Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (38 page)

What about animal matter? Of course, many people bring up their children successfully as vegetarians. However, staying with the Savanna Model, fish and fowl are fine. Free-range, omega-3-rich eggs are always good in any quantity. Just remember, you don’t have to give your child anything that, as a Savanna Model practitioner, you would not eat yourself.

In addition, a baby has a bigger need for the essential fatty acids (in a ratio of 1:1 for omega-3s and omega-6s) than an adult. There are at least two other fatty acids that their immature bodies are not capable of manufacturing for themselves: DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and ARA (arachidonic acid). However, don’t worry about them too much because the infant fed in accordance with the Savanna Model will not be deficient in either DHA or ARA.

There will certainly be times when it is just not possible to prepare your own baby food. What about the commercially available products? Here, again, food manufacturers have gotten a lot more clever about formulating reasonably healthy substitutes. When you go shopping, the same rules apply—take your reading glasses and scrutinize the ingredient labels. Don’t be misled by the attractive marketing labels proclaiming “healthy,” “low-fat,” “no artificial additives,” etc. The food manufacturers always put the advantages of their product in large lettering, while the truth is grudgingly portrayed in small print in a corner of the label. This time you are reading the ingredient list for a dependent baby, so be conscientious. Don’t buy anything that contains ingredients that you would not want for yourself: salt, sugar, glucose syrup, vegetable oil, fat, starch, and so on.

Finally, if your infant is not drinking mother’s milk or formula milk, then the only other beverage he or she should have is plain water. Will any kind of water do? Tap water, unjustly, is much maligned and is quite safe to use when boiled. For all young babies, you should boil the water anyway. For the cautious, by all means buy bottled water. Avoid the high-sodium brands, and distilled water is the safest. Juiced “Green” vegetables from Group 3 are fine, but avoid carrot juice and fruit juices—they give a sugar rush and help rot teeth. As for packaged drinks, be ultra-suspicious. Read the fine print, as they are almost always loaded with sugar and other harmful substances. Don’t even think of giving your child colas and other carbonated drinks. Get your child to accept water as the normal thirst-quencher.

Don’t forget, this is one phase in your child’s life when he or she is most open to influence from adults. It is now that you have to indoctrinate good consumption reflexes. This is not the time to introduce your child to pizzas, hamburgers, take-out chicken, or hot dogs. Even less is it the time to introduce your child to candies, cookies, ice cream, and confectionary. If you can get him or her through this phase without ever having tasted them, then you are well on the way to insulating your child from addiction later on.

Many adult health problems are established in these formative years. Perhaps the most significant is obesity. If your baby is allowed to get overweight, then the chances are that he or she will be overweight, or even obese, for the rest of their life. Worse, if your baby is overweight, he or she is already laying down plaque in the arteries and storing up a mid-life heart attack, as well as laying the foundations for cancer, arthritis, and a host of degenerative diseases.

Children/Adolescents

The special needs of children and adolescents are often exaggerated. They will be eating a lot for their size, but they do not need any particular divergence from the Savanna Model. By far the greatest problem is to stop them from eating harmful foods. It is too much to expect that you can, like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, hold back the floodwaters of the junk food society. Accept with good grace that your child will eat junk food from time to time, but don’t be defeatist. Make sure that at home he or she is following the Savanna Model. If that is assured, then your child will survive the storms of junk food relatively unscathed.

Avoid using junk food as a treat, much less as a reward. Rather, you need to indoctrinate children with the idea that junk food is shoddy, tacky, malignant, even hazardous, toxic, and poisonous. Children will accept that they are different from their peers if you present it as their particular belief system. You need to give them the arguments and words to use when well-meaning friends and relatives question their eating habits. Let them understand that they are eating in a way that avoids the deficiency diseases of their peers.

Play hardball. If necessary, discreetly draw attention to the signs in their friends of deficiency disease, malnutrition, and over-indulgence. Point out their poor complexion, constant colds and flu, listless eyes, allergies and eczema, bad breath, lack of physical fitness, and grossness of obesity. You may have scruples against this approach, but be aware that your child is being peddled temptations even more prevalent than those offered by the neighborhood drug dealer.

Does this mean that your children should never have a hamburger, cola, ice cream, or candy? No. If you have done your job well, your children will be sensible and be able to handle social situations adroitly. They will still want to go to birthday parties and proms, and hang out at the local burger joint. But this is where they will need the self-discipline, confidence, and social skills to limit the potential damage.

At home, you have an iron responsibility to ensure that the right foodstuffs are constantly available. Always have a supply of ready-to-eat fruit, vegetables, and salads. Have homemade dishes like vegetable hot-pot and ratatouille available in the fridge and freezer. Have stocks of oily fish like canned salmon, sardines, and tuna. In other words, have a larder well-stocked for the Savanna Model. Water should still be the main drink; try carbonated water with a twist of lemon. Tea, iced or otherwise, is also okay. Finally, remind yourself that a child needs a role model. From the youngest age, your child will want to emulate the feeding patterns of the adults in the house.

Get your child into the habit of filling up with food at home, and preparing and taking food supplies with her when she goes out. Never have junk foods in the house. Never buy cookies, cakes, pastries, candies, hamburgers, hot dogs, ice cream, pizzas, or ready-made meals. Never have colas, fruit juices, or carbonated drinks in the house.

What about condiments? It’s been said that the only way to get a kid to eat his vegetables is to smother them in ketchup. Strangely, if that is what works, then it is tolerable. A good quality ketchup is not such a bad condiment. The main drawback is the sugar content. But, for a Savanna Model practitioner, ketchup used in modest quantities is a small and tolerable lapse. Don’t forget herbs and spices. They are full of healthful micronutrients (hence their pungent taste and aroma). Get into the habit of using copious quantities of “Green” natural herbs and spices in all your dishes. Wean yourself and your family off processed and junk sauces.

