Talking about what constitutes nutritious food as if we’re chemists has turned our focus on chemicals and away from what really matters: ingredient source and cooking tradition.
Most foods in the grocery are not much different from pet foods.
To avoid getting lost in conflicting nutritional paradigms, think like a chef.
According to skeletal records, access to greater quantities of animal products historically produces bigger, tougher bodies.
Access to nature is the real source of genetic wealth.
But if thought corrupts language, language can
also corrupt thought. —George Orwell
In 1987, my friend Eduardo, an antiquities conservator for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, was called to Laetoli in Northern Tanzania to restore fossilized footprints left by a wandering family of hominids some 3.5 million years ago. Befriended by local tribesmen, Eduardo soon found himself immersed in a world both unimaginably vibrant and deeply spiritual. By day, Eduardo used hypodermic needles to inject poison into tiny plant shoots that threatened to break apart the footprints left by our Australopithecus afarensis ancestors. By night, he shared food—on one memorable occasion, the still-beating heart of a goat—with Tanzanian herder-gatherers, known as Maasai, whose culinary rituals had remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.
Hearing Eduardo describe his time with the Maasai, I was reminded of the kind of awe with which Weston Price described the cultures he visited and the people he studied. Eduardo was most impressed by the tribal chief, who, while rumored to have been over seventy years old, was still an impressive physical specimen, standing over six-foot-five, completely free of wrinkles, and still able to keep the peace among his several wives. It seems that few people who journey to visit the Maasai have returned home without feeling profoundly changed. Jen Bagget, a travel writer, describes her visit to Tanzania as if she’d discovered Shangri-La. “With distinctively tall and willowy frames and striking facial features, the Maasai are easily the most beautiful people we’ve seen in the world. We were instantly captured by their friendly dispositions, open manner, and natural elegance.” 199
The Maasai represent one of the rare surviving intact and functional indigenous cultures. These societies are, in essence, windows into our past. Reading accounts of travelers who’ve spent time among people like the Maasai, one could get the impression that—as far as human health is concerned—once upon a time really existed. In the good old days, people enjoyed an almost idyllic physiologic prosperity. This prosperity was earned, in large part, by the maintenance of an intimate relationship between the people and the land, their animals, and the edible plants that rounded out their diets. As a result of this intimacy, they talked about food differently than we do. To us food is primarily a fuel, a source of energy, and sometimes a source of guilty pleasure. To people who remain connected to their culinary origins, food is so much more. It is part of their religion and identity. And its value is reinforced with story.
In the beginning, Ngai [the Maasai word for God, which also means sky] was one with the earth. But one day the earth and sky separated, so that Ngai was no longer among men. His cattle, though, needed the material sustenance of grass from the earth, so to prevent them dying Ngai sent down the cattle to the Maasai…. No Maasai was willing to break the ground, even to bury the dead within it, for soil was sacred on account of its producing grass which fed the cattle which belonged to God.200
In a few sentences, this story articulates the cattle’s central position in Maasai life and the necessary injunction against harming the land. As startled as Eduardo was when invited to take his share of a still-beating goat heart, he might have been more unnerved had they started talking about the total number of calories in their meal, the percentage of their daily intake of protein, carbs, and fat, and the benefits of eating fiber. Such reductionist terminology would have been out of step with the way the Maasai see the world. If they did start talking that way, as a physician, I’d be concerned. Because, no matter where you live, talking about—and then envisioning—food in such arbitrary categories is bad for your health.
Of course, here in the United States, we talk about food that way all the time. These days, very few of us participate in any deeply rooted culinary traditions, let alone share mythical stories connecting the food we eat to the environment it came from. Like everything else, “foodspeak” has to meet the requirements of a sound bite culture and is limited to grunting imperatives such as “eat your veggies,” “watch your carbs,” and “avoid saturated fat.” Having lost the old ways of talking about food, we’ve also lost the physiologic prosperity that once endowed us with the gift of perfectly proportionate growth. George Orwell warned that the acceptance of newspeak is no small matter; it can ultimately convince us to trade liberty for totalitarianism.201 So what have we lost by accepting the reductionists’ foodspeak?
