We are less healthy today than our ancestors, despite boasting a longer lifespan.
Nutrition science of the 1950s convinced people that the only healthy foods were relatively bland.
An optimal human diet is full of both nutrition and flavor.
By disregarding culinary traditions, we’ve predisposed ourselves to genetic damage.
Ask ten people what the healthiest diet in the world is and you’ll get ten different answers. Some people swear by the Okinawa diet. Others prefer the Mediterranean or the French. But have you ever wondered what it is about all these traditional diets that makes the people living on these dietary strategies so healthy? This book will describe the common rules that link all successful diets. These rules constitute the Four Pillars of World Cuisine, which make up the understructure of the Human Diet. Throughout history, people have used them to protect their own health and to grow healthy, beautiful children.
In other words, they used diet to engineer their bodies. Most of us probably have something we’d want to change about the way we look and feel, or a health problem we’d like to be free of. What if you knew how to use food to upgrade your body at the genetic level?
Any improvement you’ve ever wished for your body or your health would come from optimization of your genetic function. Your genes are special material inside every one of your cells that controls the coordinated activity in that cell and communicates with other genes in other cells throughout your body’s many different tissues. They are made of DNA, an ancient and powerful molecule we’ll learn more about in the next chapter.
Think about it: What if you could re-engineer your genes to your liking? Want to be like Mike? How about Tiger Woods? Halle Berry? George Clooney? Or maybe you want to change your genes so that you can still be you, only better. Maybe you want just a modest upgrade—a sexier body, better health, greater athleticism, and a better attitude. When you start to consider what you might be willing to pay for all this, you realize that the greatest gift on Earth is a set of healthy genes. The lucky few who do inherit pristinely healthy genes are recognized as “genetic lottery winners” and spend their lives enjoying the many benefits of beauty, brains, and brawn. Being a genetic marvel doesn’t mean you automatically get everything you want. But if you have the genes and the desire, you can, with intelligent choices and hard work, have the world at your feet.
Back in the mid-1980s, a handful of biotech millionaires thought they had the technology to bring daydreams like these to life. They organized the Human Genome Project, which, we were told, was going to revolutionize how medicine was practiced and how babies were conceived and born.
At the time, conventional medical wisdom held that some of us turn out beautiful and talented while others don’t because, at some point, Mother Nature made a mistake or two while reproducing DNA. These mistakes lead to random mutations and, obviously, you can’t be a genetic marvel if your genes are scabbed with mutations. The biotech whiz kids got the idea that if they could get into our genes and fix the mutations—with genetic vaccines or patches—they could effectively “rig the lottery.” On June 26, 2000, they reached the first milestone in this ambitious scheme and announced they’d cracked the code.
“This is the outstanding achievement not only of our lifetime but in terms of human history,” declared Dr. Michael Dexter, the project’s administrator.8
Many were counting on new technology such as this to magically address disease at its source. Investors and geneticists promised the mutations responsible for hypertension, depression, cancer, male pattern baldness—potentially whatever we wanted—would soon be neutralized and corrected. In the weeks that followed, I listened to scientists on talk shows stirring up publicity by claiming the next big thing would be made-to-order babies, fashioned using so-called designer genes. But I was skeptical. Actually, more than skeptical—I knew it to be hype, an indulgence of an historically common delusion that a deeper understanding of a natural phenomenon (like, say, the orbits of the planets) quickly and inevitably leads to our ability to control that phenomenon (to manipulate the orbits of the planets). Add to this the fact that a decade earlier, while attending Cornell University, I had learned from leaders in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology that a layer of biologic complexity existed that would undermine the gene-mappers’ bullish predictions. It was an inconvenient reality these scientists kept tucked under their hats.
While the project’s supporters described our chromosomes as static chunks of information that could be easily (and safely) manipulated, a new field of science, called epigenetics, had already proved this fundamental assumption wrong. Epigenetics helps us understand that the genome is more like a dynamic, living being—growing, learning, and adapting constantly. You may have heard that most disease is due to random mutations, or “bad” genes. But epigenetics tells us otherwise. If you need glasses or get cancer or age faster than you should, you very well may have perfectly normal genes. What’s gone wrong is how they function, what scientists call genetic expression. Just as we can get sick when we don’t take care of ourselves, it turns out, so can our genes.
