I’ve been thinking a lot about how to get started with this blog. There are so many topics and ideas relating to good and healthy nutrition that the subject itself can (and does) feel very overwhelming at times. One of the “Big Ideas” I keep coming back to, over and over, in terms of a “big-picture” look at the complexities of food, health, nutrition and the human condition, is the relationship between what we eat and our basic, genetic, anatomical and physiological make-up. We actually are “designed” to run most effectively and efficiently on a very specific subset of nutrients that are in tune with the four million year old genetic template of our ancestors; nutrients that for most people in most cultures today are not fully present (and often-times almost non-existent) in the typical daily diet.
There have been three major periods or “epochs” of human diet over the millennia, with as many combinations and permutations and cross-fertilizations as there are human cultures and groupings. The first (and by far the longest and most influential in terms of our genetic connections with nutrition) is the time of the hunter-gatherer, roughly from about 4 million years ago to about 10 – 12,000 years ago. This time period set the foundation for who we are as a nutritional species; what the needs are at the system, tissue and cellular level. Nora Gedgaudas, in her recently published book, Primal Body—Primal Mind goes into great detail describing the nutritional-physiological relationship of our paleo ancestors. Some 95+% of our genetic patterns are still based on this time period, and for the most part, they are extremely different from what most modern humans eat today. By far and away the majority of foods and nutrient types that most people take in today were not available to our paleo ancestors, which means they were not available for the largest part of our genetic history. This includes all dairy products, all cereal grains, all processed foods, most fruits and vegetables, most vegetable oils and almost all sugars and other sweeteners. Essentially, what we’re eating today is alien to our systems.
The second dietary epoch started about 10,000 years ago with the agriculture revolution. By domesticating animals and plants (especially dairy animals and cereal grains) our dietary input shifted markedly — and our physiology is still trying to catch up. This was the first step in a long road to chronic disease and dysfunction. Paleontologists and anthropologists have discovered that there was a significant decline in stature and bone structure of humans during the first part of the agricultural revolution, that parallels an increase in grain-based diets (see Cordain and others: Origin and Evolution of the Western Diet. American Society for Clinical Nutrition. 2005). Many people today suffer from conditions that result from allergies and reactions to various proteins and other substances in grains and dairy products that our paleo ancestors never experienced. Ten thousand years seems like a long time, but in evolutionary terms, based on our four-plus million year old ancestry, it isn’t long enough for significant genetic change at the dietary level (Cordain et. al., 2005). Our digestive systems, our sugar-handling relationships, our immune responses, our hormones and our circulatory and nervous systems are all still trying to make sense (and not too successfully) of the major changes in diet experienced over the past 10 millenia.
The last major dietary change (and by far, probably the most drastic) is extremely recent (mostly during the past 200 or fewer years) and has had the most telling and most deleterious impact on our physiology and our health. This is the age of industrialized, processed, manipulated, adulterated ingredients that most people in the westernized world consume today. Many, perhaps most, of these “food” items probably should not even be technically called foods – and the relative proportion of these altered nutrients is increasing in our diets at an exponential rate. Dr. Weston Price, a dentist who witnessed first-hand the effects of modernizing diets on the tooth and jaw structure of his patients, ventured throughout the world in the 1930s comparing indigenous people eating their native and “primitive diets” with their neighbors, cousins, brothers and offspring who were assimilating western diets of processed and canned foods. His studies and observations are some of the most powerful examples of the effects of diet and nutrition on the human body, mind and spirit. See Dr. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration for a clear, enlightening (and yes, sad and sometimes frightening) description of a major transition in our dietary history.
I will go into much detail about this last dietary milestone, describing how what we eat (and sometimes how we eat) has led to the health and nutritional disasters of our time – and also, more importantly, how we can move back into balance with ancestral diets that are more in-tune with our genetics and biology.
Hi Jack,
Thanks for sharing this article. Well written and supported. As for dentistry, I wanted to share my experience. I have strong oral cavity reactions to eating cow products. My teeth will ache and seem to move after eating cow’s milk, cheese, ice cream, etc. It’s interesting. Thinking about adaptation and mutation, what do you think about the idea that the longer our bodies are exposed to toxins or new foods, the beauty of our system – that we adapt and our body (in the most ideal stress free state) creates new ways to heal and protect? Is it mostly diet or could perspective, stress, or behaviors be to blame? Part of this curiosity ties into the studies I’ve heard about people getting sick because our sanitary standards don’t allow us to build up resistance. What do you think? I look forward to reading the next article.
Peace Within,
Diana
Thanks, Diana:
Several great questions here, so I’ll try and get to them all.
First, relating to the dairy/tooth issue — if I were testing your body to see how you react to certain milk substances (i.e. caseine, lactose), I would want to know how well your body tolerated these. Using lingual-neural testing, applied kinesiology (muscle checking) or blood anti-body tests or stool tests could shed some light on what is going on. I also would want to know about the history of this issue, whether you experience it with other foods, etc. Dr. Weston A. Price was one of the first (maybe the first) to look at the relationship between our teeth and oral health and dysfunction and degeneration in specific organ systems. Mercury and other heavy metals are often problematic, but I’m not sure about any specific relationship with dairy products. I will post an article at a later time on the connection that Dr. Price and others have made regarding dental health and systemic health.
As far as the connection between toxins/new foods and adaptations, there can be a quite a bit of variability, depending on what the substances are and the person’s own bio-indivduality. For the most part, our species hasn’t had nearly the time it would take to genetically adapt to the huge inputs of toxic substances that we’ve been recently exposed to (thousands of known substances and ten of thousands of possible combinations and chemical interactions). While we have some amazing detox systems built in (liver detoxing, excretion, storage, etc), almost everyone in our culture suffers from toxic overload. This is another subject I’ll go into in more detail in a later post.
Stress is always an over-riding factor and is intertwined with almost all other health issues in one way or another. People in our culture and our world are under so much more chronic long-term stress than our ancestors could have even imagined, which only adds to the great stress burdens that we receive from poor diet and physiological imbalances. This all makes it so imperative to try and eat as healthfully as possible, as similarly to how our ancestors would have eaten, and to do everything we can to reduce and “dance” with the stresses that we’re exposed to — no mean feat in the 21st century.