Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (11 page)

By making these adjustments to the familiar USDA food groups, we will be able to highlight in a more precise way how foods conform to, or diverge from, the Savannah Model. As we proceed through the book, it will be necessary to make even more subtle distinctions, but for now, this breakdown will serve our purposes. Our modified groupings then are: Grains; Vegetables (Starchy); Vegetables (Non-Starchy); Fruits; Milk and Dairy; Meat, Fish, Eggs, and Poultry; Dry Beans; Nuts; Fats and Oils; Sugars and Sweeteners; Salt and Sodium; and Beverages. Table 2.1 shows how the modified groups can be compared to the current USDA groups.

Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The categorization of the nation’s food supply into food groups is the first of a two-stage process. The second, and more important, stage, is then recommending to Americans how many servings of each food group they should be consuming every day. These recommendations are embodied in the impressive-sounding “Dietary Guidelines for Americans.” First instituted in 1980, they are revised every five years, on the decade and on the half decade.

However, these recommendations do not consist of the best advice given by impartial scientists. We have already had a glimpse of some of the political pressures at work. The USDA’s Dietary Guidelines are drawn up only after negotiation with all interested parties. These interested parties are powerful and include agro-industrialists, farmers, food lobbies, trade associations, labor unions, politicians, and financiers.

Every five years, we are treated to the spectacle of a new round of negotiations for an agreed text to put in the Dietary Guidelines. It is not edifying: each interest group brings the maximum of financial and political pressure to bear. Regrettably, in the mêlée, the scientists’ impartial advice is mostly watered down or abandoned. In other words, the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines are not a gold standard—on the contrary, they are a weak and deceitful compromise between all the competing interests.

This is a major cause for concern. In spite of their debased nature, these recommendations are then taught to our children in schools and used to design meals in hospitals, schools, prisons, and retirement homes. Worse, these recommendations become the dogma in which professional dieticians and nutritionists are trained. The conventional platitudes for healthy eating have become as sincere as a harlot’s kiss. Integrity has abandoned the field, leaving it wide open to all kinds of alternative dietary nostrums. Most of them are questionable, some are plausible, but none of them gets to the fundamentals. They cannot, for they do not know the truth about our human heritage. The whole point of this book is to provide those fundamentals and to do so in an honest, and coherent way.

ADRIFT FROM THE IDEAL

In this chapter, we have reviewed all the various ways in which diets have changed not just in the last 50 or even 500 years, but in
50,000
years. We catalogued the Farming Revolution’s upheaval of our eating pattern 11,000 years ago with the introduction of grains and legumes into the human diet for the first time. We recounted the major changes in farm practices and technology since that time. And we traced where today’s diet comes from and pinpointed when and how we drifted away from the ideal.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Americans led the way in intensifying agriculture. Now, we have found scientific ways of altering foods for all kinds of reasons. When the supply of untouched fertile soils run out, we find ways of pressing exhausted soils back into service using fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals. We are capable of producing what look like real plants but which simply do not contain the same nutrients. We can mass-produce animals on a production line system and their flesh finds its way onto our plates—injected with hormones, fed with antibiotics, and dusted with insecticide. Foods are processed and refined in ever more sophisticated ways. Artificial dyes, fillers, preservatives, colorings, flavors, and odors are routinely used in manufactured foods. Foods are routinely adulterated with cheap, nutrition-free fillers and extenders. We have seen how government agencies try to hold the line, but their efforts are subverted by political and financial pressures. They cannot be relied upon to protect the public interest.

All this sounds alarming, but which factors are of primary importance and which of secondary importance? In this chapter, we have reviewed familiar territory concerning the intensification of agriculture; but the main theme has focused on the idea that many of these foods are new to the human diet anyway. Perhaps
in themselves
these foods are posing problems: just maybe, no matter how pure or sullied they are, they need to be treated with caution. In the next chapter, we will look more closely at the origins of the foods commonly available today and examine the consequences of consuming them.

Chapter 3

How We Eat and Its Consequences

In this chapter, we will examine the history of the current food supply using the new food groups defined in chapter 2. We will indicate in general terms the consequences of accepting these foods into the diet. There are some surprises: many foods that we think of as being traditional and acceptable are in fact recent and sometimes harmful. Many foods, although newcomers to the human diet, are perfectly acceptable and in conformity with the Savanna Model. To improve our health, we have to confront some incorrect yet ingrained ideas about how we should be feeding ourselves.

GRAINS GROUP: BREAD, RICE, AND PASTA

Wherever we look, we find that farming was initially based on the cultivation of grains of some sort
.
The reason was simple: it was
possible
to grow, harvest, and store grains. Grains were the first major new food to enter the food supply since the origins of the human species. None of the world’s major civilizations could have gotten started without them. It is not surprising, therefore, that we think of grains as a normal, even essential part of our food supply. We are taught by our parents and teachers at an early age that eating grains helps build our bodies. This accepted belief has led most government authorities to give farmers incentives to grow this crop and to recommend grains as the staple (principle component) of their population’s nutrition. But such advice is mistaken, even for unrefined grains.

