By Al Valente
Key Takeaways
- Our modern-day diets go totally contrary to how our digestive systems evolved.
- Insulin is a powerful hormone whose overproduction leads to metabolic syndrome, obesity and diabetes.
- Insulin is spiked by sugar, high glycemic carbohydrates, but not fats.
- Sugar may very well be the worst food discovery we could have made.
- Short periods of starvation are actually healthy for us.
- Most people today are deficient in fiber.
- Weight training with quality protein is necessary to stave off sarcopenia.
- Automation led to sedentary lifestyles which is taking a toll on our general health.
First and foremost, this is not an article espousing the benefits of the paleo or ketogenic diet. There is so much pontificating on these and other diets for optimal health: Mediterranean Diet, Dash Diet, etc. And, many conflict with one another: high fat diet vs. high carb vs. vegetarian and so on.
But one thing remains true…all of it has to be analyzed in the context of evolutionary biology. Our human bodies were born in our caveman days and our digestive system adapted over the eons to a consistent hunter-gatherer’s diet then suddenly, bam! Within a mere hundred years we were cast into modern society where our modern-day diet is totally out of synch with our adaptive digestive system.
Scientists agree that the first organisms appeared on planet earth around 3.8 billion years ago and through millions of mutations and natural selection a myriad of species appeared and died off, but the survival of the fittest machinery kept churning.
Then about 6 million years ago a creature appeared that would be the first branch of the various humanoids. Then about 200,000 years ago, one of those branches became us – homo sapiens.
What’s absolutely key here is that our bodies evolved over 3.8 billion years to adapt to what we were able forage for, or animals that we could hunt. We were coined “hunter-gatherers”. We were enviable species, tall and lean with perhaps 6% body fat (compared to today’s average of 10%-20%).
Man Became Intelligent, then it Worked Against Us
All that time on earth allowed our hunter-gatherers ancestors to grow huge brains. This gave us higher intelligence to invent tools. And, along the way we figured out how to grow plants domestically so we didn’t have to go foraging every day.
Learning to grow crops allowed us to also grow our population and live in dense communities. But our nutritional system took a major hit. Most farmers grew what would grow abundantly, mostly single crops (think potatoes in Ireland). They really didn’t understand or were even aware of the nutritional diversity our bodies required.
From his book: The Story of the Human Body, Harvard’s Daniel Lieberman has said that the conversion to farming from hunter-gathering led to higher mortality rates in general and people started dying younger and becoming shorter. “So, farming really was initially a very bad thing for the human body in terms of longevity and nutrition and health”.
Loss of Nutritional Diversity
Hunter-gatherers were used to a very diverse diet; they ate whatever they could find or kill and it varied from season to season.
In contrast, farmers don’t grow for diversity; they grow single crops that provide great yields and good market price and this practice took a toll on homo sapiens’ health.
According to Lieberman, “Humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture, especially when it came to the variety of nutrients. Even now, about 60% of our calories come from corn, rice and wheat. Learning to grow wheat was a bad idea. That’s because we removed the bran and milled it to a fine white flour which leads to a myriad of high glycemic foods that raising havoc with our insulin levels”.
Later, the discovery of sugar was even a worse idea than that of wheat. From the early 1800’s when we first started consuming sugar, we ate about 4 lbs. per year; we consume about 100 lbs. per year today.
We simply don’t have the bodies that are able to cope with those high levels of sugar. And the result is that we get sick, often with metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes and/or fatty liver disease
Learn more about sugar’s effect on our health:
Sugar – The Worst Discovery for Our Health
Then We Decided When and How Often to Eat
Probably out of convenience because we went out into the fields or factories, or other workplaces, we found it convenient to eat 3 meals a day. Worse, in modern era, we decided we should snack in-between meals and bedtime to keep our energy level up. Nothing could have been worse.
Hunter-gatherers probably ate only once or twice a day and often went without eating for extended periods of time. That’s what our modern-day bodies evolved to expect: feast/famine cycles. But instead, today from cradle to grave we eat every 3-4 hours of our waking day and tax our digestive system and keep our insulin level constantly elevated. This is a major contributor to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
Governments Did Their Best, But Failed
Seventy years ago, with rising obesity, coronary heart disease, and diabetes, the U.S. government had to step in and try and do something. In 1992, wrongly believing fat was the culprit to all of our obesity and chronic diseases, the U.S. Department of Agriculture came up with the “food pyramid” which placed a heavy emphasis to consume more carbohydrates and less fat.
It was dead wrong and fraught with food industry lobbyists influences. The pyramid promoted eating hearty servings of carbohydrates and minimizing fats. In fact, the largest segment was that of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta, the high glycemic foods that led to rampant obesity.
The Hunter-Gatherers Diet
Homo Sapiens after millions of years of evolution and just prior to taking to farming bodily systems were in harmony with what they were eating and hence were tall lean athletes.
