This post starts a series of chapters on eating to lose weight: future posts will focus specifically on protein, carbs and fats. Please take a look at previous posts on how to exercise to lose weight. Be sure to leave your comments and sign up for e-mail updates to this blog.
You and the Zoo
Not long ago, I had the pleasure of spending a day at a very famous zoo. This particular zoo had a section where you could purchase typical American-style “food” – hotdogs and hamburgers, tacos, popcorn, candy and sodas.
As you left the area set aside for human dining there was a large sign that read: “Please do not feed the animals. Your food is not a part of their natural diet and will make them sick”.
As I read this sign it occurred to me that the food that I had just eaten was not part of the natural human diet either, and was probably making us sick as well.
Eat Like A Caveman?
The question of what constitutes good human nutrition has been the subject of many scientific studies over the past several years and has led to some sharply divided opinions about which foods are good for us and which are not.
But, as with the animals in the zoo, the real key to understanding human dietary needs doesn’t lie in some scientific study filed away in the medical archives. It lies in our evolutionary history.
Like other animals, our physiology has evolved over millions of years in response to a particular diet.
In the case of humans this diet was that of a hunter-gatherer and consisted of meat (as well as organs and bone marrow) from wild game and a wide variety of wild plants that were extremely high in fiber and low in sugar.1,2,3 It is important to note that the animals our ancestors ate for most of our two million year evolutionary history were lean, free-roaming beasts that also fed on these wild plants.
Food Revolutions
Two major social “revolutions” have created radical changes in this original hunter-gatherer diet: the agricultural revolution saw the introduction of grains, domestic meats, and milk while the industrial revolution made refined sugar, flour and industrially modified fats affordable and widely available.
But these revolutionary changes have occurred in the recent past.
Agriculture made its debut just 10,000 years ago - a mere drop in the human evolutionary bucket. And the changes brought about by the industrial revolution began a mere 150 years ago. As a result, our bodies have had little time to adapt to these new foods.
Natural Nutrition
Our “natural” diet is the one that our hunter-gather ancestors ate. Whenever we question whether a food is good or bad for us or how much of a certain type of food we should eat, all we really need to do is ask whether our hunter gatherer -ancestors ate that type of food and, if so, how much of it they ate.
Fortunately, we don’t have to guess at this. Scientists like Dr S. Boyd Eaton of Emory University and Dr. Loren Cordain of Colorado State University have researched this diet extensively and published several scientific articles and popular books about it.* I will be referring to their findings in the chapters that follow.
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CHAPTER SUMMARY
1. The only good diet is our natural diet. This is the diet that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate for millions of years.
2. Our natural diet consists of unprocessed meat and animal organs and wild plant foods
3. Unfortunately our diet has changed in recent years due to the introduction of agriculture and industry. These changes are largely responsible for the epidemic of degenerative disease that we are now experiencing, including the obesity epidemic.
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REFERENCES
1. Eaton 1992 : humans lipids and evolution Lipids 27, 814-820
2. Stanford and Bunn 1999. Meat eating and hominid evolution. Curr Anthrop 40, 726-728
3. Marean and Assefa 1999. Zoological evidence for the faunal exploitation behavior of neaderthals and early modern humans. Evol. Anthrop 8, 22-37
4. Cordain, Watkins, Florant Kelher Rogers and li “Fatty acid analysis of wild ruminant tissues: evolutionary implications for reducint deit-related chronic diseases. . European journal of Clin Nutr. (2002) 181-191
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