Diseases of Civilization- What Should Humans Eat?

The question of what humans are supposed to eat has been plaguing modern society for some time. In light of other species, it seems like a ridiculous question. What does any animal eat? It’s pretty easy to find out—just follow it around and observe it in its natural environment. But what is a human’s natural environment? A city, a town, a farm?

Sure, we are social animals and have always existed in packs, family units, extended families, and tribes. However, for most of our existence on Earth, we have been nomadic or at least semi-nomadic—not living in cities or even villages. Even when dwelling in caves, we weren’t truly settled, and that’s where the difficulty starts. You might be thinking, “But we’ve been farming since ancient times, and there were many great civilizations.” However, I want to express one very important point: in light of the time humanity has walked the Earth—and even longer for our hominid ancestors—everything we think of as ancient human culture is not truly ancient at all. Compared to the time humans existed as nomadic hunter-gatherers, it’s just a blink of an eye.

Humans Have Roamed the Earth For a Long Time

Anatomically modern Homo sapiens have been on this earth for at least 300,000 years, and our various ancestral species for at least 2 million years. Almost all of this time, we have been nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers. We did not begin farming until the end of the last Ice Age, and that was only some of us. That was about 12,000 years ago. Think of the time between 300,000 and 12,000 years ago—or even 2 million and 12,000—and you’ll realize that the most ancient civilizations, cultures, and religions in history were comparatively just yesterday in human evolution. There are still many nomadic hunter-gatherers today who never settled down to farm. Observing these people offers valuable insight into how humans have lived for most of their existence on earth, because these are humans in their natural habitat.

Let’s compare the settled life to the nomadic life. It’s true that living as a nomadic hunter has its challenges, but this lifestyle is something we evolved to do. Just like any wild animal, humans are well suited for their environments. We go after game, and if there is none, we keep moving. We usually stayed near water, and if the water dried up or we wandered away, we kept moving until we found it. The water was typically clean because there were no sedentary civilizations with human and cattle waste to pollute it. Staying near water also allowed us to catch fish—early hunter-gatherers were fisher-gatherers too, which is important. Life was probably difficult, and from fossil remains, we know that many people died young. However, modern examples show this was more likely due to high infant mortality and accidents that led to infection, not a lack of nutrition.

Now, consider the shift to farming 12,000 years ago—the Neolithic period. Farming allowed us to settle down. Growing grains meant we could store them through the winter, giving us some security. Domesticating cattle meant we didn’t have to wander for meat. Surviving the winter can be harsh for hunter-gatherers, but like all pack hunters, we probably did well because the cold weakens prey and makes for easier kills. Wolves feast in the winter; summer is a time of hunger. Settling down presents new problems: if your crops fail or a blight hits your cattle, you’re stuck starving. Nomads keep moving until they find resources. Villages and later cities tend to pollute their waters, making it unsafe to drink. This is where fermentation saves the day. People in medieval Europe, like many other places, typically drank diluted alcoholic beverages instead of water because it was safer. Most humans around the world figured this out—thank the gods for that!

Farming- The Rise of Civilization- The Decline of Health

Farming allowed us to develop civilizations and culture, eventually great cities. We developed technologies, philosophies, and architecture—everything we currently think is great about humanity. We needed the stability farming gives us to do so. Farming also allows us to have more children—a lot more. Raising more than one child at a time is a burden on hunter-gatherer parents, and their bodies typically just don’t do it. Because a sedentary farming lifestyle supports more children, and because the stability it offers lowers infant mortality, evolution seemed to favor the Neolithic shift to farming. Big families turned into bigger towns and cities, and in turn, advanced philosophies and technologies. It surely seems to have been mankind’s rise. But was it? The fossil record tells a different story.

The biggest jump start to human evolution was during the Ice Age, when man started big game hunting. Humans, being cunning pack hunters with developed tools, could take down large prey and feed a whole tribe. Coupled with the knowledge of how to prepare meat by cooking this led to larger brain size. Our brains are very energy-intensive and require a lot of fuel, which could only be provided by the most nutrient-dense food available: red meat. Digesting it raw like a tiger requires too much energy, but our ability to cook meat made it much easier to digest and assimilate, allowing us to grow bigger brains, along with strong bones and teeth. What happened when we started farming?

The fossil record shows that we became shorter in stature, and our lifespans began to decrease. Though many nomadic people would die from accidents, not having reliable medicine or a nurturing environment to heal, just like today’s hunter-gatherers, their natural lifespan would have been closer to at least 80 years old. Some hunter-gatherer tribes in modern history had a surprising number of centenarians, like the Plains Indians of North America. Once farming began, the average lifespan dropped to somewhere between 40–50 years old and is still so in some sedentary, grain-reliant populations today, like India. Along with shortened lifespan came shorter stature, loss of bone density, and periodontal disease. So yes, settling down allowed us to have more children and build cities. From a cultural perspective, it seems like mankind’s rise, but from a health perspective, it appears to be mankind’s decline—and this decline did not occur over thousands or even hundreds of years; it occurred within generations. Only now, through modern medicine, have our societies increased our lifespan to resemble that of hunter-gatherers, and in America, it is now going back down again. Why? Disease—not from lack of sanitation, but what are now recognized as “diseases of civilization.”