According to Lieberman, “How much meat they ate is conjecture, but meat constitutes approximately 1/3 of the diet among hunter-gatherers in the tropics (more fish and meat are consumed in the temperate habitats)”.
“This would make sense because eating a chunk of antelope steak yields five times more energy than an equal amounts of carrots as well as receiving essential proteins and fats”.
How to Merge Our Intelligence with our Evolution
Hunter-gatherers didn’t know squat about science, clinical trials, macronutrient ratios, vitamins, etc. They just went out and foraged and hunted. They ate and brought back to the clan what was available out there.
We pointed out that our intelligence gave us the ability to farm but brought with it a mismatch of macronutrient proportions and a lack of necessary nutritional diversity. Our intelligence also freed us up from hard labor leading to a sedentary lifestyle which raised further havoc on our good health.
Once we understand how and why our body’s systems work due to evolution we can use science to hack the system for optimal health.
Knowledge is Power – Understanding How Our Systems Respond to Food
Understanding how to manage insulin
Insulin is a powerful hormone that detects glucose in our bloodstream and instructs our cells to open up and ingest it. But when there is too much sugar in our system it then instructs our bodies to store it as body fat.
The trick is to watch the glycemic index of the foods you’re eating. On the glycemic scale of 1-100, the higher the number the larger the spike in insulin. Pure glucose has a glycemic index of 100.
Sugar is a Toxin
Hunter-gatherers didn’t eat sugar except for occasional honey and neither should you, it’s toxic to your system. What’s worse is that it hidden in those prepared foods you buy. It doesn’t matter if it’s table sugar or high fructose corn syrup, stay away from it.
The biggest spike in sugar comes in liquid form. A 12-ouce can of soda can hold as much as 9 teaspoons of sugar…yikes! It shoots straight into your bloodstream and super elevates your insulin levels which is trying to neutralize it.
Think fruit juice is the healthy alternative, think again. Yes, soda is loaded with sugar which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose, but fruit juices are heavily laden with fructose which can only be processed by the liver. Too much of it can lead to fatty liver disease. Understand this, fruit juice is junk food!
Should we Throw Out the Low-Fat Diet Entirely?
Ironically the obesity epidemic began because fats got a bad rap. Maybe because a gram of fat has twice the calories as a gram of carbohydrates. But fat does not spike insulin. Then there is the whole debate of saturated fats being bad for you but the scientific evidence is not backing this up.
Our hunter-gatherers’ bodies were accustomed to eating fat. Until today’s saturated fat debate is finally settled, it would be best to eat monounsaturated fats like avocados and olives and olive oil to be on the safe side.
Quality Meats and Strength Training
Vegetables are extremely healthy for us, they’re loaded with polyphenols, vitamins, minerals and fiber and most are low on the glycemic scale. The question becomes can you achieve optimal health solely with a vegetarian or vegan debate. That debate continues to this day.
Optimal aging has to take into consideration the maintenance of lean muscle mass and that requires muscle stress and quality protein.
As Dr. Mark Hyman is fond of saying, “You have to eat muscle to make muscle”. He’s referring to the challenge of adding healthy lean muscle by eating a strict vegetarian diet.
Due to sarcopenia, we will lose 5 lbs. of lean muscle per decade unless we strength train and eat properly to keep it on. Left unabated sarcopenia can leave us frail as we enter our seventies and eighties.
From age 30 to age 70 most of us, who do not strength train properly to maintain muscle, will lose 20 lbs. of muscle due to sarcopenia. That means if we’re the same weight at age 70 as we were at age 30, we’re actually carrying 20 extra pounds of body fat.
An intelligent lifelong regiment of strength training an eating moderate amounts of fish and meat can counteract sarcopenia.
Thankfully, many farmers are finally waking up to the fact that we all want healthier meats. So, there is an effort to offer pasture raised chickens which are out in the fields eating what they can scratch up. Plus, cattle that allowed to graze off of grass in the fields are much healthier than pen raised, corn fed cattle.
The New Microbiome Dimension
Our brain power has worked against us in a number of areas: agriculture, convenience foods, automation, etc. to make us fat and sedentary. We can use our intelligence to go well beyond the hunter-gatherers’ diet and lifestyle. A big example is our new found knowledge of the microbiome.
The microbiome is a hot topic lately and we’re really just beginning to fully understand the necessity of maintaining a diverse set of healthy “bugs” in our gut and exactly how fiber and the microbiome interact in humans.
“We’re beginning to realize that people who eat more dietary fiber are actually feeding their gut microbiome,” Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford University. The only way you’re going to get sufficient fiber to your microbiome is to eat high fiber vegetables as there is zero to none available in meat and fats from animal flesh.
Unfortunately, with the standard wester diet of today, we’re consuming less than 15 grams of fiber per day. Health authorities recommend closer to 30 grams per day. Plus, we’re not consuming a diversity of vegetables to optimize gut health.
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