DRIVEN FROM THE GARDEN:
A RECORD IN THE BONES
Along the western coast of South America, the powerful Humboldt current sweeps north from near the South Pole until its frigid water is blocked by a coastline of sandy plains descending from the high peaks of Peru’s Cordillera Mountains. The resulting upswelling current helps to produce several months a year of rain-rich clouds and, in terms of sustaining sea life, is one of the richest currents in the sea. This food-producing confluence of geographic and oceanographic elements helped give rise to the great civilizations of Peru, whose ancient cities are thought to have supported up to a million people.
In the mid-1930s, Weston Price, interested in the effects of nutrition on jaw structure, was drawn to the area by mummies—some fifteen million of which had been buried in mounds and preserved by the succession of seasonal rains on the dry sand. Grave robbers had previously unearthed many of them, so upon his arrival it appeared as though the objects of his intended study had come to greet him. “As far as the eye could see the white bleaching bones, particularly the skulls, dotted the landscape.”202 Price was interested in those skulls because, at that time in America, 25 to 75 percent of the population had some deformity of the dental bones or arches, and he suspected that rate of malformation was an historic anomaly.203 His visit proved to be illuminating. In a study of 1,276 ancient bones, he “did not find a single skull with a significant deformity of the dental arches.”204 What’s most striking about Price’s visit to Peru is that when he left the desert mummies to study modern city dwellers, he found the people’s structural symmetry and balanced growth patterns had melted away, replaced by what he described as “a sad wreckage in physique and often character.”205 The Peruvians had changed. Using anthropologic methodology (studying skull structure), Price showed that when a farming population adapts a city lifestyle, this shift can affect bone structure. But how? What was the root of the problem?
Price’s discovery was not entirely new. Physical anthropologists have long recognized the diversity of human cranial development, and the anthropologic literature is full of discoveries that link skeletal modifications to dietary changes. For example, when Native Americans migrated down the coast from Alaska to California and the consumption of animal products dropped, the average women’s bone size shrank by 9 percent and the men’s 13 percent within just a few generations. Meanwhile, brain size dropped 5 and 10 percent respectively.206 Elsewhere, in South Africa, two distinct episodes of skeletal shrinkage occurred, one 4,000 years ago, the other 2,000. The first coincided with population pressures and the second with the use of pottery, indicating an increased dependence on farming. In the intervening years, absent of farming artifacts, the skeletal size (including the skull and brain space) appears to have recovered.207 And in the southernmost Andes Mountains, precisely where plants were first domesticated in South America, the fossil record again reveals “farmers hav[ing] a smaller craniofacial size than hunter-gatherers.”208
Not only is it a consistent finding in the anthropologic record that modifications in diet coincide with modifications in human growth, but there seems to be a general downward trend in size. That is, as groups of modern humans move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural-based lifestyles, their bodies shrink. Why would that be? Bioanthropologists, who consider nutrition in their studies, suggest that “our hunter-gatherer forbearers may have enjoyed such variety of viands [foods] that they fared better nutritionally than any of their descendants who settled down to invent agriculture.”209
The development of farming has long been thought to represent one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the cardinal technologic leap that would set us on course to living easier and healthier lives with every passing century. But this assumption has been challenged lately by both skeletal and living anthropologic evidence. It appears that the hunter-gatherer and herder-gatherer (like the Maasai), who lived in greatest harmony with natural cycles, may have enjoyed an easier lifestyle than all but a few of the wealthiest families today. In fact, Marshal Sahlins, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, calls hunter-gatherer-style communities (of old) the “original affluent society.”210 In his treatise on hunter-gatherer life, he paints an Arcadian image:
A woman gathers in one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure is maintained throughout the year.211
Embroidery? Entertaining visitors? Visiting your neighbors and trading gossip over tea? Though it might sound like something out of Martha Stewart Living, this is a fieldworker’s description of an average day in the early twentieth-century life of the Hadza, a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers who have lived in the Central Rift Valley of East Africa for perhaps 100,000 years. Many other accounts corroborate the fact that the ecology in certain locations once provided more than enough bounty for the hunter-gatherer to simply sit back and enjoy, at least on the average day.
