Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (2 page)

The insights of nutritional anthropology get at the root causes of the “diseases of civilization”: cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and many more. These diseases are not inevitable, they are optional. These are lifestyle diseases, which can be avoided and put into remission. By understanding the principles of nutritional anthropology and eating in accordance with our naturally adapted lifestyle, you will be able to choose the right foods to eat and know why. You can improve your health to be better able to combat any disease and live longer. Your body will find its natural ideal weight, either losing or gaining according to its needs. You will be able to take control
of your eating habits and thus your life.

These are powerful claims, but as a scientist I am not given to flights of fancy or guesswork. All the information in this book is based on evidence-driven science. These insights are new, because the various pieces of the puzzle have only recently been put together. For example, peering deep into our DNA is one of the exciting new tools for unlocking the secrets of our genetic heritage. And there are many other fields that are yielding fascinating new insights about how human beings are “designed” to live. This book gathers this scattered, cutting-edge information and synthesizes it into a coherent whole.

But this is not just theory—the ideas work. Over the past decade, thousands of individuals have been empowered by this information. I have personally worked with many of them to understand the nature of disease, to take control of their eating habits, and to help them live a healthier lifestyle. Many people’s lives have been transformed by the insights of nutritional anthropology.

The Journey Ahead

The first part of the book explains nutritional anthropology—how we know what it means to be a human being, particularly in nutritional terms. We highlight the consequences of our divergence from the ideal eating pattern. The middle part of the book deals with how humans moved away from our naturally adapted environment, feeding patterns, and lifestyle and looks at the science supporting our claims. Then, based on these insights, we develop an “Owner’s Manual” for how we should be feeding ourselves today and show you how to put it into action today. Finally, we present an overview of specific diseases and how these relate to the ways we eat and live.

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Chapter 1 describes the remarkable discoveries of nutritional anthropology: about where we came from and how our ancestors made their living there.

•
Chapter 2 describes how, over many millennia, more and more foods have become part of our diets (not always for the best) and describes how governments, somewhat arbitrarily, provide dietary guidelines.

•
Chapter 3 reviews how we eat today and hints at the surprising health consequences.

•
Chapters 4 and 5 go backstage to look at the science behind these assertions, bringing in evidence from other areas of scientific enquiry that satisfyingly complete the picture.

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In chapter 6, we pull all the pieces of evidence together to define the “Owner's Manual,” the naturally adapted eating pattern for the human species.

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Chapter 7 sets out the route map for feeding ourselves in today’s world. It gives practical advice, strategies for different situations, and a step-by-step approach for easily putting the principles into practice.

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Chapter 8 shows how we can make adjustments in our lives—to bring them in line with our naturally adapted lifestyle—that can help our well-being. Stress, exercise, spirituality, kinships, family relationships, differences between the sexes, parenting, and other topics are explored.

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Chapter 9 looks at the connection among what we eat, lifestyle factors, and the “diseases of civilization.” Returning to our naturally adapted feeding patterns can greatly improve our health and well-being.

This book’s fusion of healthy eating with healthy thinking could not be more important, dealing as it does with the absolute fundamentals of human nature. It feels good to know at last that you have a coherent and focused road map for humbug-free bodily nutrition. It is a relief to be clear about where you have to go, and you’ll feel better about yourself for taking control of your destiny.

You will find the secret to what it means to be a human being living in close connection with our natural lifestyle. Everyone can use these ideas to enhance their image, inside and out. It contains the easy-to-learn skills of how to harmonize your eating with human genetic programming. We
can
make adjustments to our ways of eating, our ways of thinking, and our lifestyle so that they coincide as closely as possible with our inherited natural traits: they are the key to a healthy and harmonious life. In this book, we dub this process – of aligning our lives with the way nature intended – “The Bond Effect”.

Chapter 1

What is Nutritional Anthropology?

Much of what we think we know about food has filtered into our minds through our upbringing, our cultural conditioning, and commercial advertising. We absorb still other ideas from the not-so-subtle influences of the health industry, junk science, and the trendy wisdom of the day. Our individual theories are all different and no one could argue that any of them is the complete answer. The reason is simple—even the experts cannot agree. They are like the blindfolded men trying to guess that they are touching an elephant. One touches the trunk and thinks it is a snake, the next touches a leg and thinks it is a tree, and so on.

There is, however, a valid science that has emerged which lifts the blindfold and shows the whole picture. It sees across the barriers between many compartmentalized scientific disciplines and finds new, overarching knowledge in the patterns that are revealed. We sometimes forget that, just like all other creatures on this planet, we sleep, feed, excrete, beget offspring, and indeed bleed. If we are like animals in those respects, then we resemble them in the rest.

This new science studies how humans fit into this vast and complex mosaic of nature. We go back to our origins to understand our place in the scheme of things. We learn what it means to be human—as organic beings—interacting in a multitude of intricate ways with our native environment. Second, it uses a range of scientific disciplines to identify the kind of feeding pattern for which our bodies have evolved over millennia. We learn the kinds and proportions of plants and creatures we consumed, and we match this with what we know makes us ill or well today. Various peoples around the world practice a range of dietary patterns—these practices are not without consequences and we learn from those as well.

