Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (19 page)

Vanishing Ways of Life

The interesting thing to note about life expectancy is that we do not know how long someone will live until they die. Thus, life expectancies are based on people who were born in the first decades of the 20th century and are now dying. When we look at the life expectancy figures for 1990, those Chinese, Greeks, Hong Kongers, and Americans lived the formative part of their lives through the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. Those old people have bodies and habits that reflect their traditional ways of life. Nowadays, as international lifestyles converge on the same eating pattern, we are losing this valuable resource.

The information gets even more interesting as we drill down to find out what diseases are prevalent in a country and what diseases their populations die of. Deliberately, we go back in time to sample the conditions when people’s lifestyles were much more traditional. For example, in 1960, for every 100,000 men, 466 Americans died of heart disease, whereas only 48 Greeks died of it. Greeks were five times more likely to die of a stroke than an Egyptian. Britons were 1.5 times as likely to die of cancer as a Yugoslav.
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In 1978, Norwegian women were five times more likely to suffer a hip fracture than a Spanish woman.
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In 1954, Japanese women had a very low incidence of breast cancer—just 4 deaths per 10,000—compared to 18.5 deaths in the U.S.; an American man was 20 times more likely to die of prostate cancer than a Japanese man.
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There is little correlation between health and wealth. Japan and the U.S. are both rich countries, but poor countries can be healthy too. In 1978, Albania was the poorest country in Europe with an annual income of only $380 per person. In spite of that, an Albanian man was half as likely to die of coronary heart disease as a British man.
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There is another often-used measure of well-being known as “health expectancy”—this is the number of years that a person can expect to live “in full health.” Based on this measure, the Japanese have the highest health expectancy of 74.5 years.
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In comparison, the British come in 14th with 71.7 years and Americans come in 24th with only 70.0 years. In other words, you die earlier and spend more time disabled (on average) if you are an American.

Statistics like this give us plenty to ponder. What is so special about the Greeks, the Japanese, and the Hong Kong Chinese that they live longer (and in better shape) than Americans? Why are some people more vulnerable to cancers, heart disease, strokes, and osteoporosis than others? There is now a massive body of research to identify how different populations’ lifestyles influence their life and health expectancy.

Lifespan in Historical Times

There is a prevalent illusion that we live longer and better than people in historical times. This is perhaps driven by our images of life in the fetid cities so graphically described by Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. Sure, in those days, and in those places, life for many people was indeed “mean, nasty, brutish and short” (to quote the English enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes). But that is hardly a standard by which we should judge our prosperous and pampered lives today. We have seen that rural Americans have much the same life expectancy at 15 as did their great grandparents 150 years ago.

What about the prosperous and pampered societies further back in time? It is a central thesis of this book that neither the lifestyle of ancient agricultural civilizations nor those of Medieval and Victorian Europe are a good model for us today. Nevertheless, it helps to cast the spotlight on a number of issues. After the farming revolution 10,000 years ago, for the first time in the history of the human race, people were living in close proximity with each other and they were dependent on farming. For the first time, human populations were exposed to the hazards of crop failure, new diseases – particularly new diseases – and disastrous floods and plagues. Babies were born at more frequent intervals, but more babies died in infancy. This drags down the averages. After a natural disaster whole populations would be wiped out. The technology of warfare became ever more murderous. But how are we to put on a statistically sound basis a true estimate of longevity? The answer is that we cannot.

To get another bearing on the question, we can look at what the ancient peoples themselves thought of their life expectancy. First, a quick look at the writings of the ancient Greek, Homer. Based on Homer’s directions in the Iliad, the archeologist Schlieman discovered the site of Homer’s 3,000 year old Troy in 1870. It was a dramatic vindication of the historical basis of Homer’s stories about Odysseus. Homer relates how Odysseus’ wife Penelope remained faithful even though he was absent for twenty years. The remarkable, but little commented feature is that Penelope was besieged by ardent suitors for the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence. Some of the suitors were the same age as her son Telemachus. In other words, in ancient Greece, 3,000 years ago, a 40-plus woman was such a marriageable attraction that she was pursued by men half her age. Or we can look at the words of Aristotle living in ancient Greece over 2,300 years ago. He recommended that men wait until they are 35 years old before even getting married. The Greeks in general thought that a man reached his peak at the age of 40. These are hardly the strategies of people expecting a short life or a decrepit old age.

Look again at some of Alexander the Great’s generals
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. Antigonus Monophthalmos was a battling veteran who, encouraging his troops from his war-horse, finally succumbed to a hail of javelins at the Battle of Ipsus. He was 81 years old. His opponent, Lysimichos was later killed at the Battle of Coropedium at the age of 79. His ally Selfcos Nicator survived all battles only to be assassinated at the age of 78. This is the other side of the coin, old men with a youth’s vigor. Old men who could lead their troops into battle, wielding the heavy armament of the period. Of course, this is all just circumstantial evidence. Yet it is surely no coincidence that the ancient Greek diet is still represented, 23 centuries later, by the much studied, and healthful, Cretan diet that we discuss in a later segment.

We will look at the knowledge obtained for a few populations to see how the evidence builds up. To get the best contrast, we have chosen some extreme cases.

The Eskimos

As our species spread out around the world, even the most inhospitable regions were settled. The Eskimos were originally Siberians who got pushed across the Bering Strait by population pressures. They arrived in Alaska 6,000 years ago and found the land already occupied by the American Indians, who had migrated there several thousand years earlier. The only available territory was the land that the American Indians had shied away from—the unimaginably difficult Arctic regions of Alaska and Canada.