Hunting and gathering requires a lot of moving around, wandering from place to place chasing seasonal abundance. Farming, on the other hand, enabled us to stay put. Along the banks of the world’s mightiest rivers, on some of the world’s most fertile soils, societies grew larger and more stratified, developed more tools and technology, and embarked upon ambitious engineering projects like the pyramids. But there was a tradeoff. All the while, agriculturalists struggled to provide the level of nutrition to which their hunter-gatherer genes had grown accustomed. Over generations, this drop-off in nutrition would impair growth so that stature would diminish relative to that of their hunter-gatherer counterparts. You could say that, for the sake of developing agrarian civilizations, these societies chose to swap some of their vitality, toughness, and robusticity for aqueducts, large buildings, and other public works. Of course, if any group of people were to break away from city life and return to nomadic hunting or herding and gathering, they would (as with the migrating Native American tribes mentioned above) reclaim the physique they’d given up; their bodies would grow larger, and their skulls tougher and more robust.
This ability to adjust stature to better match a given nutritional context lends more support to the idea of an intelligent, responsive genome (as the operating mechanism) than to the suggestion that physiologic change depends solely on random mutation. If evolutionary change were dependent on random mutation, then it would be exceedingly unlikely that responses to nutritional change would be so consistent and quick to appear. If, however, an intelligent genome had recorded in its epigenomic library which physiologic adjustments were most appropriate in any given nutritional context, then the epigenomic librarian (see Chapter 2) could simply read the instructions on what to do next. And this is why we see that “throughout the course of human evolution, features of robusticity like supraorbital and occipital tori [boney ridges] have been acquired, lost, or changed in different groups.”212
If you want to be poetic about it, you could say that the shifting and morphing skeletal and facial features represent the genomic artist at work. Each set of subtle skull feature modifications that have distinguished all the equally beautiful nationalities of human beings is a painted portrait, each one created using different nutritional pigments in varying proportion and displayed on the canvas of world geography. In this way, the intelligence in our genes has generated numerous variations on the theme of human attractiveness. The striking cheekbone, the slender waist and graceful legs, the delicate female chin, and the powerful brow of a dominant male face—all these universally desired features are tweaked a tiny bit to generate the continuum of anatomical variation that is Homo sapiens.
But if you look at these anatomical variations the way Dr. Marquardt does and focus on the basic blueprint of our skeletal plan rather than the embellishments, you’ll see that in reality very little has changed over time. Though our statures and the prominence of individual facial features may vary, thanks to the genetically programmed growth preference for phi-proportionality, everything fits neatly together. Every part has maintained its functional relationship to every other part. Everything works. This is true of people living everywhere around the world. Or rather it was true. Very recently, something changed.
Which brings us back to Price, and those perfect skulls he found scattered on the Peruvian sand. On Price’s visit, he recognized that a precipitous drop in proportionality of Peruvian skulls had taken place in contemporary history. There was a key difference in the dentition of ancient and modern Peruvians (and up to 75 percent of the American population) that indicated a process entirely distinct from the nuanced skeletal variations present throughout evolutionary time. That difference: a loss of proportion. Why is that so significant? As we’ve seen in the preceding chapters, health and beauty are all about proportion. Disproportionality impairs the body’s ability to function.
In Chapter 4, we saw that a perfect face—and the bones beneath it—is one that has grown in accordance with a mathematic formula called phi, which defines healthy growth in numerous species of plant and animal life. Dr. Marquardt, the plastic surgeon who discovered how phi-based growth occurs in the human species and created a mask to illustrate it, has shown us that balanced growth occurs in three dimensions, the X, Y, and Z facial planes. When that balanced phi-proportionality is lost, the resulting growth distortions lead to problems. In my own face, the loss of phi-proportionality in the horizontal (or X) dimension narrowed my skull so that my wisdom teeth didn’t fit into my head and had to be pulled, and my disproportionately sized eye sockets distorted the shape of my eyeball, forcing my lens to focus light to a point in front of (rather than on) my retinas, blurring my vision. A face that is more severely narrowed than mine may pinch the airway, causing sinus problems. When skull narrowing affects the Z-plane (visible in profile), it may foreshorten the palate, increasing the likelihood of sleep apnea, a condition in which a person’s own soft tissues collapse inward and periodically suffocate them, causing fatigue, memory problems, and heart disease.
