Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (40 page)

Social engineers wanted to believe that human behavior is “infinitely malleable.” If necessary, they faked scientific studies to fit their prejudices. The most celebrated case was that of Margaret Mead. An anthropological student of Franz Boas, Mead became famous for her doctoral research in 1925 that allegedly showed that Samoa is a paradise in which sex is unrestricted; where jealousy, rape, and adolescent adjustment problems are unknown. But none of it was true. Mead never learned the Samoan language and she interviewed only two schoolgirls who, only in their old age, admitted that they had deceived her for their own amusement.
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She wrote a book about her “research” entitled
Coming of Age in Samoa
. It became a best-seller and required reading as “a classic of universal truths” in university courses.

In the book, Mead claimed that adolescent behavior in humans could be explained only in terms of the social environment. Human nature, she declared, was “the rawest most undifferentiated of raw material.” It wasn’t until 70 years later, when anthropologist Derek Freeman unearthed the truth about Mead’s sloppy studies, that her theories were finally debunked.
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In the meantime, Western thinking—and societies—have been distorted for several generations. We now know that deep-seated urges and instincts underlie and direct human behavior.

Anthropologists and other researchers have studied the huge range of different cultures around the world. From these studies, they have teased out the characteristics that are common to all human cultures; they call them “human universal values.”
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In other words, they are features that are hardwired into human behavior and not affected by cultural conditioning. We will now examine the main features and show how the San shape up to these features, then we will see how they compare with common practice in our Western culture. This will throw into relief any discord with our savanna-bred natures.

Every normal human on this planet has fundamental feelings of pain, fear, happiness, and physical attraction. These are emotions that manipulate our bodies for basic survival and reproduction. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how any species can survive if it does not have a similar impulse system to signal when, for example, to fight for vital space, to flee from danger, or to mate.

Hardwired Behavior

All creatures are born with a set of instructions wired into their brains, mostly simple “rules of thumb.” For example, a newborn duckling’s tiny brain is wired with the instruction, “Attach yourself to the first moving thing you see.” In nature, this would be the mother duck, so this works fine. However, if the emerging duckling first sees a balloon, it bonds with that instead. Psycho-biologists call this process “imprinting.” This phenomenon is of the utmost importance in understanding how early experiences, if they are not what nature expects, can program our brain’s computer incorrectly. Not surprisingly, today our lifestyles often program modern infant brains inappropriately.

Humans’ hardwired instructions are the first level reflexes, which occur subconsciously. Typical examples are blinking, swallowing, and the knee-jerk. Others invoke emotions, which have an evolutionary and survival purpose—to make the brain give instructions to the body. A clear example is when a lion attacks. Our body’s sensors, chiefly the eyes and ears, send signals to the brain. The brain speeds up the heart and puts the muscles in overdrive. We feel this cascade of activity as fear. All this happens subconsciously—it is an automatic, hardwired reflex.

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, specializes in finding out how the brain detects emotion and feeling. The brain is receiving billions of reports every second from every cell in the body. The brain then integrates these reports and we perceive the result as an emotion.
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“Background” emotions work at a subconscious level and only surface to our consciousness vaguely: we can feel “under the weather” or we can have an instinctive dislike of someone. “Primary” emotions are basic ones such as fear, sadness, and happiness. Yet another category concerns “social” emotions, which evolved to make us behave in appropriate ways in society and in personal relationships. They are genetically programmed feelings such as conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, dignity, rejection, humiliation, moral outrage, sorrow, mourning, and jealousy.

When we talk about “programming,” “hardwiring,” and “genetically programmed emotions,” where do these features come from? The answer, quite simply, is in our genes. In the words of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, genes “are the replicators and we are their survival machines.”
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Down through the eons, genes in bodies that failed to reproduce died out. We are all carriers of genes that succeeded in getting into the next generation—millions of times over. To do that, they had to make sure that the bodies they found themselves in were fit for survival. In this regard, we still inhabit bodies honed to perfection for successful gene transmission in the savannas of east Africa.

Genes can aid their reproduction more subtly too, by helping copies of themselves that are in other bodies. They manipulate the body they are in to help other bodies survive if they are likely to contain copies of themselves. We perceived this manipulation as instincts, emotions, and feelings. Human mothers feel more like risking their lives to save their own baby than they do for an unknown person; it is a phenomenon that we call, quite naturally and innocently, maternal instinct.

Instincts, Emotions, and Feelings

Instincts, emotions, and feelings are the genes’ way of ensuring their self-preservation. There is a powerful lesson to be drawn: nature designed this mental life to work in forager groups in the African savanna. Our lives today are so far removed from these conditions that we are continuously stressed by emotional signals occurring in inappropriate ways.

For example, humans are programmed with instructions that say, “If you see tasty food, eat it until it is all gone.” This worked fine in our ancestral homeland as food was not abundant, was largely bland in flavor, and required work to obtain. Today, that hardwired instruction is self-defeating. Food is abundant, food companies are experts at making it appealing and tasty, and we have lost the link between obtaining food and the work required to get it. Our emotions are crying out “eat”!

Humans, as well as many other creatures, have mechanisms that can override the hardwiring. We can still choose to not eat even if the food is there, even if we are hungry or if the food is tasty. But this requires two things: the recognition that there is a good reason to override our instinct and the exercise of willpower to carry it out. This process is unpleasant and stressful.

