Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (47 page)

This picture contrasts sharply with how Western society has evolved, in just the last 50 years. Not only today’s mother but also the father are expected to be round-the-clock parenting machines. In fact, they are victims of the “Blank Slate” philosophy, bamboozled into believing that their children are amorphous lumps of putty who would stay that way unless they spend every moment of the day shaping them with constant entertainment, instruction, and “quality time.” Parents are made to feel guilty for every misfortune and inadequacy that befalls their children. However, a host of studies, including those on identical twins brought up in different environments, show that they grow up with the same personalities. A parent can ensure that a child learns the piano where another does not, but as people they grow up just the same.
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Mostly, the child’s genes orchestrate how he or she turns out, even down to political affiliation and degree of religiosity.
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In the words of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, “All those differences among parents and homes have no predictable long-term effects on the personalities of their children. Not to put a fine point on it, but much of the advice from parenting experts is so much flapdoodle.”
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In a similar way, there is an expectation among middle-class Western parents that they should be companions for each other. In one sense, they are: they operate as a team to ensure the survival and well-being of the genes lying in their offspring. However, in almost every other way, metaphorically speaking, men and women are from different planets. John Gray, in his book
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
, confronted head-on the doctrine that men and women should have identical drives and personalities.
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As we have seen, they have different desires, objectives, ways of talking (and of not talking), ways of working, parenting, interests, innate talents, and physical attributes.

The relationship between husband and wife in middle-class Western society is one of the most vexed. It plainly is not working and has to be constantly maintained and repaired by a massive industry of marriage guidance counselors, self-help books, and talk show therapists. Many of them identify the symptoms quite accurately. However, no one outside evolutionary psychology draws the obvious conclusion: that the way we structure family life today is excruciatingly dysfunctional. It is as though we put a cat and a dog—both excellent creatures in their own right—into a sack and expect them to get along.

Men and women need to structure their joint lives differently. Today, we expect a man and a woman to coexist in intense proximity in a little box. However, as we have seen, although a husband and wife might have concern and affection for each other, they do not make natural round-the-clock buddies. And if the reader feels we have focused more on the male predicament than the female one, this flows naturally from the state of affairs today. The Western world has become feminized to such an extent that the male qualities mentioned earlier—risk-taking, bravery, strength, aggressivity, heroism, female protection, ingenuity, hunting skills—have no place or role.

In forager society, each individual had a much higher degree of “social connectedness,” a phrase sociologists use to describe the number and quality of links a person has with other members of the wider family. Husbands and wives had less intensity of contact with each other but a much richer and developed suite of contacts with everyone else in the band. This looser arrangement is the “natural” state.

In this chapter, we have explored the way our ancient ancestors lived their lives for eons. We have seen how many factors, such as the power of our genes, quite naturally lead to conflict in many situations and to harmony in others. This overview has brought out the major themes controlling our feelings, which in turn control the way we behave. In a great many ways, they operate at cross-purposes to the way our modern society demands. Since the farming revolution, humans, without realizing it, have been forced to pioneer new manners of living. In the process, many natural checks and balances have been removed and artificial ones have been instituted.

We have mostly avoided making formal recommendations and instead we lay out the issues for you to think about. Our society is structured with such rigidities that in many respects it is hard to change your own life within it. However, examine the issues and question how they relate to your own circumstances. You may find that you can make adjustments, subtle or otherwise, that help you get in touch with the naturally adapted heritage that makes you most comfortable.

Our evolutionary psychology illustrates how our current lives are out of sorts with our savanna-bred natures. This discord is adversely affecting our health just as our nutritional habits are. We must remember, too, that there is no going back. We have become so numerous that our prosperity and survival depend on structuring society in new, complex, and unproven ways.

Chapter 9

Disease and The Bond Effect

We are fortunate that, in modern industrialized societies, a great many health scourges of the past are now a distant memory. Public health engineering, by bringing clean water and safely disposing of sewage and garbage, eradicated many diseases like cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague. Medical science with its hygiene, antiseptics, drugs, and vaccinations brought deadly infectious diseases like smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, syphilis, and diphtheria under control. Nutritional science discovered how to eliminate deficiency diseases like scurvy, rickets, and pellagra. Surgeons learned how to cut out appendixes, amputate gangrenous limbs, and reset broken bones without killing us.

We have dealt with just about all the afflictions that nature can throw at us, so what is left? The answer is the reason for this book: self-inflicted ones. These are the diseases that were virtually unknown in prehistoric times: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, senile dementia, and many more. Most, if not all, of these “diseases of civilization” are quite avoidable. Many that have become entrenched can be abated or even cured. In all of them, our eating patterns are the major factor, although often other lifestyle factors play a role.

In our travels through this book, we have encountered many instances of how our choice of “body fuel” makes the machine run well or run badly. We looked at the type of feeding pattern that operated during the formative time of the human race in east Africa. We called it the “Savanna Model” and saw how the San still lived like that in recent history. They enjoyed enviable health and well-being, in spite of their rudimentary lifestyle in which there is an absence of both medical support and of many food groups that we think of as normal. We witnessed the radical change in dietary habits when humans first took up farming and saw how mass-marketing techniques were used to change and manipulate our feeding habits. We hinted at the kinds of diseases that humans began to suffer as a result.

