Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (18 page)

The average farm laborer in 1900 consumed a half pint of beer on a Saturday night, and that was it for alcohol for the week. Today, Americans of drinking age are consuming, on average, 5 pints a week, much of it concentrated into one or two binges. Beer drinking on a large scale is linked to obesity (beer gut), heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, allergies, poor bone health, and cancers. The connection is the same as for sugars: beer contains a hyperactive sugar, maltose, which creates abnormal blood sugar surges. In addition, some people are allergic to the barley gluten in beer. The alcoholic content is also a problem (see sidebar), but beer is relatively dilute in alcohol, so this factor is of secondary importance to the sugar diseases.

The Problem with Alcohol

Alcohol occurs frequently in nature, especially where ripe fruits ferment of their own accord. There are stories of elephants gorging on overripe, fermenting mangoes and rampaging around in a drunken stupor. The human body handles alcohol perfectly well in these modest, naturally occurring circumstances. However, with our cleverness, we have made alcohol much more readily available and in greater concentrations. Greater consumption interferes with fat metabolism, brain chemistry, and many other bodily functions. The liver, the organ responsible for detoxifying alcohol from the blood, can develop the fatal condition of cirrhosis. Sometimes, the one-way valve into the stomach becomes a two-way valve, leading to acid reflux, when the contents of the stomach rise back up the esophagus and burn the lining. Plus, alcohol is empty calories: at best, it just adds to the waistline, at worst, it displaces more nutritive foods from the diet. Chronic alcoholics frequently suffer vitamin and mineral deficiency diseases and their life span is shortened by 10 to 12 years because of this.

Tea, whether black or green, seems to be mostly positive in its health effects. It is rich in certain micronutrients that are in short supply in the average Western diet. The body gratefully seizes these and uses them to reinforce the immune system, so that tea drinkers are less likely to suffer certain cancers and infectious diseases. And the caffeine content is moderate: a cup of tea contains about the same as a 12 oz can of cola.

Although consumed by the large mug, the classic American coffee is weakly brewed and relatively benign. The trend now is for coffeehouses to serve much stronger brews but still in large portions, which is getting us into the territory where caffeine overdose (see sidebar) may undermine our health. Coffee in these concentrations is associated with raised blood pressure, increased heart rate, strokes, and heart disease. On the other hand, coffee does have some protective effect against some types of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes. However, the balance of advantage stays with keeping the coffee weak.

Cocoa also contains caffeine at low levels, but it also contains a rich variety of micronutrients that are heart healthy and protective against many cancers. The warning is the same: use the genuine cocoa powder, not the artificial confections that masquerade as “chocolate drinks.”

Caffeine Overdose

Caffeine is found to a greater or lesser degree throughout the plant kingdom. The human body is clearly well adapted to handle it. Today, we tend to focus on the plants with a high content, particularly coffee, for its stimulative properties. On the whole, caffeine is quite benign and does not have many drawbacks. However, used consistently and in large doses, it interferes with blood sugar control and with bone health, and it reduces elasticity of the arteries. Caffeine addicts who try to stop often find that they suffer classic drug withdrawal symptoms: headaches, sleeplessness, irritability, tiredness, and so on.

Soft drinks and, by volume, colas dominate the market and have a number of problems. Their sugar content is directly associated with childhood obesity and heart disease. By adulthood, we see diabetes, cancers, raised blood pressure, high cholesterol, and all the usual sugar diseases. Colas, because of certain ingredients, are also associated with poor bone-building in children and osteoporosis in adults.

Fruit juices also have their problems. Fruits lose their fibrous structure in the juicing process. In addition, pasteurization knocks out many micronutrients, dramatically reducing their nutritional value. Finally, juice processing brings out the sugar content, which hits the bloodstream hard—fruit juices too are associated with the sugar diseases and, in particular, obesity and diabetes.

We have dealt with milk at length in the Milk Group and it is associated with all the problems of that group: heart disease, poor bone-building, allergies, obesity, and many more. Milk consumption has been dropping in spite of increasingly desperate promotions by the dairy industry. Studies suggest that they are losing out to carbonated soft drinks, which is simply replacing one problem with another.

Let us now turn to the other alcoholic beverages—wine, spirits, and liqueurs. Wine, particularly red wine, contains a number of micronutrients that appear to be helpful to health, especially cardiovascular conditions and cancers. The proviso is that you should drink no more than a couple of glasses per day. After that, the alcohol content takes over and starts to dominate the consequences. Wine, particularly dry wine, does not have the catastrophic effect on health that beer can have—wine drinkers on the whole suffer less from beer belly and the sugar diseases. Spirits have higher concentrations of alcohol, so the limit is reached more quickly and this is their main danger. But they do not provoke the sugar diseases like beer does. There is some evidence that high alcohol concentrations irritate the mouth, throat, and esophagus linings to the point where cancers develop. Spirits do not have any worthwhile concentrations of nutrients. Liqueurs suffer the same drawbacks and have an additional one—high sugar content. Liqueurs are doubly fattening (sugar and alcohol) and have nothing worthwhile to contribute nutritionally.

Finally, back to water: on the big scale, this is the least of our worries. Municipal water supplies are still far healthier than the fetid, polluted, and disease-ridden waters that our ancient ancestors were obliged to drink. Bottled waters are a harmless diversion. The alarms about dehydration are largely overdone, simply marketing manipulation to get us to drink far more bottled water than we need.