In the old model of genetic medicine, diseases were believed to arise from permanent damage to DNA, called mutations, portions of the genetic code where crucial data has been distorted by a biological typo. Mutations were thought to develop from mistakes DNA makes while generating copies of itself, and therefore, the health of your genes (and Darwinian evolution) was dependent on random rolling of the dice. Mutations were, for many decades, presumed to be the root cause of everything from knock-knees to short stature to high blood pressure and depression. This model of inheritance is the reason doctors tell people with family histories of cancer, diabetes, and so on that they’ve inherited genetic time bombs ready to go off at any moment. It’s also the reason we call the genetic lottery a lottery. The underlying principle is that we have little or no control. But epigenetics has identified a ghost in the machine, giving us a different vision of Mother Nature’s most fantastic molecule.
Epigenetic translates to “upon the gene.” Epigenetic researchers study how our own genes react to our behavior, and they’ve found that just about everything we eat, think, breathe, or do can, directly or indirectly, trickle down to touch the gene and affect its performance in some way. These effects are carried forward into the next generation, where they can be magnified. In laboratory experiments researchers have shown that simply by feeding mice with different blends of vitamins, they can change the next generation’s adult weight and susceptibility to disease, and these new developments can then be passed on again, to grandchildren.9
It’s looking as though we’ve grossly underestimated the dictum “You are what you eat.” Not only does what we eat affect us down to the level of our genes, our physiques have been sculpted, in part, by the foods our parents and grandparents ate (or didn’t eat) generations ago.
The body of evidence compiled by thousands of epigenetic researchers working all over the world suggests that the majority of people’s medical problems do not come from inherited mutations, as previously thought, but rather from harmful environmental factors that force good genes to behave badly, by switching them on and off at the wrong time. And so, genes that were once healthy can, at any point in our lives, start acting sick.
The environmental factors controlling how well our genes are working will vary from minute to minute, and each one of your cells reacts differently. So you can imagine how complex the system is. It’s this complexity that makes it impossible to predict whether a given smoker will develop lung cancer, colon cancer, or no cancer at all. The epigenetic modulation is so elaborate and so dynamic that it’s unlikely we’ll ever develop a technological fix for most of what ails us. So far, it may sound like epigenetics is all bad news. But ultimately, epigenetics is showing us that the genetic lottery is anything but random. Though some details may forever elude science, the bottom line is clear: we control the health of our genes.
The concept of gene health is simple: genes work fine until disturbed. External forces that disturb the normal ebb and flow of genetic function can be broken into two broad categories: toxins and nutrient imbalances. Toxins are harmful compounds we may eat, drink, or breathe into our bodies, or even manufacture internally when we experience undue stress. Nutrient imbalances are usually due to deficiencies, missing vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, or other raw materials required to run our cells. You may not have control over the quality of the air you breathe or be able to quit your job in order to reduce stress. But you do have control over what may be the most powerful class of gene-regulating factors: food.
Believe it or not, designer babies aren’t a new idea. People “designed” babies in ancient times. No, they didn’t aim for a particular eye or hair color; their goal was more practical—to give birth to healthy, bright, and happy babies. Their tools were not high technology in the typical sense of the word, of course. Their tool was biology, combined with their own common sense, wisdom, and careful observation. Reproduction was not entered into casually, as it often is today, because the production of healthy babies was necessary to the community’s long-term survival. Through trial and error people learned that, when certain foods were missing from a couple’s diet, their children were born with problems. They learned which foods helped to ease delivery, which encouraged the production of calmer, more intelligent children who grew rapidly and rarely fell sick, and then passed this information on. Without this nurturing wisdom, we—the dominant species on the planet as we are presently defined—never would have made it this far.
Widely scattered evidence indicates that all successful cultures accumulated vast collections of nutritional guidelines anthologized over the course of many generations and placed into a growing body of wisdom. This library of knowledge was not a tertiary aspect of these cultures. It was ensconced safely within the vaults of religious doctrine and ceremony to ensure its unending revival. The following excerpt offers one example of what the locals living in Yukon Territory in Canada knew about scurvy, a disease of vitamin C deficiency, which at the time (in 1930) still killed European explorers to the region.