Grains Keep us Alive but Don't Help us Thrive

Dr. David Perlmutter, a neurologist and nutritionist who wrote the book *Grain Brain*, estimates that it would take humans at least 40,000 years to evolve enough to adapt to a grain-based diet. He also mentions that scientists estimate at least 46% of the earth’s population is sensitive to gluten, and there is about ten times more gluten in wheat than our ancestors ate, due to selective breeding. But it doesn’t stop there. Our increasing intake of carbohydrates—and even worse, refined carbohydrates—along with sugar and high fructose corn syrup, has us living in a perpetual state of elevated blood sugar, from cradle to grave. The low-fat diet trend has produced another insult: not enough essential fat in our diets for brain, nerve, or even cell repair. The result? A huge rise in obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and ironically, heart disease. Farming was the first step in the downward spiral of human health, and the next came from our refinement of grains and sugar, leading to the epidemic of ultra-processed foods, coupled with the avoidance of healthy red meat and fat.

Diseases of Civilization

Many, if not most, of the diseases we have considered inevitable casualties of old age don’t seem to exist in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies—groups of humans who are still living on a species-appropriate diet. The Maasai warriors of Africa, who live on a diet of beef, milk, and blood, have no apparent issues with heart disease, diabetes, or periodontal disease. If eating red meat and lots of fat caused those problems, why don’t they have them? The Maasai who moved to neighboring cities and adopted non-traditional diets certainly did. Similarly, the Plains Indians who lived primarily off buffalo had no cases of heart disease or dementia, even though they had an unusual number of elders who lived to be over 100. When we think of hunter-gatherers, we imagine men hunting animals and women gathering berries and vegetables, but really stop and think about how much fruit and vegetable you could gather if you could only eat them local and in season—then think about what that would have been like in the Ice Age. To put that into perspective, let’s look at some modern people who live in Ice Age-like conditions: the Inuit.

The Inuit, more commonly referred to as Eskimos, live almost entirely on fatty red meat and fish. They tend to prefer the fattest parts of the animals, like the organ meat, which they usually eat first, often giving the lean meat to the dogs. Vegetables and tubers are only eaten during times of starvation and mostly ignored when there is enough meat and fish. Consider a tribe of Ice Age people who killed a mammoth. There would be a lot of food, and they would eat it nose to tail. Do you really think they would be concerned with fruits and vegetables when the nutrient-dense red meat and fat in a large animal like a mammoth would satisfy all their needs?

Let's Talk About Metabolism

The last and most relevant question to address is obesity, particularly in the U.S. Some doctors pass it off as genetic or blame the patient for not restricting calories and exercising enough. Unfortunately, these doctors are not staying informed with modern research, because studies have demonstrated that calorie restriction and exercise are terribly ineffective ways to lose weight. Calorie restriction is totally unnatural to any animal—no mammal stops eating before it is full, unless it is being fed a diet that is not appropriate to its species. What does a cow eat? That’s easy to observe: it eats grass. Does a cow ever overeat grass? No, it knows instinctively when to stop eating. That’s because grass is a species-appropriate diet for a cow. For humans, a species-appropriate diet is meat and fat. Fat triggers the release of satiety hormones, telling you that you are full. Carbohydrates do not. The carbohydrates that our diet is so heavy in break down into glucose in your bloodstream, which is sugar, and is so harmful to the walls of your blood vessels that your body tries to get it out as quickly as possible. The glucose in your bloodstream spikes your blood sugar, which triggers your insulin response and lays down all the glucose that is not immediately burned as fat cells. After this, the individual is likely to be hungry again. Unlike humans on a high-carbohydrate diet, humans on a species-appropriate diet do not overeat and have relatively even levels of energy. How do you fatten up a cow? You feed it a non-species-appropriate diet: corn, wheat, and soy. How do you fatten up a human? Same!

Humans are adaptable and will typically exploit any resources in their environment. This is why we have been so successful. But to imagine that we went from eating mammoths to suddenly requiring six servings of grains and vegetables a day to be healthy is very misguided—and we are not healthy. We can survive off things that are not meat, but we don’t thrive on them, and this is where so many modern diseases—diseases of civilization—come from. We find cave paintings of game animals, not wheat or cabbage—animals that gave us the nutrient-dense meat we needed to survive. There is no way our nutritional requirements could have changed so drastically in just 12,000 years, which was really just yesterday in the evolutionary scheme of things. Now, we are paying the price that comes with living on a diet not fit for our species.

#paleo #diet #evolution