Phi seems to be the universal template nature uses to ensure that optimal proportionality drives development, even under conditions of varying nutritional inputs. Over the past century or two, however, the typical human diet has diverged so far from anything before that our growth patterns can no longer adhere to the template. The switch from hunting and gathering to farming was accompanied by nutritional sacrifice, yes. But it did not block the ability of the phi-template to continue generating perfect proportionality. Why not? As I’ve suggested, modern historians have vastly under-appreciated the value of traditional nutritional knowledge. I believe it was this wisdom that enabled people who’d made the shift from hunter-gatherer life to settled life to continue to make (mostly) sound decisions about what kinds of foods they needed to feed their children and expectant parents in order to ensure optimal health. Though history’s most celebrated inventions—like trigonometry, plumbing, and the plow—helped give rise to the visible artifacts of civilization, none of this could have been possible had we been severely undernourished. The extraction of adequate nutrition from grains, as on the Scottish Isles, for instance, required advanced biologic technology of soil fortification, fermentation, and other strategies. These vastly undervalued strategies enabled growing populations to maintain nutrition adequate for healthy growth even after leaving the relative bounty of their hunter-gatherer pasts behind. And they did this using the Four Pillars of World Cuisine.
The skeletal record evidences the success of traditional dietary regimes around the world—which universally include all four of the Pillars. If we were to create a visual timeline of the entire human story from nearly 500,000 years ago until today by lining up human skulls on one long table, we would find that, as Homo sapiens progressed, migrating across continents and oceans—some finding tiny, isolated islands to call home—all the while changing size and varying features, some skulls, like Paleolithic Homo sapiens, would be heavy and robust and others, like recently discovered Homo floresiensis, diminutive. But with every skull in our lineup, we’d see teeth well aligned and free of caries,213 square jaws, and phi-proportionate construction in the X, Y, and Z facial planes.214 This math is what gives rise to deep and wide eye sockets, powerful male brow ridges and delicate female chins, broadly arched zygoma (cheekbones), and all the other features anthropologists use to define a skull as belonging to a former Homo sapiens. These features would be clearly visible in every skull on our table. Until, that is, we walk to the end of the table where the lineup is still being built. In the skulls from the past 100 years or so, we’d see an abrupt change.215
Human skulls have recorded within their features every switch from hunter-gatherer to farming lifestyles and every migration from place to place. But our healthy and proportionate bodies had been maintained and protected as if under the aegis of a kind of nutritional Garden of Eden. So what happened to those skulls at the rightmost end of the aforementioned human-timeline table, the ones with the disfigured dentition and disrupted proportion? An examining anthropologist might conclude that we’d left the Garden for good, completely abandoning the diets that had protected us throughout history, and made a pilgrimage to the nutritional equivalent of a barren and inhospitable country. But what no anthropologist could discover by sorting through the bones is why? What nutritional sin had we committed?
The answer to that riddle can be found in the pages of a cookbook written over 100 years ago. You see, in order for a burgeoning food industry to convince people to make this journey—this exodus from nature—and to give up traditions with thousands of years of success, it needed to change the way people talk about food.
YOU SAY POTATO …
Have you ever heard someone say, “I’ve been trying to cut out carbs”? Or a TV chef say, “Now, all this dish needs is a protein”? Carbs? A protein? These are biochemical terms. When did we start talking about our foods like chemists? The answer is, not coincidentally, right around the time of the Industrial Revolution.
The Fanny Farmer 1896 Cook Book introduced this new food terminology to a large audience: “Food is classified as follows: Organic or Inorganic,” with organic being composed of the following: “1. Proteid (nitrogenous or albuminous); 2. Carbohydrates (sugar and starch); 3. Fats and oils.”216 This new, simplified breakdown of food immediately began influencing our approach to food and diet, and not in a good way. What was once understood holistically—rabbit, potatoes, or hand-pressed oil of known origin—would now be seen as so much protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Don’t get me wrong. Francis Farmer’s cookbook is considered a classic, and deservedly so. But the classification of complex organic systems based only on their more readily isolatable chemical components makes about as much sense as describing the Taj Mahal as so many tons of rock. In terms of isolatable components, a bottle of Romanee-Conti isn’t all that different from box wine, but the winemakers of Burgundy would likely argue that there’s more to wine than its basic components.
