100 Million Years of Food (28 page)

Based on his reading of the ancestral human literature, Mark figures that it's okay to eat when you're hungry and abstain when you're not, instead of following a regular three-square-meals-a-day plan, and that exercise should consist of a lot of moving about rather than strenuous workouts, which Mark believes caused him to be frequently sick and injured during his competitive days. His version of Paleo puts an emphasis on lifestyle and, unlike pure-form Paleo, includes dairy.

Mark asserts that after cutting grains out of his diet, he cured himself of lingering arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, colds, persistent sinus infections, and heartburn. The key, Mark suggests in his book and on his blog, Mark's Daily Apple, is the role of insulin. When too much simple sugar enters the body, it leads to loss of insulin response, which in turn floods the body with glucose; this excess glucose interferes with protein function by sticking to the proteins and creating advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which are believed to accelerate aging processes, including chronic inflammation.

One potential complication with the Primal/Paleo philosophy is that some of the longest-lived groups on the planet historically ate high-carbohydrate, low-protein diets. The Okinawans, as previously described, subsisted largely on vegetables, sweet potatoes (introduced from Central or South America via China in 1606), rice, tofu, fish, and sake (rice wine); whale blubber, when it could be obtained, was eagerly consumed.
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The long-lived Costa Rican Nicoyans dined on corn tortillas cooked with lime, rice and beans fried in pork fat, boiled plantains, bits of meat and fat, fried eggs, vegetables, and large quantities of tropical fruits.
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On Sardinia, a centenarian bastion off the west coast of Italy, as late as 1941, a typical day's meal offered a kilogram of bread, an onion, some fennel or radishes, beans, perhaps goat's milk or mastic oil, minestrone soup in the evening, and not more than a quarter bottle of red wine. Richer folks would add cheese or pasta to this diet.
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Moreover, as previously discussed, caloric restriction studies seem to indicate that protein restriction is as important as or more important than calorie restriction in promoting long life. When I ask Mark about the long lives of people in places like Okinawa and Costa Rica, he replies that people there were happy by nature and dealt more effectively with stress. Mark also points out that these people were highly physically active and did not have continuous access to large quantities of food.

A frequent claim by Paleo followers is that they lose weight and eventually feel better on low-carb diets. However, the same claims of weight loss and mood improvement are also made by people who maintain vegetarian or raw food diets. There is some evidence that in the initial phases, people do lose weight more quickly on low-carb diets than on conventional low-fat weight-loss diets, with no short-term adverse health consequences. However, it seems that this weight is gained back in the long term. Additionally, eating a lot of meat may shorten life span, as previously mentioned, particularly for people under the age of sixty-five, when the risks of chronic diseases stemming from meat or fat consumption are of concern. On the other hand, also previously noted, people over the age of sixty-five who consume a lot of meat may live longer, because chronic diseases tend to take a long time to develop, and the health concerns of older people are linked instead to issues like frailty and wasting.

While it's hard to provide a comprehensive theory that will cover everyone at every stage of life, it's likely that low-carb diets are most harmful to children and most beneficial to older adults. For middle-aged people, consumption of cholesterol and fat is likely to improve mood and sex drive, while there is not much evidence for long-term weight loss. A better road to weight loss than a radical low-carb diet is to change our lifestyles so that we get more moderate exercise, which Mark himself advocates. It should be kept in mind that people whose traditional diets were meat-heavy, such as Arctic peoples, may do best by continuing to eat such diets, given the complications of genes that are not adapted to high-carbohydrate or high-calcium diets.

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Back to our original question: Why do smart people disagree vehemently on something so basic as a healthy diet? One reason for the disagreement is that each of these diets has different health effects, both good and bad. Dean Ornish's low-meat, low-fat diet is the best bet for a long life, due to the effects of cutting back on animal protein, but it is the least psychologically satisfying and therefore also hard to maintain. Sally Fallon Morell's and Mark Sisson's high-dairy, high-meat diets are more likely to lead to shorter lives, but such foods are also likely to make people feel better and more likely to improve muscle mass. Moreover, high animal protein diets may be beneficial for the elderly, due to the problems of frailty and wasting associated with advanced age.

