Five: The Health-Supportive Whole-Foods Eating Style
In the preceding chapter I’ ve outlined the various modern dietary practices and their effects. But what is the optimal one? Is there a way of eating about which one can say, unequivocally, that it is the most supportive of health? Is there any incontrovertible evidence? Popular belief has it, as I mentioned earlier, that we are today much healthier than in the past. This may be true if we compare our life only to life in Europe and America between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. But when we compare our health status to that of traditional cultures in other times and other places, it does not show up as an improvement. In many ways, the health of“ primitive” peoples has been and is much better than that of the“ civilized” moderns. Explorers in centuries past commented at length on the health and beauty of the natives, both young and old, that they encountered on their trips. L. A. de Bougainville, of France, wrote about the Tahitians he met( he was the first European explorer to arrive on that island):“ Their vigor and agility, even in old men, surpass those of our young folk.… The contented old age which they attain, without any infirmities, the acuteness of all their senses and the singular beauty of their teeth, which they keep at the most advanced age— what a testimony to the healthiness of the climate and the wholesomeness of the regime followed by the inhabitants!” 1 Weston Price, a dentist who carried out extensive studies of the dental health of ancient, primitive, and modern people and its relationship to their diet, noted that among 1,276 skulls of ancient Peruvian Indians, he didn’ t find a single dental-arch deformity. In comparison, as many as 75 percent of contemporary Americans studied exhibit malformation of the jaws and dental arches, with their attendant orthodontic problems. His data on primitive Indians show that close to 100 percent of their teeth are free of caries or faulty position. 2 Dr. Price’ s exhaustively documented work, complete with photographs of“ before and after” civilization, verifies what both early and modern travelers have reported: People who live, or have lived, a simple existence in accordance with natural cycles and tradition are indeed better off in terms of health than we are. On traditional, local diets devoid of“ civilized” foods, such as sugar, canned vegetables, and white flour products, people are longer lived, often handsomer, and generally considerably healthier than their modern counterparts. As soon as processed foods become part of the native diet, problems set in. Tooth decay, tuberculosis, structural defects in children, and difficulties with childbearing are the first symptoms. These health disorders appear even if the lifestyle remains mostly unchanged in other respects. They are clearly not inherited, for they appear in the children, not in the parents. Interestingly, Dr. Price found that the diet-induced health disorders are often reversible from one generation to the next. When“ primitives” who had suffered any of the consequences of“ civilized” foods reverted to the native diet, their children once again showed the excellent health and structural strength of their grandparents. What do native diets consist of? While their effects in terms of good health and longevity may be similar, their content at first glance is noticeably varied. Traditional Maori( New Zealand) food, for example, includes fish, shellfish, kelp, grubs, roots. The ancient Peruvians studied by Dr. Price ate seafood, river plants, potatoes, corn, beans, seeds, and guinea pig meat. Natives of the Outer Hebrides near Scotland ate oat cakes, fish eggs, and fish livers. Early Danes, Swiss, and eastern Europeans lived on raw milk and its products, black bread, fresh vegetables, fruit, and meat once a week. The migratory Indians from the American High Sierras had corn and parched beans as their staples, consuming nothing else during their long journeys. The Sikhs of northern India eat raw-milk products, fruits, root vegetables, porridge from seeds and legumes, and meat every ten days. The Masai in Africa live almost exclusively on meat, milk, and blood, while other African peoples consume sorghum, millet, fresh vegetables, and game. The Tasadays, last of the Stone Age cave men, discovered some years ago in the Philippines, feast on wild yams, grubs, frogs, bananas, and fruit. The early Greeks lived on bread, barley meal porridge, lentils, flaxseed, greens, turnips, figs, olives, goat cheese, fruit, wine; meat was for holiday feasting and for war.( The effects of this spartan fare were admirable. Besides laying the foundations for the next 2,500 years of Western thought and culture, the Greek writers and philosophers were quite long-lived. Plato lived to eighty-seven, Sophocles to ninety-one, Hippocrates to eighty-three, Euripides to seventy-eight, Democritus to ninety; and Socrates’ life was taken when he was three score and ten.) In recent years, nutritional studies have been made of those traditional peoples who have been found to be generally healthy and long-lived. What do their diets have in common? Laboratory tests show that despite the seeming diversity, their diets are all low in calories, protein, and fat, and high in complex carbohydrates. In addition, by examining these traditional diets we notice that they consist of foods that are:
• Fresh or preserved with natural means( dried, pickled, smoked)