Though you can boil, extract, and refine living tissue to isolate the protein, carb, or fat, you do so only at the cost of everything else that held the cells and organs together. Yanking certain components from living systems—as we do to make flour, sugar, protein slurries, and 90 percent of what’s now for sale in the store—and expecting them to approximate their original nutritional value is like removing someone’s brain from their body and expecting them to respond to questions. That is not science; it is science fiction. So is the idea that heavily processed food can be healthy.
So where does this terminology, this way of talking about food, get us? It gets us away from talking about the most important aspect of any food, its source. And that, by the way, is exactly how the mass producers of cheaply manufactured processed food products would have it. Now, we can say things like, “Sweet potatoes are really nutritious!” without stopping to consider that some sweet potatoes—those grown in sterile, toxic soil—are nutritionally bereft. We can toss another package of farmed salmon into our shopping cart thinking that it’s essentially the same, nutritionally, as wild. And we can buy beef from cows raised on petrochemical-soaked corn, in deplorably crowded conditions, and tell ourselves that, as long as it’s tender, it’s every bit as good for us as the flesh from happy, roaming, grass-fed animals. Once they’ve got us believing such absurdities or, worse yet, buying our food reflexively as a thoughtless habit, they can get us to buy just about anything. Why, with a little marketing and the right package, they might even get us to eat dog food.
THE DOG FOOD AISLE
Take a look at the back of a bag of dog or cat food, and here are the ingredients you’ll see: corn meal, soy meal, (occasionally) wheat, partially hydrogenated soy or corn or other vegetable oil, meat and protein meal, and a few synthetic vitamins. But guess what? The animal pushing the shopping cart is buying foods with the same list of ingredients for himself. The main differences between donuts, breads, and Cheerios are the quantities of hydrogenated oil and sugar. Cheerios, in turn, are nearly identical to Ramen noodles. Throw on a little salt, and you’ve got snack chips. Add tomato flakes and bump up the protein powder and—bam!—it’s Hamburger Helper with noodles. Add a pinch of meat byproducts, take away some tomato powder, and we’re in the pet food aisle again, holding a twenty-pound bag of grade A Puppy Chow.
We already know why manufacturers make food this way: it’s cheap and convenient to reformulate the basic ingredients of protein, starch, and fat (there are those words again!) into a variety of shapes and textures, coat them in sugars and artificial flavor enhancers, and ship them just about anywhere. That’s why they make it. But why would we eat it? Same reason: it’s cheap and convenient. These days, a busy parent can buy a frozen lasagna dinner heavy enough to feed a family of five for about what it would cost to make from scratch. It comes in its own disposable aluminum pan, so—no fuss, no muss—the dinner riddle is solved. Like other foods in the supermarket, it keeps forever (or at least a really long time) in the freezer, so if we don’t eat it tonight, it’ll be ready when we want it. And thanks to the fact that these convenience foods contain protein, fat, and carbohydrates, plus some synthetic vitamins, we can survive on them—at least for a certain amount of time. But that doesn’t mean these foods aren’t changing us. They are.
As I described earlier, whenever our ancestors moved from one place to another, their diets changed and, in turn, so did their physiologies. And, as you’ll recall, each time they relocated from one natural locale to another, though that relocation influenced their stature and relative prominence of certain facial features, their skeletons generally remained perfect examples of function and proportionality. They didn’t think of food in terms of carbs and protein and fat. They thought more in terms of good soil, healthy animal, freshly picked. And for this reason, their traditional cultural practices, and the foods they took into their bodies, kept them firmly tethered to the natural world. In other words, they stayed connected.
For eons, human beings maintained that connection, thanks to the guidance of their cultural wisdom. But they couldn’t have known all the possible consequences of cutting those natural ties. How could they? Until recently, the people of this planet benefited from a relatively stable climate without knowing how easily it could be thrown into chaos; we never had to think about it until it all started breaking down. Indeed, we might have remained blind to the underlying cause had it not been for a handful of prescient climatologists and geologists who, at great professional cost, made certain their warnings were heard. As a result, most of us are fairly well versed in the concepts of climate regulation and instability.