Nature has equipped many creatures to eat grains. For example, the chicken has a hard, ridged palate to husk the seed and a powerful, muscular gizzard to grind the grain into flour. It even swallows gravel to help the grinding process. However, nature did not so equip humans. Let us look at the processing required to turn grains into something that will feed us. The hard, outer husk of the grain is inedible and difficult to remove just by chewing, so the first farmers had to think up new mechanical techniques to achieve what nature alone could not provide. First, they had to split the edible part of the grain (“wheat”) from the inedible husk (“chaff”) by a process known as threshing. They did this with a flail (two long rods joined by a leather thong) and beat the wheat until the grains were separated from the chaff. It took a man one day to thresh the amount of wheat that grows on about 100 square yards. Second, the wheat is “winnowed” (separated from the chaff) by tossing the mixture of wheat and chaff into the air; the wind then blows away the lighter chaff.

Even then, the food processing is not finished: humans do not have teeth designed to chew the grain, so the farmers had to find mechanical ways to break down the seeds into something the body can handle. The solution is grindstones: with a lot of physical effort, they could mill the grain into a coarse or fine powder called flour. Finally, nature did not equip the human body to digest flour in its raw state. Real grain eaters, like chickens, have special enzymes for the digestion of raw flour. Their pancreas, the chief organ for secreting starch-digesting enzymes, has several ducts,
⁴³
while the human pancreas has only one. The only way the human digestive system can handle flour is by cooking it first. Those first farmers had to take the flour, make it into patties, and roast them in the embers of a fire. In this way, humans were already moving from a natural diet to one based on a rudimentary technology. Rudimentary, yet quite impractical for the average hunter-gatherer. In making these changes, those first farmers were smart enough to grow foods that tasted good and provided a level of nourishment. However, although these new foods filled their stomachs, they were not necessarily helpful to their general health.

Those early farmers were eating flour cooked without yeast—in other words, unleavened bread. It took another 5,000 years before someone in the Egyptian civilization discovered the use of yeast to “raise” bread and give it a more agreeable texture. Modern breads still owe their basic recipe to an inventive Egyptian baker who lived around 4500
b.c.

The Problems with Eating Grains

Grains, as a class of food, were never part of our ancestral diet. We are speaking of all types of grains—wheat, rye, rice, barley, oats, quinoa, and so on—and all forms of these grains, including bread, pastry, breakfast cereals, pasta, pizza, oatmeal, and cookies. Consumption of all these grains is linked to a range of conditions such as heart disease, high cholesterol, cancers, osteoporosis, obesity, depressed immune system, premature aging, and diabetes. There is a common thread to some of these conditions: they are, in part, provoked by abnormal surges in blood sugar. These surges in turn disrupt hormones that control other processes, such as bone building, immune function, cell renewal, and cholesterol control.

Hormones

Hormones are potent chemical messengers. Thousands of them are in continual movement, whizzing around the body, instructing organs to do something or other. Tiny amounts of hormone have powerful effects: for example, they turn caterpillars into butterflies. In humans, they regulate every function of the body, including the immune system, sexual functions, pregnancy, digestion, blood clotting, fat control, kidney function, bone building, growth, blood pressure, and even mood and behavior.

Grain consumption leads to micronutrient deficiency. Even whole grains have poor concentrations of the multitude of these vital substances that are essential to human health: vitamins, minerals, carotenes, flavonoids, and many more. Grains are basically bulk fillers that displace more nutritious foods from the diet. The situation is even worse with refined grains, because with mechanization, the millers strip out the most nutritious part of the grain. Now we know why governments try to compensate for this shortfall by insisting on the “fortification” of breakfast cereals and many other grain products. Of course, these efforts are only a crude and inadequate substitute for the real thing—the marvelous cocktail of thousands of compounds working together as a team, which are provided by plants conforming to the Savanna Model.

From anthropological evidence, we know that the earliest farmers suffered a sharply reduced quality of life: reduction of stature,
⁴⁴
increase in infant deaths,
⁴⁵
reduction of life span,
⁴⁶
increase in infectious diseases,
⁴⁷
increase in anemia,
⁴⁸
diseased bones,
⁴⁹
and tooth decay.
⁵⁰
Today, we can also link grain consumption to many other conditions that cannot be preserved in the archaeological record, including brain disorders, such as autism,
⁵¹
schizophrenia,
⁵²
and epilepsy,
⁵³
and immune system disorders, such as multiple sclerosis,
⁵⁴
rheumatoid arthritis,
⁵⁵
eczema,
⁵⁶
and allergies. There is even a common occupational ailment in the baking industry, “baker’s asthma,” a debilitating allergic reaction to cereal flours. We are only recently beginning to discover a host of microscopic substances, known as antinutrients, that are common in grains and are secretly gnawing at the foundations of our health in many unsuspected ways.