In chapter 3, we looked at the various food groups and spelled out some of the impacts on our health. Then, we reviewed the diets of various populations around the world and examined our biochemistry, digestive systems, and modern diet from a scientific point of view. We reached some conclusions about how dietary errors are making us sick. We drew up the “Owner’s Manual” for the ideal food supply and eating pattern. Chapter 8 painted a picture of how our social environment diverges from our savanna-bred natures. This discord stresses us in many ways, another factor leading to ill-health.

Now, we draw all these threads together and present the material from the other side: that of specific diseases and the factors that make us vulnerable to them. Not surprisingly, there are many common factors. This reinforces the notion that adopting a lifestyle that mirrors our anciently programmed minds and bodies is the sensible way to go.

The human species is remarkable for how little its members vary genetically from each other, no matter where they live around the globe.
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Chimpanzee populations show ten times the genetic variation that humans do. In other words, we are all still built to the same body plan and the same basic message is good for all of us. Nevertheless, there is some variation in our genetic makeup. We all have slight differences in susceptibility to disease, and our bodies have differing abilities to circumvent deficiencies in the diet. That is why, even though eating and living the same way, different people will break out in different illnesses.

This chapter is devoted to setting out our current knowledge of what aspects of our lives are helpful and what aspects are harmful for specific illnesses and what we should do about it. With regard to food, we know that there are literally tens of thousands of active compounds in the foods we eat, particularly non-starchy plant food. We can’t define exactly how all these compounds work, but we know that they need to work together as a team.

We need to rid ourselves of the “magic bullet” mentality, the notion that there is a straight line from cause to effect, that for each disease there is one simple fix. On the contrary, most of our modern diseases are due to a complex interaction of many factors that are going wrong at the same time. We cannot micromanage or second-guess many of these processes. It is not good enough to cherry-pick from the menu of the Savanna Model. Ultimately, we have to nourish the body the way it was designed—with the complete package.

Finally, it is a fallacy to think that if you are sick with a modern degenerative disease, it is because it is “in the genes.” Cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and other such diseases have been increasing alarmingly just in the last 50 years. But the genetic makeup of the population has not changed one bit in that time. The only thing that has changed is lifestyle! Some people will be genetically more vulnerable than others to certain diseases, but the vulnerability is only exposed—and expressed—when a discordant lifestyle pushes the body into failure. An extension of this fallacy is saying that a disease “runs in the family.” What runs in families, apart from genes? Bad habits!

Our fate is not written in our genes—it is in our own hands. We just have to take responsibility and accept the idea of changing our habits. Note that putting your lifestyle right is not necessarily a substitute for medical treatment once you have got a disorder. However, by doing so, you will ensure that the medical treatment has the best chance of success.

CANCER

What causes cancer? Smoking? Sunlight? Radiation? Pesticides? Barbecued meat? Microwaves? These are some of the answers likely to be given by the average citizen, yet he or she would be wrong. All these have strong links to cancer, but they cannot be the root cause. Much of the population is exposed to these carcinogens, yet only a small minority actually suffers dangerous tumors as a consequence.
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You are probably aware that our bodies are made of trillions of cells. As a rule of thumb, a normal adult is considered to be made up of something like 30 trillion cells. They are the basic building units of living bodies. Some creatures, like bacteria, consist of just one cell. Cells are where a myriad of chemical reactions take place, where energy is generated, and, above all, where our genes are located. Just about every cell has a full copy of our genetic blueprint, the DNA.

Most cells either are damaged or wear out as time goes by. When this happens, they are programmed to die. Their life span depends on where they are in the body. It can be as little as a few days—the cells lining the colon are such a case. Red blood cells have a life span of four months; the tendon cells can live for as long as several years. To replace cells that die, living cells divide themselves into identical copies under instruction from nearby cells. That means carefully making a duplicate of every single piece of machinery in the cell, including the DNA and each strand of DNA is composed of over 10 million molecules. Ideally, all this copying takes place without a mistake.

Not surprisingly, something goes wrong from time to time: a cell does not self-destruct when it is supposed to and becomes immortal; a cell keeps dividing itself uncontrollably; or things go wrong with the copying process and rogue DNA is created. Sometimes these things happen all at once, and then we have the makings of a cancer cell. Such cells mean trouble, but there is worse to come. A small percentage of such cells have the diabolic ability to detach themselves from where they are, float around the body, and put down roots elsewhere. In this way, they spread seeds of cancer into every part of the body.

The 30 trillion cells must cooperate with each other to keep a human being healthy over the course of a lifetime. Because of the huge numbers involved, there are bound to be a few cells going cancerous every day; we are even born with precancerous cells. Why is it, then, that we don’t all die of cancer at an early age? The chief answer is that the evolutionary mechanism has evolved a battery of defenses that fight cancer cells at every turn. These defenses are collectively known as the immune system.

The Immune System—An Overview

The immune system comprises many components working together. White blood cells known as phagocytes gobble up and kill offending cells by digesting them. T-cells and B-cells are known as “killer cells,” which reside in the lymphatic system and bloodstream. They lock on to enemy cells and kill them by making them commit suicide. For all this to work properly, the immune system has to recognize which cells are legitimate and which ones are enemy. Alarms and signals must pass correctly between different elements of the immune system. The lymphatic system and bloodstream must pump these immune system cells quickly to the place where they are needed.