At a deeper level, the approaches of nutritional activists like Ornish, Morell, and Sisson conflict because they analyze food in terms of nutrients—protein, fat, carbohydrates, sugar, vitamins, etc.—rather than adopting a nuanced view of evolution. Breaking food down into its nutritional components has brought many advantages, such as the elimination of diseases like beriberi, pellagra, and rickets, because it allowed scientists to determine which nutrients were missing in modern industrialized diets and lifestyles. However, due to the complexity of human physiology, the ethical barriers to human experimentation, and the great variability of our ancestral diet and our gene pool, the monumental scientific efforts and funds poured into nutritional research have yielded disappointingly scant progress since the conquering of beriberi, pellagra, and rickets in the first half of the twentieth century. This leaves the public understandably bewildered and frustrated about what to eat to maintain or restore health.

A major flaw in nutritional research has been neglecting the insights that evolutionary theory offers. Without understanding the evolutionary history behind humans, trying to determine the optimal diet is like trying to decipher a difficult text by reading only one page; only evolutionary theory provides the means to understand how all the components of an organism's life are linked together, including nutrition and health. On the other hand, overly simplistic interpretations of evolution, such as viewing the human ancestral diet as consisting primarily of meat, also deprive us of valuable insights into nutrition and health.

When we put a nuanced view of evolutionary theory back into nutrition and health, we end up with the following observations:

• If we do not exercise or make an attempt to be physically active, then we are much more vulnerable to chronic diseases, regardless of food choices; conversely, if we exercise or are sufficiently physically active, then we can avoid chronic diseases while eating liberally. This is because humans evolved in a context of constant movement and moderate physical activity; sitting for prolonged periods was extremely rare, because that would have led to starvation or the loss of opportunities to socialize and, therefore, reproduce.

• To get a balance of nutrients, we should eat traditional cuisines, the older the better (for example, from five hundred years ago), because traditional cuisines were carefully pieced together through trial and error. Focusing on nutrients is often a fool's errand. For example, eating less meat and fat can be harmful if we end up craving sugary foods instead. Traditional cuisines get around this problem by offering balanced, tasty meals. For people who trace their ancestry to a specific region of the world, the traditional cuisine from that area is likely best suited for their genes.

• Eating a lot of animal foods when you are younger will make you grow taller and stronger and be more fertile and attractive but will increase your risk of dying earlier. As we discussed, this trade-off between robustness in early life and poorer longer-term health is exactly what we should expect from an evolutionary perspective, because evolution is concerned only with the passing on of genes to the next generation, at whatever cost necessary to the current generation—poorer long-term health being such a cost.

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There are other aspects of food and cooking, besides nutrients, that are critical to our well-being. For example, the fact that meals containing little meat may be healthier in the long run may not matter much if people who are poor or lack knowledge of cooking are unable to prepare savory low-meat meals. How can we ensure equitable access to healthy cuisine, and how do we make these ingredients sustainable for a larger population? The city of Melbourne, I discover, is a good place to examine trends in food fairness and sustainability.

Melbourne has recently been the site of an unusual food innovation: pay-what-you-can restaurants. Fork out a buck or two, or cough up a hundred, it's all up to you; you'll still get the same meal at one of three restaurants called Lentil as Anything, a reference to an Australian art-school new wave band, Mental as Anything. The name of the restaurant sums up the ethos of these eateries: a little bit crazy, a little happy, a vegetarian-anarchist wonderland.

A friend introduces me to the restaurant, taking me down a flight of stairs that spill onto a riverside path just a few hundred yards from the street. We step into precolonial Australia, dusty and dry; a path runs along a sluggish river, the banks crowded with eucalyptus. We follow the winding path, cross some sheep pens, and slip into the sprawling grounds of a former nunnery adorned with a spacious flower garden.

This is the flagship Lentil as Anything restaurant, pulling in a smorgasbord of gaunt artists and students, well-to-do liberals, and curious tourists. After stuffing all my spare change into the collection box—no one is looking, but my lawyer friend seems generous with her dollars—I stack my plate with South Asian–inspired cuisine: curries, fried pastries, rice, and coconut. I could eat much more of this delicious food, but would there be enough for the latecomers? Communal eating has this peculiar effect of forcing us to think of others' needs.