When I asked an old Indian … why he did not tell the white man how [to prevent scurvy], his reply was that the white man knew too much to ask the Indian anything. I then asked him if he would tell me. He said he would if the chief said he might. He returned in an hour, saying that the chief said he could tell me because I was a friend of the Indians and had come to tell the Indians not to eat the food in the white man’s store…. He then described how when the Indian kills a moose he opens it up and at the back of the moose just above the kidney there are what he described as two small balls in the fat [the adrenal glands]. These he said the Indian would take and cut up into as many pieces as there were little and big Indians in the family and each one would eat his piece.10
When I first read this passage in a dusty library book from the 1940s called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, it was immediately obvious just how sophisticated the accumulated knowledge once was—far better than my medical school training in nutrition. My textbooks said that vitamin C only comes from fruits and vegetables. In the excerpt, the chief makes specific reference to his appreciation of the interviewer’s advice to avoid the food in the trading posts (“white man’s store”), demonstrating how, in indigenous culture, advice regarding food and nutrition is held in high esteem, even treated as a commodity that can serve as consideration in a formal exchange. We’ve become accustomed to using the word share these days, as in “Let me share a story with you.” But this was sharing in the truest sense, as in offering a gift of novel weaponry or a fire-starting device—items not to be given up lightly. In fact, the book’s author admitted consistent difficulty extracting nutrition-related information for this very reason. There is an old African saying, “When an elder dies, a library burns to the ground.” And so, unfortunately, this particular human instinct—an understandable apprehension of sharing with outsiders—has allowed much of what used to be known to die away.
Today we are raised to think of food as a kind of enriched fuel, a source of calories and a carrier for vitamins, which help prevent disease. In contrast, ancient peoples understood food to be a holy thing, and eating was a sanctified act. Their songs and prayers reflected the belief that in consuming food, each of us comes in contact with the great, interconnected web of life. Epigenetics proves that intuitive idea to be essentially true. Our genes make their day-to-day decisions based on chemical information they receive from the food we eat, information encoded in our food and carried from that food item’s original source, a microenvironment of land or sea. In that sense, food is less like a fuel and more like a language conveying information from the outside world. That information programs your genes, for better or for worse. Today’s genetic lottery winners are those people who inherited well-programmed, healthy genes by virtue of their ancestors’ abilities to properly plug into that chemical information stream. If you want to help your genes get healthy, you need to plug in, too—and this is the book that can help.
For fifteen years, I have studied how food programs genes and how that programming affects physiology. I’ve learned there is an underlying order to our health. Getting sick isn’t random. We get sick because our genes didn’t get what they were expecting, one too many times. Most importantly, I’ve learned that food can tame unruly genetic behavior far more reliably than biotechnology. By simply replenishing your body with the nourishment that facilitates optimal gene expression, it’s possible to eliminate genetic malfunction and, with it, pretty much all known disease. No matter what kind of genes you were born with, I know that eating right can help reprogram them, immunizing you against cancer, premature aging, and dementia, enabling you to control your metabolism, your moods, your weight—and much, much more. And if you start planning early enough, and your genetic momentum is strong enough, you can give your children a shot at reaching for the stars.
In many ways, it was my own unhealthy genes that inspired me to go to medical school and, later, to write this book. I’d had more than my fair share of problems from the beginning of my sports career. In high school track, I suffered with Achilles tendonitis, then calcaneal bursitis, then iliotibial band syndrome, and it seemed to me that I was constantly fitting corrective inserts into my shoes or adding new therapeutic exercises to my routine. In college I developed a whole new crop of soft tissue problems, including a case of shin splints so severe it almost cost me my athletic scholarship.
When my shin splints got bad enough that I had to start skipping practice, I paid yet another visit to the team physician. Dr. Scotty, a squat, mustached man with thick black hair and a high-pitched voice, told me that this time he couldn’t help me. All I could do was cut back my training and wait. But I was sure there was something else I needed to do. Perhaps I had some kind of dietary deficiency? Applying my newly acquired mastery of Biology 101, I suggested that perhaps my connective tissue cells couldn’t make normal tendons. Like many of my own patients today, I pushed Dr. Scotty to get to the bottom of my problem. I even had a plan: simply take some kind of biopsy of the tendon in my leg and compare the material to a healthy tendon. My ideas went nowhere, as I imagine such suggestions often do. Dr. Scotty furrowed his bushy eyebrows and said he’d never heard of any such test. I’d read stories in Newsweek and Time about the powerful diagnostics being brought to us by molecular biology. In my naiveté, I couldn’t believe Dr. Scotty didn’t know how to use any of that science to help me. I was so confounded by his unwillingness to consider what seemed to me to be the obvious course of action, and so enamored with the idea of getting to the molecular root of physical problems—and so enthralled by the promise of the whole burgeoning biotech field—that I scrapped my plans to be a chemical engineer and enrolled in every course I could to study genetics. I went to graduate school at Cornell, where I learned about gene regulation and epigenetics from Nobel Prize–winning researchers, then straight to Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey, in hopes of putting my knowledge of the fundamentals of genetics to practical use.