The Eskimos live in the most extreme of unfavorable environments. It is either cool, cold, or extremely cold most of the time. However, they have no biological special adaptation for these temperatures—the Eskimos are still tropical creatures. They can only live inside the Arctic Circle by insulating themselves from it. This was possible once some Siberian ancestor had worked out how to kill and skin a large furry animal and tailor it into a weather-tight garment. Like astronauts who are obliged to wear spacesuits to work in the vacuum of outer space, so the Eskimos have to cocoon themselves to live in the Arctic cold.

The Eskimos’ main activity is hunting and traveling, but they also spend quite a lot of time eating, sleeping, and loafing about.
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In the depths of winter, just warming up the air they breathe takes 1,000 calories. They eat much of their meat frozen, and that costs their bodies another 300 calories just to thaw it out. Oxford University professor/explorer Hugh MacDonald Sinclair specialized in studying the Eskimo diet, at a time when there were still many Eskimos living the traditional way. In 1953, he estimated
that, in winter, the average Eskimo needs to consume about 4,500 calories per day.
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In Eskimo society, contrary to the Savanna Model, hunting is not a luxury but a necessity. It is virtually the only source of food—at no time is gathering an option as a mainstay. Men are still the driving force in the hunt, although often the women come along and help. Even so, in complete contrast to the Savanna Model, the women and children are highly dependent on their men to feed them. The women are occupied with the domestic chores of skinning the kill, preparing the food, and making clothes and other artifacts.

The Eskimo Diet

How did the Eskimos feed themselves? Today, the Eskimo has the double-edged “benefit” of modern civilization, so we have to go back to quite old studies, archives, and records. Anne Keenleyside is a Canadian researcher with special interest in paleopathology, the analysis of ancient bones. She found that, with virtually no vegetation in their environment and winter temperatures dropping to below –40F, the Eskimos had to rely almost entirely on animal sources for their food.
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Dr. Keenleyside and many other researchers have built up a picture of the traditional Eskimo feeding pattern. Eskimos hunted fish, seal, whale, walrus, musk ox, caribou, polar bears, wolves, birds, rabbits, ducks, and geese. They ate every part of the animal—brains, blood, intestines and even the feces. On occasion, the women would gather eggs, crabs, mollusks, and shellfish.

The Eskimos were particularly fond of the rather sour contents of the caribou paunch. These are the partly digested remains of lichens and mosses. They cut the blubber off the kill for use as lighting oil and other external uses. They ate most animal food raw, sometimes after considerable putrefaction. Other foods, particularly seal meat, were eaten frozen. Some foods were lightly cooked over a seal-oil lamp or boiled or roasted. Because the Eskimo lives above the tree line, a campfire was a rare luxury fed by dried seaweed and other dried plant remains.
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In times of plenty, the Eskimo could consume prodigious amounts of meat: 9 pounds in a day has been measured as a normal occurrence. They drank prodigious amounts of water too (we will see why later when we discuss acid/alkali balance).

It was only in the short summer that the Eskimo ate any plant food. The treeless plains of the Arctic have a permanently frozen subsoil, known as tundra, and no plants grow more than knee high. The women would forage for berries, roots, stalks, buds, and leaves. They gathered some kinds of algae and seaweed too. It is estimated, however, that plant food represented no more than about 5% of the diet, even during the growing season.

The muscle meat of seal and whale shares similar characteristics with our ancestral wild game—there is little “marbling,” or fat permeating the muscle. The small amount of muscle fat and the visible fat (blubber) are particularly rich in a essential fatty acids (EFAs),
notably one called eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). Later in this chapter, we’ll look at essential fatty acids and their significance to human health.

Dr. George Mann, in a report for the U.S. National Defense Committee in 1962, stated that by eating all the animal parts, the Eskimo obtained enough of the “classic” micronutrients to survive including vitamin C.
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This might come as a surprise, since we think of vitamin C as only coming from plants. However, the skin and guts of animals like seal and caribou are also rich in this vitamin. On the other hand, the Eskimo diet was very deficient in “background” micronutrients.

Calcium consumption was huge—over 2,000 mg per day.
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Protein intake was very high and the fat and oil intake was high.
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However, the types of fat are of key importance: the Eskimo diet was very low in saturated fat, high in omega-3 oils, and quite high in cholesterol; there were virtually no unhealthy trans-fatty acids. The Eskimos’ intake of fiber, carbohydrates, and sugars was almost nonexistent, although they got some glycogen (a kind of animal carbohydrate) from the meat. Canadian researcher Kang-Jey Ho estimates that 50% of energy came from fat, 35% from protein, and 15% from glycogen.
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Most notably, there was virtually no plant food, no soluble fiber, nor the myriad of micronutrients that only plant foods can provide.

Eskimo Health

The Eskimos first attracted attention because of an anomaly: in spite of their high-fat, high-meat diet, they had no cardiovascular disease, thromboses, or strokes; they had low blood pressure and good cholesterol levels.
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In fact, it was too much of a good thing. Their blood was slow to clot when needed (known as a prolonged “bleeding time”) and they suffered from difficult-to-stop nosebleeds. These discoveries led researchers to find the vital role of the various fatty acids in manipulating body biochemistry. The Eskimos did not suffer from vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) or from vitamin D deficiency (rickets); nor did they suffer from diabetes, appendicitis, arthritis, cancer, or dental caries (cavities).