Holistic Health November 2000 Newsletter
Today a great deal of confusion exists regarding nutrition. We are inundated with experts who tell us what we should eat, often totally contradicting each other. What's worse, new research invalidates the old. It is hard to know what to eat, what not to eat. Eggs were good, then they were bad, now they're good again. Margarine was good, now it is bad.
To make sense of all this, we need to utilize a common sense approach. Let's look at archeological data: when were people sick, when were they healthy? What did they eat when they were healthy?
People lived 5-6 million years without technology. They ate what was readily available and they ate it without cooking, they had no fire.
Gorillas and chimpanzees, the two apes closest to humans eat mostly leaves, roots, bark, and small animals like ants, insects, worms and rodents. Their diet pattern analysis showed that it is 80% complex carbohydrates, 10% protein and 10% fat. We can expect that prehistoric people ate a similar diet.
About 10,000-25,000 years ago a shift occurred. People discovered fire and invented farming. Cultivating foods and animals allowed them to eat foods that weren't edible before, such as grains, beans and milk.
Archeology shows that the bone structure of the hunter/gatherer people is strong (this is true of hunter/gatherers today as well), whereas farming cultures have a high incidence of osteoporosis, bone deformities and other degenerative diseases. Scientists have proved that most chronic degenerative diseases are diseases of malnutrition, i.e. lack of nutrients.
Modern diet not only lacks many nutrients (through soil depletion and processing), but worse, adds artificial chemicals, the ability to cope with which, is not in our DNA programming.
The consequence of these irritants is a chronic weakening of the body's ability to compensate for the changing environment. In other words, we are not able to fight off diseases and we see a dramatic, continuing rise of incidents of cancer, diabetes, cardiac disease and other degenerative disease.
What can we do? The answer is to return to our ancestral diet as much as possible (we can leave out the worms and rodents). Eat more raw food. Avoid harmful substances and eliminate accumulated toxins. Eat complex, whole foods. Avoid artificial chemicals and additives. Drink less soda, more clean water. In future issues we will explore how to do all this.
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