I then found out why Dr. Scotty had been dumbfounded by my questions years before. Medical school doesn’t teach doctors to address the root of the problem. It teaches doctors to treat the problem. It’s a practical science with practical aims. In this way, medicine differs quite drastically from other natural sciences. Take, for instance, physics, which has built a body of deep knowledge by always digging down to get to the roots of a problem. Physicists have now dug so deep that they are grappling with one of the most fundamental questions of all: How did the universe begin? But medicine is different from other sciences because, more than being a science, it is first and foremost a business. This is why, when people taking a heart pill called Loniten started growing unwanted hair on their arms, researchers didn’t ask why. Instead, they looked for customers. And Loniten, the heart pill, became Rogaine, the spray for balding men. Medicine is full of examples like this, one of the most lucrative being the discovery of Sildafenil, a medication originally used to treat high blood pressure until it was found to have the happy side effect of prolonging erections and was repackaged as Viagra. Since medicine is a business, medical research must ultimately generate some kind of saleable product. And that is why we still don’t know what leads to common problems like shin splints.
I didn’t go to medical school to become a businesswoman. My dreams had sprouted from a seed planted in my psyche when I was five, during an incident with a baby robin. Sitting on the street curb in front of my house one spring morning, the plump little fledgling flew down from the maple tree to land on the street in front of me. Looking directly at me, he chirped and flapped his wings as if to say, “Look what I can do!”—and then I saw the front tire of a station wagon roll up behind him. In a blink, the most adorable creature I’d ever seen was smashed into a feather pancake, a lifeless stain on the asphalt. Dead. I was outraged. Overwhelmed with guilt. Whoever was driving that car had no idea of the trauma he’d just inflicted on two young lives. This was my first experience with the finality of death, and it awoke a protective instinct that has driven my career decisions ever since: prevent harm. It was why I’d wanted to be a chemical engineer (to invent nontoxic baby diapers) and why I had gone to medical school. I was all about prevention, and that meant I needed to understand what makes us tick and what makes us sick.
Unfortunately, soon after enrolling in medical school, I found that the gap between my childhood dream and the reality of limited medical knowledge was enormous—so enormous that I concluded it wasn’t yet possible to breach. To pursue my dream of preventing harm, the best I could do was practice “preventive medicine,” and the best place to do this was within the specialty of primary care. To tell the truth, I kind of forgot about the whole idea of getting to the bottom of what makes people sick, and for many years after graduation I went on with ordinary life. Until something drew me back in.
It was those malfunctioning genes of mine, again. Shortly after moving to Hawaii, I developed another musculoskeletal problem. But this one was different from all the others. This time no doctor, not even five different specialists, could tell me what it was. And it didn’t go away. A year after I developed the first unusual stinging pain around my right knee, I could no longer walk more than a few feet without getting feverish. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard of. I’d had exploratory surgery, injections, physical therapy, and I’d even seen a Hawaiian kahuna. But everything I tried seemed to make the problem worse. Just as I was giving up hope, my husband, Luke, came up with an idea: try studying nutrition. As an excellent chef and an aficionado of all things relating to cuisine, he’d been impressed by the variety and flavors he encountered at the local Filipino buffets. Like many professional chefs I’ve spoken with since, he suspected there might be other opinions out there on what healthy food might actually be. Having fought his own battles against malnutrition while growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in a small town, he recognized that there were nutritional haves and have-nots, just as with everything else. And he suspected that my high-sugar, convenience-food diet put me in the have-not category and might even be impairing my ability to heal.
Sure, I thought, everyone has an opinion. I—on the other hand—went to medical school. Hel-l-l-lo-o-o … I took a course on nu-tri-tion. I learned bi-o-chem-is-try. I already knew to eat low-fat, low-cholesterol and count my calories. What more did I need to know? The next day, Luke brought home a book. Had I not been literally immobilized, I may never have bothered opening Andrew Weil’s book Spontaneous Healing and started reading.
Medical school teaches us to believe that we’re living longer now, and so today’s diet must beat the diets of the past, hands down. This argument had me so convinced that I never considered questioning the dietary dogma I’d absorbed throughout my schooling. But we need to take into account the fact that today’s eighty-year-olds grew up on an entirely different, more natural diet. They were also the first generation to benefit from antibiotics, and many have been kept alive thanks only to technology. Today’s generation has yet to prove its longevity, but given that many forty-year-olds already have joint and cardiovascular problems that their parents didn’t get until much later in life (as I found in my practice), I don’t think we can assume they have the same life expectancy. And the millennium generation’s lifespan may be ten to twenty years shorter.11 I was going to get my first inkling of this reality very soon.