OUR CHANGED FOOD SUPPLY

We have examined how various foods have entered the food supply. Not all newcomers to the diet are unwelcome—many are fine alternatives to the foods our ancestors were adapted to in the Savanna Model. In recent history, new foods have arrived from all over the world. Some of them, such as the potato, have colonized our food supply so thoroughly that we cannot imagine life without them. In a similar vein, most cuisines around the world have accepted that fine addition to our diet, the tomato, which was unknown to Shakespeare just 400 years ago.

However, things are not always what they seem. For example, just in the past few centuries, the carrot has gone from purple to bright orange and now it is going back to purple again. In changing the colors, we keep changing the nutrients. The strawberry used to be just a little fruit about the size of a pea. In this continuous hybridization process, what nutrients have changed? In the industrialized production of the modern world, generic foods can change out of recognition, just in a generation.

Today, we see a host of new diseases afflicting our populations: autism, allergies, asthma, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, bone disease, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many more. These diseases have become so pervasive that we think of them as part of the normal human condition. We simply cannot imagine that there is a direct connection between our lifestyle, notably eating habits, and these diseases.

We have catalogued, food group by food group, the major divergences of these foods from our ancestral foods of the African savanna and looked at some of the consequences. We see that there are problems with grains, milk products, potatoes, and dry beans. Less surprisingly, we find that sugar creates havoc with our health. We should never have accepted certain types of vegetable oil in bulk quantities and we have done certain things to red meat that make it unhealthy to humans and non-conforming to the Savanna Model. We come to the startling realization that nature never intended us to eat some very familiar foodstuffs, which are making us sick.

Much of this new knowledge has not yet percolated into the schools, the nutritionist creed, and the medical community. And many of these revelations are daunting—they call into question many of our sincerely held beliefs and make us realize how much our upbringing, our schools, and the health industry have indoctrinated us. In the next chapter, we provide the scientific background to these astonishing conclusions, and then we will pull all the strands together to build the ideal eating plan in modern terms.

Chapter 4

The Science I:
Population Studies and Biochemical Clues

In the last chapter, we thoroughly reviewed how we have arrived at our present food supply. We often focus on the changes that have occurred in living memory and, indeed, the pace of change has accelerated in just the last 50 years. However, our lengthy exploration demonstrates how, over a very long period of time—more than 11,000 years—our food supply has been steadily, subtly, and imperceptibly changing. We can see that the way we eat today is radically different in
nature
from the way humans fed themselves for eons on the savannas of east Africa.

How much does this matter? In chapter 3, we outlined some of the consequences of these differences but without going into detail. We will now go into justifying these assertions based on scientific evidence. As each piece of the jigsaw slots into place, we will see how this evidence completes the gaps in the “Owner’s Manual.”

We begin by looking at scientific studies on human populations around the globe and investigate how their diets affect their health and life span. Such studies are known as population studies, although scientists often use the term
epidemiological studies
. Then, we will look at the way our biochemistry is supposed to work and what this tells us about the foods we should be eating. In the next chapter, we examine the way nature has designed our digestive system to work. Finally, we will look at what our modern diet is doing to us. Along the way, we will discover insights to thought-provoking conundrums such as how the Eskimo, with a massive calcium intake, suffers from osteoporosis or how the long-lived and healthy Okinawans nevertheless suffer unusually from senile dementia.

POPULATION STUDY CLUES

Humans fanned out from Africa some 60,000 years ago until, by 15,000 years ago, they had ventured to all the major parts of the planet. In this way, this tropical creature,
Homo sapiens
, now lives in places that are not tropical. Moreover, these groups were obliged to live on what was locally available, so humans all over the planet were now consuming new foods in new ways.

Today, the planet is like a huge laboratory with experiments going on in different parts. It is an ideal opportunity to study statistically how different lifestyles affect health and longevity. If a scientific research institution were to propose such an experiment today, the authorities would reject it as being cruel and unusual. However, nature and history have combined to perform the experiment for us, so we can learn from this wonderful resource. Let’s look at some examples of interesting populations to see how their diet has changed from the Savanna Model and the effect it has had on their health.

Life Expectancy and “Health Expectancy”

A good starting point is to examine countrywide statistics for death rates and the
reasons
for death. National governments collect these figures and international bodies like the World Health Organization collate them. Life expectancy is the factor that is most often paraded as an indication of how well a country is doing.

The figures most bandied about are for life expectancy at birth. This means,
on average
, for every baby born, the number of years it might be expected to live. In Pleistocene times, or even with the San, 30% of babies would die within the first year. This drags down the averages for life expectancy
at birth
, particularly in the underdeveloped world. For this reason, researchers often look at life expectancy at a later age, often at age 15. This gives the average number of years a 15-year-old is expected to live. This produces some surprising and useful results: we find that once an individual from a poor country has made it safely to 15 years old, he or she can expect to live as long, or even longer, than their counterparts in industrialized societies.

For example, 15-year-old boys can expect to live to the age of 76.5 in Japan, 75.6 in Greece, 75.3 in Hong Kong, but only 72.9 in the United States.
⁸⁵
Women live longer than men in all countries and the proportions are similar: 15-year-old girls can expect to live to the age of 82.4 in Japan, 80.9 in Hong Kong, 80.5 in Greece, but only 79.6 in the U.S. The Japanese overall have the longest life expectancy in the world, closely followed by people living in Hong Kong. Even if we take life expectancy at birth, Chinese boys born in the Shanghai province have a life expectancy of 75.7 years, while American boys at birth have a life expectancy of 71.8.
⁸⁶
Shanghai baby girls can expect to live for 79.2 years, but American baby girls can only expect 78.6 years of life.