This science puts all of these clues together to identify the ideal feeding pattern for the human species. Why is this important? Very simply, we are making ourselves grievously sick and unnaturally shortening our lives by blindly ignoring our nutritional heritage. This new science lights our way to the remedy: it not only gives us the definitive specification for the human diet, it also teaches us how to put it into practice. It is comforting to know that this is not only possible but also easy, once we connect the dots.

What is this science? It links the study of human beings (anthropology) with the science of fuelling the body (nutrition). That science is
nutritional anthropology.
It goes right to the heart of what it means to be a human being in nutritional terms.

THE “OWNER’S MANUAL” FOR THE HUMAN BODY

It is helpful to think of the human body as being an incredibly complex machine. This machine has a particular construction and functions in a particular way, yet, annoyingly, we do not have an Owner’s Manual. We do not have the specification of the
fuel
that the machine was designed to run on. It is incredible to think that, up until now, so little thought has been given to the matter. We inhabit this wonderful community of minute cells that have come together for a common purpose—to create and sustain life in a human body—and each one of those cells requires to be fueled, but with what?

In this chapter, we start the hunt for the Owner’s Manual by looking at four promising trails:

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We will go on a journey of discovery back to our ancestral human homeland and get to know the workshop where our bodies were forged.

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We will find tribes that, even in modern times, continue to live like our early ancestors.

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We will analyze fossilized bones to see what food nutrients contributed to their structure and we will examine fossilized teeth to see what kind of feeding pattern caused them to wear and scratch in a particular way.

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We will seek confirmation for what we discover by comparing our digestive system with other human-like creatures.

OUR ANCESTRAL HOMELAND

Where do we come from? The answer to this question is of capital importance because it tells us
where
we should look to find the Owner’s Manual. There we will find the place where our bodies were fashioned. We need to understand this place’s geography and natural history, so we can discover what
use
our ancestors made of it and how it shaped our ideal feeding pattern.

The great explorations of the 15th to 18th centuries found human beings living on every continent, with the exception of Antarctica. Human populations were living in a huge variety of climates, geographies, and cultures. In the 19th century, intrepid explorers discovered the chimpanzee and the gorilla in the jungles of tropical Africa. Their human-like form and eerily human behavior fascinated the people of the time. The great naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) predicted, but could not prove, that humans (
Homo sapiens
) had their origins in tropical Africa too. No one had yet uncovered any ancient fossils in Africa to confirm this prediction.

Then, in relatively quick succession, anthropologists discovered ancient bones not in Africa, but in Germany in 1856 (Neanderthal), in Indonesia in 1891 (Java Man), and in China in the 1930s (Peking Man). They were all remains of humanlike species dating back 50,000 to one million years ago. These creatures had stone tools, made rudimentary ornaments, and daubed crude cave paintings. However, there was no center—these humanlike creatures seemed to be living all over Europe and Asia.

The picture was further confused because, in southern Europe about 30,000 years ago, there was an abrupt improvement in the sophistication of tools and cave paintings. A new type of human, dubbed “Cro-Magnon,” appeared on the scene. There was puzzlement about what it all meant.

Finally, in the 1960s, the anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey (and later their son, Richard) began uncovering extremely old, humanlike bones in tropical East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania). Some of these bones were several million years old. Two famous skeletons are “Turkana boy” and “Lucy.” Once again, it was looking as though humans had their origins in Africa after all.

Remarkable Insights from DNA

During the 1990s, from the most unexpected direction, came dramatic confirmation of our origins from an extremely powerful tool: DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis. It just so happens that our genes contain the key to the whole history of the human race. Our genetic material tells us that, with the exception of the Cro-Magnon, all these human-like creatures that inhabited Europe and Asia for over a million years, including the Neanderthals, are not our ancestors at all. They are a different species. Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens
were closely related species, granted. They were almost as close as the donkey is to the horse, but they did not successfully interbreed; there are no Neanderthal genes in
Homo sapiens
.

Allan Wilson and Rebecca Cann are Berkeley genetic microbiologists who have used sophisticated DNA analysis techniques to trace the ancestry of humans back to their origins.
¹
They and other pioneering researchers, such as the geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza,
²
have built up a remarkably precise picture of our ancient genealogy. The molecular evidence indicates that
Homo sapiens
arose around 250,000 years ago. The population of
Homo sapiens
was small—no more than about 10,000 of them—and the population remained at around this level for a very long time. Furthermore, studies of the genes of different peoples from all over the world show that all their ancestral lines lead back to a single location for our homeland. This key information tells us that our mother country is an area bounded by Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia.

Indeed, these studies show that our ancestors remained in their homeland until about 60,000 years ago. According to the eminent Anglo-American anthropologist Ian Tattersall, we now know that everyone on this planet is descended from a group of people who lived in the savannas of East Africa until just 60,000 years ago.
³
This is a highly significant piece of information—it tells us that our origins are tropical African and
recent
in evolutionary terms.