Once I cracked the book open, it didn’t take much reading to bump into something I’d never heard of before: omega-3 fatty acids. According to Weil, these are fats we need to eat, just like vitamins. These days, our diets are so deficient that we need to supplement. This blew my mind. First of all, I’d thought fats were bad. Secondly, we were supposed to be eating better today than at any point in human history. Either he was off base, or my medical education had failed to provide some basic information. Like a kid who gets into the bathtub kicking and screaming and then doesn’t want to get out, I soon couldn’t get enough of these “alternative” books. They gave me valuable new information—and hope that I might walk normally again.
In another publication, I came across an intriguing article entitled “Guts and Grease: The Diet of Native Americans,” which suggested that Native Americans were healthier than their European counterparts because they ate the entire animal. Not just muscle, but all the “guts and grease.”
According to John (Fire) Lame Deer, the eating of guts had evolved into a contest. [He said] “In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.”12
I liked the voice of authority this Native American assumed, as if he were drawing from a secret well of knowledge. I also liked that the article’s authors offered healthy people instead of statistics of lab simulations as evidence. At the time, the approach struck me as novel—focusing on health rather than disease. Early European explorers Cabeza de Vaca, Francisco Vaquez de Coronado, and Lewis and Clark described Native Americans as superhuman warriors, able to run down buffalo on foot and, in battle, continue fighting after being shot through with arrows. Photographs taken two hundred years later, in the 1800s, capture the Native American’s imposing visage and broad, balanced bone structure. Presenting a people’s stamina and strength as evidence of a healthy diet seemed reasonable, and it rang true with my own clinical experience in Hawaii: the healthiest family members are, in many cases, the oldest, raised on foods vastly different from those being fed to their great-grandchildren. I began to doubt my presumption that today’s definition of a healthy diet was nutritionally superior to diets of years past.
Still, the dietary program of Native Americans seemed bizarre. Reading the passage about two grown men chewing their way through an animal’s unwashed, fat-encased intestine forever changed the way I remember the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp. It also brought up some serious questions. For one thing, wouldn’t eating buffalo poo make the men ill? And isn’t animal fat supposed to be unhealthy? The first issue—eating unwashed intestine—was too much for me to tackle (though later I would). So I sank my teeth into the matter of the health effects of animal fat.
Two things I learned about nutrition in medical school were that saturated fat raises cholesterol levels, and that cholesterol is a known killer. Who was right, the American Medical Association—whose guidelines are used to teach medical students—or John (Fire) Lame Deer?
This was how I began to close the knowledge gap that years ago had derailed me from pursuing further studies of the fundamentals of disease. To determine the best dietary stance, I would look at all the necessary basic science data (on free radicals, fatty acid oxidation, eicosanoid signaling, gene regulation, and the famous Framingham studies), which, fortunately, I had the training to decipher. It took six months of research to get to the bottom of this one nutritional question, but I ultimately came to understand that the nutrition science I’d learned in medical school was full of contradictions and rested on assumptions proved false by researchers in other, related scientific fields. The available evidence failed to support the AMA’s position and overwhelmingly sided with that of John (Fire) Lame Deer.
HYGIEIA: GODDESS OF NUTRITION IN THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH
Hygieia’s Bowl. In Greek mythologic emblems, Hygieia is depicted holding a bowl, from which she feeds the serpent, a symbol of medical learning. In ancient Greece the philosophy of wellness was balanced by two complementary ideas. The female, Hygieia, the goddess of health, personified the first. Hygieia was all about building healthy bodies with sound nutrition from the start—prenatally and throughout the formative years of childhood—and maintaining health for the rest of a person’s life. In other words, she embodied the most effective form of preventive medicine there is. When that first line of defense failed, and people succumbed to infections or the inevitable accident, Aesculapius, the god of medicine, acted as a kind of Johnny-on-the-spot. He provided knowledge of healing surgical procedures and therapeutic potions. The Hippocratic oath I took on graduation day invokes the wisdom of Aesculapius, Hygieia, and Panacea, the god of potions or cure-alls. But like hundreds of other fresh-faced M.D.s standing beside me in the lecture hall, hands raised, I had no idea who Hygieia was or what she stood for.
Over the last 3,000 years of civilization, the male aspect of medical science has taken over. Hygieia, which was once a highly scientific and advanced compendium of nutritional information, has been reduced to simplistic notions of cleanliness, like washing your hands and brushing your teeth. It’s time to bring Hygieia back.