My friend and I eat indoors; the heat outside is sticky. Most of the eating space is taken up by long wooden tables that encourage mingling. The staff is young and diverse; the restaurant has a policy of helping to sponsor refugee applicants. The notion of eating the same good food as everyone around me is moving and inspiring. The fare isn't Michelin, but it is much better than what I can cook on my own. What made this generosity and camaraderie possible? And why aren't places like Lentil as Anything more widespread?

A week later, I meet with the founder of the restaurant chain. Shanaka Fernando is courteous and eloquent, speaking in a meditative, ruminating manner, like a monk or poet. His father was a Sri Lankan army officer, his mother an Irish potter who was disowned by her family for marrying a dark-skinned native. Shanaka grew up privileged in Sri Lanka, white beneath the dark skin: servants, security, the best schools. He lived through periodic violence, when the Sinhalese majority viciously persecuted Tamil minorities,
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then came to Melbourne to study law to appease his father. He lost interest in his studies, dropped out, and opened a café. With characteristic impulsiveness and idealism, he wiped the prices off the board.

Why pay-as-you-can? Shanaka observed during travels among rural groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Amazon that food was shared among neighbors. “Food is a strong gesture of our kinship. Whereas, I find that sometimes in Western societies, at least in Melbourne for example, whenever you go out to a restaurant to eat lobster, it is a means of highlighting privilege and separating yourself from a majority of society. I wanted to see how we could capture that culture of making food available and then seeing everyone eat together from all walks of life, especially because money is such a divisive force in society. I was curious to see if we could use the money that people donated or made available to unite people, the focus being the importance of having a good meal and being able to sit with the rest of the community, the rich and poor, everyone, together and eating.”

Against the odds (and the objections of his then-partner), Shanaka opened first one, then two more pay-as-you-can restaurants, and a school canteen, drawing out of his skeptical Melbourne residents previously unthinkable fonts of generosity and trust. Shanaka was feted as an Australian Local Hero, appeared on a national stamp, met the prime minister, gave TED Talks, and co-officiated a TV cooking contest with the Dalai Lama. Shanaka's pay-as-you-can philosophy, considered subversive a decade ago, is now mentioned in Australian educational curricula. The idea has been exported to Dublin, and in 2011 Jon Bon Jovi opened a similarly themed community kitchen in New Jersey.

However, Shanaka paid a price for following his idiosyncratic path. Heroin addicts dipped into the collection boxes, which eventually had to be locked. He battled for years with the Australian government over $300,000 in unpaid sales taxes owed by Lentil as Anything; eventually Shanaka and his supporters succeeded in having the sales tax law revised, in view of the nonprofit nature of the restaurants. He had to declare bankruptcy at one point but formed another legal entity and bought back the restaurants' equipment. Shanaka pays himself a basic wage out of the earnings, though child support payments became a legal issue, and he has been threatened with jail over $14,000 in unpaid traffic fines. Businesses and landlords have pushed for the eviction of Lentil as Anything restaurants, in part because they draw in an unsavory crowd of social outcasts. Shanaka is weary of the battles and the restaurant business; he wants out. He has a lot of plans; he has worked with children's education and reconciliation in Sri Lanka. Like many of us, he wants to challenge deep-rooted social inequities; unlike the majority of us, Shanaka has the courage to do so.

Shanaka's restaurants prove that healthy eating does not have to be the privilege of the well-off in society. As Shanaka and many anthropologists have noted, in small-scale traditional societies, food was shared among neighbors. Indeed, the act of sharing food was essential to village life, because it meant that the risk of not obtaining enough food in a foray could be spread among the villagers. Nowadays, this communal aspect of eating has been nearly wiped out in industrialized societies, with people dashing off to a supermarket, farmer's market, bakery, or deli and returning home to consume the stash of food by themselves, perhaps with some family, occasionally with friends. Eating in a restaurant is not much different, because, as Shanaka noted, the costs of restaurant meals can serve as markers of status, like a fancy car, watch, or purse. For most Americans, this is exactly the point: If you work hard to make money, then you get to splurge on luxuries, including pricey meals. But this raises a question: Is a city or town merely a place with good jobs, safe housing, decent education for the kids, and places to blow excess cash for amusement, like malls and restaurants? Or are communities supposed to be places where we look out for one another, buffering our fellow citizens against the vagaries of misfortune? This might sound like a philosophical question to pose in a book about food and health, but in historical terms, the sharing of food and risk in general was the cornerstone of communal life.