We know, for example, that the Industrial Revolution and subsequent commercial growth created massive carbon dioxide pollution, which magnified the greenhouse effect and is now making global climate warmer. What we don’t yet appreciate is the extent to which the Industrial Revolution polluted the food we eat, leading to so many changes in our health and physiologies that it has altered the way we look. Over the past 100 years, we have completed the single most comprehensive dietary shift in the history of our race. This shift, a major dietary migration over vast nutritional territory, has gone on largely unnoticed—even by the medical community—for the following reasons:
The shift didn’t involve moving from one geographic point to another; only our food has changed.
Except for the very well-off and the recently urbanized, few of us in America have been exposed to the products of culinary tradition and therefore don’t know what we’re missing.
Since the migration from real to fake food has occurred over five generations, even our parents were likely born into an environment bereft of culinary tradition.
Cheap and convenient products catch on quick, and we tend not to ask where they were made or what they were made of, so the easier and cheaper our food gets, the less we think about it.
The merging of business and science into one corporate body means that medical science can no longer countenance advice incompatible with the interests of commerce.
A constant stream of new technologic fixes continues to buttress our collapsing physiologic infrastructure, which has so far masked what would otherwise be obvious maladaptive consequences of that collapse.
This last point is the most significant. If needing glasses killed us, we would no doubt pay keen attention to factors that render a child nearsighted. If having oral cavities killed us, we would steer clear of the things known to rot teeth as if our lives depended on it. If there were deadly consequences from inattention to nutritional detail, our nutrition science would be so advanced that it would be, dare I say, effective at preventing disease and capable of promoting health. In the past, when the knowledge of building healthy bodies with nutrition was, in fact, a matter of life and death, it was so highly valued that Dr. Price found many indigenous people reluctant to “disclose secrets of their race.”217 As Price discovered, “The need for this [reluctance] is comparable to the need for secrecy regarding modern war devices.”218 We don’t think that way anymore. And it’s ironic that the kinds of technological advancements that allowed for the mass production of nutritionally wanting processed foods are now necessary to address the physiologic consequences of their consumption.
CHANGING OUR DIET MAY CHANGE US
Big brains require brain-building fats like cholesterol, lecithin, choline, saturated fat, and long-chain polyunsaturated fats. These compounds are found in highest concentration in organ meats, cold-water fish, and fish eggs. Today these rich foods are primarily consumed by the wealthy, in high-end restaurants where foie gras, fresh oysters, lobsters, crab, and caviar are staple items. Our hominid ancestors consumed them in greater quantity than other primates.
That’s an irony I’d just as soon watch play out from a safe distance. And I’m not alone. How do I put this delicately? If you think the wealthy—members of the upper social class—would even touch the foods most Americans eat daily, the foods relentlessly touted as healthy, you’d be mistaken. No, the most privileged among us eat very much the way their great-great-great-grandparents did. If we could fly past the iron gates guarding the White House and peer through the dining room windows to see what the guests were eating at President Obama’s second inaugural lunch, we’d see this:
FIRST COURSE
Lobster Tails with New England Clam Chowder Cream Sauce
MAIN COURSE
Hickory-Grilled Bison [presumably pasture-raised] Tenderloin with Wild Huckleberry Veal Demi-glace Reduction, Baby Golden Beets and Green Beans, and Strawberry Preserves and Red Cabbage
THIRD COURSE
Sour Cream Ice Cream and Artisan Cheeses219
Those dining on these sinfully rich foods represent the same government whose food pyramid forbids us regular folk from eating anything of the kind. And since we’re all supposed to be watching our sodium, we’d hardly risk touching our lips to something as salty as demi-glace or artisan cheeses. Have these culinary daredevils lost their minds, wandering so far outside the protective dietary shadow cast by the food pyramid? Or are their chefs the instigators, luring these susceptible victims over the cliff with the aroma of lobster and cream sauce? Whether through daring, by calculated intention, or by virtue of the same felicitous winds of fate that have caressed other aspects of their lives, one thing is sure: by maintaining their diet of real, traditional foods, the well-heeled have managed to ensconce their genomes inside the walls of a nutritional fortress and defend their physiologic dynasties against the hoi polloi—the swelling masses of the sick and enfeebled.