This was a big deal. Contrary to the opinion of medical leaders today, saturated fat and cholesterol appeared to be beneficial nutrients. (Chapter 8 explains how heart disease really develops.) Fifty years of removing foods containing these nutrients from our diets—foods like eggs, fresh cream, and liver—to replace them with low-fat or outright artificial chemicals—like trans-fat-rich margarine (trans-fat is an unnatural fat known to cause health problems)—has starved our genes of the chemical information on which they depend. Simply cutting eggs and sausage (originally made with lactic acid starter culture instead of nitrates, and containing chunks of white cartilage) from our breakfasts to replace them with cold cereals would mean that generations of children have been fed fewer fats, B vitamins, and collagenous proteins than required for optimal growth.
Here’s why: the yolk of an egg is full of brain-building fats, including lecithin, phospholipids, and (only if from free-range chickens) essential fatty acids and vitamins A and D. Meanwhile, low-fat diets have been shown to reduce intelligence in animals.13
B vitamins play key roles in the development of every organ system, and women with vitamin B deficiencies give birth to children prone to developing weak bones, diabetes, and more.14, 15 Chunks of cartilage supply us with collagen and glycosaminoglycans, factors that help facilitate the growth of robust connective tissues, which would help to prevent later-life tendon and ligament problems—including shin splints!16
By righting the wrong assumptions that mushroomed from this one piece of nutritional misinformation, I had already gained a greater understanding of the root causes of disease than I’d thought possible. A single item of medical misinformation—that cholesterol-rich foods are dangerous—had drastically changed our eating habits and with that our access to nutrients. The effect on my personal physiology was to weaken my connective tissues, an epigenetic response that had already managed to change the course of my life in ways that I can’t begin to calculate. After reading every old-fashioned cookbook I could get my hands on, and enough biochemistry to understand the essential character of traditional cuisine, I changed everything about the way I eat. For me, eating in closer accordance with historical human nutrition corrected some of my damaged epigenetic programming. I got fewer colds, less heartburn, improved my moods, lost my belly fat, had fewer headaches, and increased my mental energy. And eventually my swollen knee got better.
It seems like every day another study comes out showing the benefits of some vitamin, mineral, or antioxidant supplement in the prevention of a given disease. All these studies taken together send the strong message that doctors still underestimate the power of nutrition to fortify and to heal. Of course, people know this intuitively, which is why dietary supplements and nutraceuticals sell so well. Unfortunately, in all this research there is also something that’s not talked about very often: artificial vitamins and powdered, encapsulated antioxidant products are not as effective as the real thing—not even close. They can even be harmful. A far better option is to eat more nutritious food.
To identify the most nutritious foods, I studied traditions from all over the world. The goal was not to identify the “best” tradition, but to understand what all traditions have in common. I identified four universal elements, each of which represents a distinct set of ingredients along with the cooking (or other preparation technique), that maximize the nutrition delivered to our cells. For the bulk of human history, these techniques and materials have proved indispensable. The reason that so many of us have health problems today is that we no longer eat in accordance with any culinary tradition. In the worst cases of recurring illnesses and chronic diseases that I see, more often than not, the victim’s parents and grandparents haven’t, either. This means that most Americans are carrying around very sick genes. But by returning to the same four categories of nourishing foods our ancestors ate—the Four Pillars of World Cuisine—our personal genetic health will be regained.
The health of your genes represents a kind of inheritance. Two ways of thinking about this inheritance, genetic wealth and genetic momentum, help explain why some people can abuse this inheritance and, for a time, get away with it. Just as a lazy student born into a prominent family can be assured he’ll get into Yale no matter his grades, healthy genes don’t have to be attended to very diligently in order for their owners’ bodies to look beautiful. The next generation, however, will pay the price.
We’ve all seen the twenty-year-old supermodel who abuses her body with cigarettes and Twinkies. For years, her beautiful skeletal architecture will still shine through. Beneath the surface, poor nutrition will deprive those bones of what they need, thinning them prematurely. The connective tissue supporting her skin will begin to break down, stealing away her beauty. Most importantly, deep inside her ovaries, inside each egg, her genes will be affected. Those deleterious genetic alterations mean that her child will have lost genetic momentum and will not have the same potential for health or beauty as she did. He or she may benefit from mom’s sizable financial portfolio—but junior’s genetic wealth will, unfortunately, have been drawn down.
That’s a real loss. Over the millennia, our genes developed under the influence of a steady stream of nourishing foods gleaned from the most nutritionally potent corners of the natural world. Today’s supermodels have benefited not just from their parents’ and grandparents’ healthy eating habits, but from hundreds, even thousands, of generations of ancestors who, by eating the right foods, maintained—and even improved upon—the genetic heirloom that would ultimately construct a beautiful face in the womb. All of this accumulated wealth can be disposed of as easily and mindlessly as the twenty-year-old supermodel flicking away a cigarette.