The culture we grow up in provides the “reason” to override our instincts. It imposes a set of behavioral values that are commonly accepted by society, often strongly bound up with religious doctrines that have developed over centuries. Frequently, cultures impose behavioral patterns that are quite at variance with human nature.
Taboo
is from a Polynesian word (
tapu
) that means a prohibition imposed by social custom against a particular behavior. Humans seem to be hardwired to adopt taboos in general. However, the nature of the taboo can be whatever the culture programs into the brain circuits. For example, to Western culture, cannibalism is taboo, whereas it was common practice in many peoples from the Polynesians to the Aztecs. Taboo, and especially its breaking, arouse incredibly deep, visceral emotions. There are many taboos that seem to be common to all cultures; they are “human universal values.” An example is the taboo against incest, which is the result of imprinting, a device by which our genes maximize their survival into the next generation. Taboos that have arisen for this reason are good for well-being; most others are not necessarily so. We must, therefore, make fundamental distinctions among those notions that come to us because of our hardwiring, those imprinted at an early age, and those that are programmed into us as “ideas.”

Ideas and Indoctrination

Ideas float around in the environment waiting for a susceptible brain to colonize. We all carry a baggage of ideas, opinions, beliefs, and prejudices that have taken up residence in our minds, usually in a haphazard way. New ideas have to fight the current incumbents for a place to be heard. If they are successful, they in turn take up residence and modify our behavior. If these ideas are really successful, they multiply by getting us to tell other people about them. Richard Dawkins has likened the behavior of ideas to that of viruses. He even coined a name for them: mind-viruses or “memes.”
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The Vienna-based founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, had a remarkable nephew, Edward Bernays, whose family migrated to America when he was a baby. In 1919, Bernays opened a marketing agency in New York. He offered techniques using Freud’s psychological principles to “influence people to buy products they don’t need or want.” Bernays coined the term
public relations
for this technique. Bernays used these psycho-techniques with remarkable success; for example, in the 1920s, to persuade women that it is acceptable to smoke in public. His delighted client, the American Tobacco Company, saw cigarette sales soar. Bernays “engineered” public opinion in many other celebrated cases, including the idea that bacon is a breakfast food.

We have all been indoctrinated from the earliest age: by our family, schools, health professionals, sociologists, our cultural belief system, and much else. In matters to do with food, for example, we are under constant, sophisticated, and persuasive assault by the food industry. For generations, they have provided, free of charge, attractive yet self-serving propaganda in the form of educational materials to schools. They take charge of food supplies in schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Various lobbies, including dairy, snack-food, sugar, fast-food, processed food, and cattlemen, deploy the most sophisticated psychological techniques to seduce us into buying their products.

We have the challenge of understanding how our minds are being manipulated. When we have done that, then we have the next mental challenge—changing our habits.

LIVING ARRANGEMENTS

We have to remind ourselves that the way we live today is light years away from our naturally adapted pattern in the tropics of east Africa. Our ancient ancestors (and forager tribes like the San) slept according to the rhythms of light and dark. In the tropics, whatever the season, dusk comes around 6
p.m.
and dawn around 6
a.m.
For a few hours after dusk, the San huddle around the campfire talking quietly and doing tasks by the firelight. Sleep would come around 9:30
p.m.
and they would wake up with the sun.

The creatures from whom we are descended,
Homo erectus
, discovered fire at least one million years ago. We can imagine the nights with strange unknown rustlings in the dark; the campfire must have been a great comfort. We all feel, even today, the fascination of a fire: gazing reflectively into the flames is a pleasure deeply anchored in our psyches. Campfires constitute a flickering island of reassurance going back to the beginning of human existence. This is our naturally adapted prelude to sleep.

Up until the beginning of the 20th century, populations, even in the West, did not have the luxury of much light after dark. They just had flickering whale-oil lamps and beef-fat candles; people still followed ancient ancestral sleep rhythms. Since 1900, light at night gradually became more common, first with gas lighting and then with electric light. The net result is that we do not prepare our brains for sleep in the way nature envisaged. Today, the average American sleeps two hours fewer than in the 1960s. He or she certainly sleeps less—and less well—than the ideal for which our naturally adapted sleeping pattern has programmed us. Some of the consequences are predictable: loss of concentration, lowered resistance to stress, and a depressed immune system. An unexpected consequence is that sleep deprivation reduces appetite-suppressing hormones such as leptin and it increases hunger-inducing hormones such as ghrelin—the less we sleep, the more we overeat.

Sunlight as Human Food

In contrast to too much light at night, we are not getting enough sunlight by day. Our African Pleistocene ancestors spent all their time unclothed and out-of-doors. With the spread of humanity to all parts of the globe, it is indicative that human skins have adapted to soak up sunlight more easily the more people distanced themselves from the tropics.

Years ago, we never used to worry about how much sun we got. Parents would even urge their children to play outside and “make some vitamin D.” This was a key insight: sunlight is an essential piece of nutrition for humans. The scares over sunburn-induced skin cancers have caused a hysterical overreaction. The modern denial of sunshine has led to a surge of diseases that are connected to sunlight deficiency, including cancers, rickets, and depression.

Cancer researcher E.M. John found that cancers are much more prevalent in the northern cities of the U.S. than in the southern rural states. In particular, the risk of breast cancer is increased by three times.
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Researcher William Grant estimates the yearly toll from cancers caused by lack of sunshine at 100,000 cases and 40,000 deaths; this is four times the mortality from skin cancer.
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The vitamin D deficiency disease, rickets, thought to be vanquished long ago, is resurging in cities. We all need to get adequate sunshine; just be sensible and avoid burning.