Given that the privileged can, and frequently do, eat the way we all used to, and given that this shift in eating habits first occurred over a century ago and that the effects of continued nutrient deprivation are magnified with each generation, the widening gap between nutritional-physiologic classes should place the other issues of class differential well into the background. A hundred years ago, two nutritional roads diverged in an evolutionary wood. The less well-off took the one never before traveled, and—judging by the health statistics—that has made all the difference.
It is as if, at the beginning of the twentieth century, ordinary working families were rounded up and ordered to start packing their bags, leave their farms and fertile soil behind, and take their assigned seats in an enormous space cruiser headed for Mars. Most of us would not undertake such a journey without resistance, because we know instinctively that the consequences for our health, and for the health of our children, might prove catastrophic. That is a good instinct, and even though our great-great-great-grandparents may not have known to follow it at the time, that instinct remains alive in every one of their descendants, and it will help get us back to Earth.
LIFE IN OUTER SPACE
In the Florence, Italy, episode of Phil Rosenthal’s most excellent PBS series I’ll Have What Phil’s Having, Phil is accompanied by celebrity chef Fabio Picchi and his elderly but remarkably spry mother to visit her rooftop garden. Taking in the 360-degree view of Florence, he is offered, for his pleasure, a small tomato rubbed with the oil of a freshly picked basil leaf. Upon tasting it Phil says with his trademark wide-eyed enthusiasm, “In Los Angeles it doesn’t taste like this!” Given his reaction, it seemed as though he were tasting a tomato for the first time—and we’re talking about one of the superstars of sit-com, creator of Everyone Loves Raymond, who could have any ingredient of his choosing flown in first class from anywhere in the world.
Watching the host’s eyes roll back with pleasure, his mouth dripping with the juices, I thought to myself, I’d like to have what Phil’s having. That tomato was the very essence of the word fresh. And it made me wonder: if world-traveling bon vivant Phil Rosenthal can be surprised by how much flavor he’s still missing out on, then what does that say about the eating experience of the average American on a limited budget? Sadly, I take Phil Rosenthal’s experience, and experiences I have had eating vegetables picked fresh from my childhood garden, and rich, creamy milk straight from the collection bucket on a farm in New Zealand, and the ocean-briney opihi scraped just minutes before from the side of a rock of the Southern shore of Kauai, as reminders that, without our noticing, freshness and real flavor have been gradually removed from our eating experiences.
No wonder children and adults alike have been driven away from bland, relatively tasteless vegetables and toward the “super-awesome-mega-intense” options available in fast-food restaurants and the sacks of snack chips stashed away in their cars. But it’s not just the sensory experience of real food that our bodies crave. Although food scientists have figured out how to recreate intensity of taste, if not the subtle nuances of real food, they cannot duplicate what Mother Nature does best: create foods that are equally rich in flavor and nutrition.
I submit that as our acquaintance with the experiences of real food have been denied us for so long and to such an extreme that the food conglomerates have nudged us, en masse, inch-by-inch, so far from nature that it is as if—with regard to foods produced for shelf life, in depleted soil, in limited space, and marketed as “healthy”—the majority of Americans today have been pushed off the planet and exiled to life in outer space.
Consider this: if we lived confined in some kind of giant penal colony on Mars, what would our diets be like? Would they really be so different from our own modern diets?
Most Martian foods would need to have long shelf lives. Since the shuttle only comes a few times a year, the shipments must be able to last for months. You’ll find most space-foods loaded with shelf-stable ingredients such as sugar, flour, protein isolates and hydrolysates, and vegetable oil. (“Sports” and “nutrition” bars contain almost nothing else.) Though these products have been refined and stripped of living, reactive components, many contain toxic preservatives to make them last even longer, including BHT and BHA (the same chemical compounds, incidentally, used by plastic and tire manufacturers).220 Since vegetable oil is particularly unappealing to micro-organisms (for reasons described in Chapter 8), you will find it incorporated into numerous products and nearly impossible to avoid while living on a Martian diet.