Such squandering of genetic wealth—a measure of the intactness of epigenetic programming—has affected many of us. My own father grew up drinking powdered milk and ate margarine on Wonder Bread every day at lunch. My mother spent much of her childhood in postwar Europe, where dairy products were scarce. Because they had inherited genetic wealth from their parents, my parents never had significant soft tissue problems in spite of these shortcomings. But those suboptimal diets did take a toll on their genes. Much of the genetic wealth of my family line had been squandered by the time I was born. Unlike my parents and grandparents, I had to struggle to keep my joints from falling apart.
Fortunately for me, my story is not over—and neither is yours. Thanks to the plasticity of genetic response we can all improve the health of our genes and rebuild our genetic wealth.
Anyone who has chronically neglected a plant and watched its leaves curl and its color fade knows that proper care and feeding can have dramatic, restorative effects. The same applies to our genes—and our epigenetic programming. Not only will you personally benefit from this during your lifetime with improved health, normalization of fat distribution, remission of chronic disease, and resistance to the effects of age, your children will benefit as well. If you think saving money for college or moving to a neighborhood with a good school system is important, then consider the importance of ensuring that your children are as healthy and beautiful as they can be. If you start early enough, the fruits of your efforts will be clearly visible in the bones of your child’s face, the face they may one day be presenting to the one person who can give them the opportunity—over all the other candidates—to inaugurate the career of their dreams. It all depends on you—what you eat and how you choose to live. I am not a specialist in stress reduction (though stress reduction is vital), and I won’t be talking that much about exercise other than to describe how different types of exercise will help you lose weight and build healthy tissue. However, by virtue of my training and subsequent studies, I am an expert at predicting the physiologic effects of eating different types of food. And my basic philosophy is simple.
I subscribe to the school of nutritional thought that counsels us to eat the same foods people ate in the past because, after all, that’s how we got here. It’s how we’re designed to eat. Epigenetics supplies the scientific support for the idea by providing molecular evidence that we are who we are, in large part, because of the foods our ancestors ate. But because healthy genes, like healthy people, can perform well under difficult conditions for a finite amount of time, there is, in effect, a delay in the system. Since nutritional researchers don’t ask study participants what their parents ate, the conclusions drawn from those studies are based on incomplete data. A poor diet can seem healthy if studied for a twenty-four-hour period. A slightly better diet can seem successful for months or even years. Only the most complete diets, however, can provide health generation after generation.
Diet books that adopt this long-term philosophy such as Paleodiet, Evolution Diet, and Health Secrets of the Stone Age have been incredibly successful partly by virtue of the philosophy itself, which has intuitive appeal. Fleshing out the bare bones of the nutritional philosophy with specifics—real ingredients and real recipes—is another matter. Authors of previously published books are still working on the old random mutation model, and so fail to account for how quickly genetic change can occur. In going all the way back to the prehistoric era, they take the idea too far to be practical. Their evidence is so limited it’s literally skeletal—gleaned from campfire debris, chips of bone, and the cleanings of mummified stomachs. These books do give us fascinating glimpses of life in the distant past. And I’m impressed by how the authors use modern physiologic science to expand tiny tidbits of data into complete dietary regimes. But each of these books, often citing the same information, leaves us with contradicting advice. Why? The data they have is simply too fragmented, too old, and too short on detail to give us meaningful guidance. How can we reproduce the flavors and nutrients found in our Paleolithic predecessors’ dinners when the only instructions they left behind come in the form of such artifacts as “the 125,000-year-old spear crafted from a yew tree found embedded between the ribs of an extinct straight-tusked elephant in Germany” and “cut marks that have been found on the bones of fossilized animals.”17
The authors do their best to make educated guesses, but clearly a creative mind could follow this ancient trail of evidence to end up wherever they like.
Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on prehistory or educated guesses. There is a much richer, living source of information available to us. It’s called cuisine. Specifically, authentic cuisine. By “authentic,” I’m not talking about the Americanized salad-and-seafood translation of Mediterranean or Okinawan or Chinese diets. I’m not talking about modern molecular gastronomy or functional food or fast food. The authentic cuisine I’m referring to is what fondest memories are made of. It’s the combination of ingredients and skills that enable families in even the poorest farming communities around the world to create fantastic meals, meals that would be fit for a king and that would satisfy even the snarkiest of New Yorkers—even, say, a food connoisseur whose glance has been known to weaken many a Top Chef contender’s knees. I am of course referring to former punk-rock-chef-turned-world-trot-ting-celebrity, Anthony Bourdain.
