchi with weight loss and insulin sensitivity, better immune function and elimination of allergies and inflammatory bowel disease. A meta-analysis from this year of 50 studies involving three million participants linked consumption of fermented foods with reduced all-cause mortality and mortality from cardiovascular disease.
One thing we do know for sure is that our guts aren’t what they used to be
Indeed, fermentation may have been intimately involved in human evolution. A great riddle for evolutionary biologists is why humans have such disproportionately large brains. At some point in our distant past, it appears there was a trade-off between gut and brain, less of one and more of the other. We swapped great swags of intestine, useful for slowly digesting and fermenting tough plant matter, as big-bellied gorillas do, for the supercomputer upstairs. This freed our ancestors, and eventually us, to do all sorts of very clever things, like creating civilization and social media, so we can tell billions of other people about our bathroom habits. To support the expanded needs of an expanded brain, we had to get more nutrition with less space to do it. One popular explanation is fire. Another is a transition to carnivory. But what if we just moved our digestive apparatus outside our body, letting micro-organisms do the hard work before we ate the food? It’s a compelling idea.
One thing we do know for sure is that our guts aren’t what they used to be. Scientists have likened it to a grand extinction event, like whatever they currently think killed the dinosaurs. Ancient coprolites – fossilized human turds – show a diversity of microbial species without parallel today. Our ancestors’ guts contained dozens of microbes that don’t even exist anymore, and many that are extremely rare or completely absent from our guts. Hunter-gatherer tribes such as the Yanomami and the Hadza have significantly more diverse species living in their guts than US adults, whether they live in the city or the country. Estimates suggest a modern US adult may have lost 50 percent of the gut diversity possessed by people living in traditional small-scale societies. Why? Industrialization and urbanization, modern processed-food diets, widespread use of antibiotics, improved sanitation and the decline in breastfeeding.
So here’s what I say: go ahead, eat some Roquefort, have a bowl of live yogurt and a serving of sauerkraut with your meal. You’ll almost certainly feel better: less bloated, more energy, a clearer head, especially if you do it regularly. You’ve got science to back you up on that. You can go the whole hog and follow all the tenets of the Living Diet. But know this: if you come to my house for dinner, I’ll be watching you like a hawk.
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