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of a healthy adolescence. Ensure that your children follow the Savanna Model, lock into place healthy habits for them, and they will be grateful to you for the rest of their long, disease-free lives.

Pregnant and Nursing Women

All we know about how our bodies work, and how our prehistoric ancestors evolved, shows that no special departure from the Savanna Model is indicated during pregnancy. Sometimes women are, mistakenly, advised to load up on calcium tablets. However, our ancestors never knew anything about calcium. Certainly, we have no instincts to search out calcium-rich foods. But if that doesn’t convince you, studies show that calcium supplementation does not make any difference to calcium metabolism.

The mother’s body naturally meets the demand for extra calcium by three hormonal activities. First, the intestines absorb a higher percentage of calcium from everyday foods. Also, the kidneys become more efficient at recycling calcium recovered from the urine. Finally, some calcium is borrowed from the bones. Nothing that the mother eats, supplements, or does changes this process.
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As soon as menstruation restarts, bone density steadily recovers all by itself.

Our forager ancestors had pregnancies spaced about every four years. This happened mainly through biological machinery: a woman is much less likely to conceive when breastfeeding, and she is less fertile when her body’s food stores are low. The main lesson to draw from this is to space pregnancies by about four years, just like our ancient ancestors, so that the bones can recover their full health before the next pregnancy.

Your doctor will probably prescribe all kinds of dietary supplements. There is not the space in this book to explain, one by one, why these supplements are not necessary, so you will dutifully take them. Just know that the pregnant Savanna Model practitioner need have no fear of dietary deficiencies. For example, one of the latest vitamins to be recommended for pregnant women is folic acid because the diet of the average American woman is deficient in it. But where is folic acid found? In foliage! The Savanna Model mother will be absorbing high levels of folic acid in salads and other vegetables, as well as all the other essential nutrients for her baby.

On the contrary, it is ever more important to not consume the non-conforming foods like bad fats and bad carbohydrates. The bad fats will reappear in the fetus and in breast milk. The excess insulin levels will upset the baby’s metabolism.

Finally, what about the cravings and nausea of morning sickness? This is definitely a tough time for the pregnant woman. According to evolutionary biologist Dr. Margie Profet, this sickness is nature’s way of preventing women from consuming plants whose antinutrients might harm the fetus.
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In addition, the fetus is already manipulating the woman’s hormones to serve its own purposes, making her feel bad. What should she do? The truth is, not a lot. This is a time for going with the flow. She eats when she can and what she can bear to eat. Just relax and wait for this phase to pass. The fetus will make sure it gets all it needs, robbing if need be, the mother’s own stores.

Thirty Something

This is likely to be a phase of life when health will seem good and there is no need to concern yourself about the future. The reality is that it is this period of life when you need to set the scene for your later years. Bad eating habits now will lead inexorably to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. They lay the foundation for the degenerative diseases of middle and old age—cancer, arthritis, osteoporosis, rheumatism, and even Alzheimer’s.

It is at this age that the blood sugar control mechanism starts to show its age. It copes less well with the stress that we put on it. It is now that “middle-age spread” begins to show. This is your warning that you are pre-diabetic—take it seriously. Change your eating pattern and relieve your body of that sugar-stress by following the guidelines in this book. But, most importantly, this is the end of the phase where your body easily builds up bone density. Now is the time to ensure that your bone capital is at a maximum.

The Menopausal Woman

Menopausal changes start in the early forties and build up to a finality in the fifties. As with pregnancy, this is a time when a woman’s hormones are undergoing a major reshuffle. It is potentially a period when Western women will have those familiar symptoms of hot flashes, irritability, hypersensitivity, depression, tension headaches, and night sweats. However, in most simple societies, these symptoms are almost unknown. Indeed, many women in the West do not suffer them either. What makes the difference?

Not surprisingly, the main thing influencing hormonal balance is food. The bodily dysfunctions caused by dietary errors will be amplified during menopause. Controlled studies show that a diet rich in bioflavonoids and vitamin C provides relief of menopausal symptoms for many women. Where are bioflavonoids and vitamin C found? In fruits and vegetables! Just boosting the intake of fruits and vegetables is enough to dramatically reduce the disagreeable symptoms. And don’t forget that bad carbohydrates and bad fats have a major effect on hormonal balances. Getting these right helps enormously too. Eliminate dietary errors by eating according to the Savanna Model.

There are also secondary dimensions, such as the stress of the Western way of life, the psychological finality of becoming infertile, and the tension in relationships caused by changes in libido, that affect women in menopause. There is a strong mind/body connection: managing stress and moods will also help stabilize hormonal balance.

What about the long-term affects? What about osteoporosis and heart disease? These are both major problems for post-menopausal women, but only in the West. If you get your eating patterns right and get other lifestyle factors into a conforming pattern, you can get on with life and not worry about these conditions.

Finally, what about hormone replacement therapy (HRT)? We can be fairly confident that Pleistocene grandmothers did not drink pregnant giraffe’s urine to obtain estrogen-rich extracts. There is no reason from a health viewpoint why a menopausal Savanna Model practitioner should supplement with estrogen.

The Elderly

It is in the later years of life that eating in harmony with our savanna-bred natures can bring rapid relief to distressing ailments like stiff joints, arthritis, digestive upsets, and general ill-health. These are the ailments that emerge, like the wreck of a ship, as the tide recedes. For a great part of our lives, our body’s biochemistry has sufficient “redundancy” built into its system to patch around errors of lifestyle. With old age, these margins of error disappear. Now more than ever, it is important to harmonize how you eat with the needs of your body. When you do so, many of these troublesome maladies disappear.