As evidence that there’s plenty of detailed information surviving to inform us exactly how people used to eat (and still should), I submit Bourdain’s travel TV show No Reservations, which ran from 2005 until 2012. Bourdain served up the colorful, vastly inventive, and diverse world of culinary arts for an hour each week in your living room. Bourdain got right to the heart of his host country’s distinct food culture, beginning each show by casting a historical light on the local food. Guided by food-wise natives, he ended up at the right spots to sample food that captured each geographical region’s soul. More often than not, these spots were the mom-and-pop holes-in-the-wall where people cook food the way it has been cooked in that country for as long as anyone can remember. Shows like Bourdain’s have helped to convince me that, culinarily speaking, growing up in America is growing up in an underdeveloped country.
While Americans have hot dogs and apple pie, Happy Meals, meatloaf, casseroles, and variations on the theme of salad, citizens of other countries seem to have so much more. In one region of China, a visitor could experience pit-roasted boar, rooster, or rabbit, with a side of any number of different kinds of pickles or fermented beans, hand-crafted noodles, or fruiting vegetation of every shape, size, color, and texture. In burgeoning, ultramodern cities, at the base of towering glass buildings around the world, farmers markets still sell the quality, local ingredients pulled from the earth or fished from the rivers and lakes that morning. My point is not to suggest that America isn’t a wonderful country with our own rich history of cuisine. My point is that we’re out of touch with our roots. That disconnection is the biggest reason why we have bookshelves full of conflicting nutritional advice. It’s also why, though many of us still have good genes, we have not maintained them very well. Like plump grapes left to bake on a French hillside, American chromosomes are wilting on the vine. They can be revitalized simply by enjoying the delightful products of traditional cuisine.
The messy amalgamation of vastly different dishes comprising every authentic cuisine can be cleaved into four neat categories, which I call the Four Pillars of World Cuisine. We need to eat them as often as we can, preferably daily. They are:
1. Meat cooked on the bone
2. Organs and offal (what Bourdain calls “the nasty bits”)
3. Fresh (raw) plant and animal products
4. Fermented and sprouted foods—better than fresh!
These categories have proved to be essential by virtue of their ubiquitousness. In almost every country other than ours people eat them every day. They’ve proved to be successful by virtue of their practitioners’ health and survival. Like cream rising in a glass, these traditions have percolated upward from the past, buoyed by their intrinsic value. They have endured the test of time simply by being delicious and nutritious, and in celebrating them we can reconnect with our roots and with each other, and bring our lives toward their full potential.
Not too long ago (and without understanding genetics, stem cell biology, or biochemistry) cultures everywhere survived based on living in accordance with the cause and effect realities of their daily experience. If someone ate a certain red berry and got sick, berries from that bush would be forbidden. If a mother developed a strong craving for a specific mushroom or kind of seafood or what-have-you during her pregnancy and went on to enjoy a particularly smooth and easy delivery of a healthy baby, then this association would be added to the growing body of collective wisdom. Their successes are now memorialized in our existence and in the healthy genetic material we have managed to retain. Solutions to the all-important omnivore’s dilemma—the question of what we should be eating—are all around us, encapsulated in traditions still practiced by foodies, culinary artists, devoted grandmothers, and chefs throughout the world, some in your very own neighborhood. Unfortunately, this wisdom has gone unappreciated, thanks to the cholesterol theory of heart disease and other byproducts of what Michael Pollan calls “scientific reductionism” (a decidedly unscientific exercise, as Pollan explains in his popular book, In Defense of Food).18
Fortunately, those who love—really love—good cooking and good food have kept culinary traditions alive. In doing so, not only have their own families benefited, they also serve as the modern emissaries of our distant relatives, carriers of an ancient secret once intended to be shared only with members of the tribe. Today, we are that tribe. And that message—how to use food to stay healthy and beautiful—is the most precious gift we could possibly receive.
Throughout this book I will highlight the power of food to shape your daily life. In fact, every bite you eat changes your genes a little bit. Just as the genetic lottery follows a set of predictable rules, so do the small changes that occur after every meal. If the machinery of physiologic change is not random, and is instead guided by rules, then who—or what—keeps track of them? In the next chapter, we’ll see how the gene responds to nourishment with what can best be described as intelligence, and why this built-in ability makes me certain that many of us have untapped genetic potential waiting to be released.