Space food’s not big on flavor. The sterile environment can support the growth of a few assorted veggies, including iceberg lettuce and hydroponically grown tomatoes. The occasional shipments of carrots, bell peppers, broccoli, potatoes, apples, and a few more fruits and vegetables offer the splashes of color that help convince inmates they’re getting real food, in spite of what their taste buds tell them. To make matters worse, significant nutrient decay occurs during extended transport so that many “fresh” fruits and vegetables actually contain little more nutrition than their canned or frozen counterparts.221, 222 Fruits and vegetables shipped from Earth are picked unripe, and as a result, they contain significantly lower levels of vitamins (less than half in some cases) than any physiologically mature product.223 Research suggests such mass-produced products might taste bland because they provide us little more than water and cellulose, some having just one tenth the vitamins or antioxidants of their organically raised cousins.224
Space is at a premium on this penal colony, so animals grown for human consumption there are denied access to pasture, sunlight, and room to run. There is no ocean, so fish—genetically engineered for prodigious growth—are farm raised on high-calorie pellets. Chickens, fish, cattle, and hogs are reared in dimly lit containers, fed a mash of corn or soy, and their more perishable fleshy parts (organs) and bones are baked into animal feed or discarded.
The manufacturers on Earth know that the well-educated prisoner is willing to spend his commissary allowance on products labeled “organic.” Producers of these products must slightly reduce chemical inputs during production to comply with the labeling rules. Shipments include a small portion of their volume as organic cereals, milk substitutes, meat and cheese substitutes, and desserts, to help these prisoners feel their foods are significantly superior. Other health-conscious inmates—sensing the inadequacy of their diets—follow the lead of U.S. astronauts and take synthetic vitamins, lots of them, unaware that the vitamins manufactured in factories typically fail to approximate the real thing.
You get the idea. It is no great exaggeration to suggest that as far as our bodies are concerned, most of us might as well be living in outer space. Compared to the Maasai, who still root their genes deep within the same nourishing fruits of the earth as their ancestors did 40,000 years ago, our genes are flailing in empty air. The milk the Maasai enjoy today is much the same as it was thousands of years ago when artists drew pictures of people with their cattle on the walls of caves in the Gilf Kabir in Northern Africa (see illustration opposite the title page of this book). More to the point, it carries the same information to their cells. The gray-white substance pumped from our sad cows? Not so much.
Fortunately, you don’t need to join a nomadic tribe in the desert to start eating better. All you need to do is follow the recipes laid out in any truly traditional cookbook. In Chapter 10, I will discuss in detail the foundational elements of the Deep Nutrition philosophy so that you can pick the best recipes from those available in your favorite cookbooks and on the Internet.
But before we get into which foods you should seek out, I would like to talk to you about two ingredients so harmful and so intrinsic to the modern American diet that with the single act of identifying these troublemakers, you put yourself miles ahead of the game.
THE KAPU LIST
Most people are aware of the harmful effects of chemical residues left over from industrial farming and of the preservatives and other agents that have harmful physiologic effects. And those of us who care about our health do what we can to avoid them. These two ingredients are different. Not only does each one seem perfectly engineered to prevent our cells from functioning the way they should, they often appear as a tag-team duo, showing up in the same foods together. I’m talking about vegetable oils and sugar.
I’m not saying that all the pollutants and toxins so often talked about aren’t hurting our health. They are. But because vegetable oil and sugar are so nasty and their use in processed foods so ubiquitous that they have replaced nutrient-rich ingredients we would otherwise eat, I place vegetable oil and sugar before all others, on the very top of my don’t eat list.
When traditional people wanted to send the message that certain foods were dangerous (or, in some cases, too special for non-royal persons), they’d place them on a do-not-eat list. In Hawaii, these foods were kapu, or forbidden. If they noticed that a food led to deleterious effects in newborns, then they would be kapu for expectant moms. Every indigenous society honored such a list; to ignore it could spell disaster for mother or child. Coming up, we’ll see why vegetable oil and sugar are the real culprits for diseases most doctors blame on chance, or—even more absurdly—on the consumption of natural fats. Once you learn what they do inside your body, I hope you’ll put them both on the top of your family’s kapu list.