Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (20 page)

On the other hand, the Eskimo aged fast: they became wizened and shriveled so that a 50-year-old looked more like an 80-year-old. It is estimated that the average life span was indeed only about 50 years. We can learn something too from their high calcium intake of up to 2,000 mg per day. In spite of this megadose of calcium, the Eskimos suffered from bone demineralization and osteoporosis.
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Doesn’t this go against all we are told today? This should make us question a major nutritional doctrine—that we have only to swallow calcium by the bucketful to avoid osteoporosis. In fact, good bone health is a very complex matter, easily upset by a myriad of lifestyle factors, of which calcium intake is almost irrelevant. We will see later the chief factor at the root of Eskimo osteoporosis and the lessons it gives us for the Savanna Model.

Today, the Eskimos suffer the same fate as other hunter-gatherers who adopt the Western lifestyle: high rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and rotten teeth, and high mortality. Life expectancy has dropped even lower. Later, we will refer back to these observations to learn how the Eskimo had remarkably good health in some areas and weakness in others.

The Japanese

We are all familiar with the so-called staple of the Japanese diet, rice. We say “so-called” because there are two misconceptions about rice. First, the Japanese did not eat that much of it—even as recently as 1998 - daily consumption of rice was just 6 ounces. And although rice retains a hallowed place in Japanese hearts, it is regarded as a poor man’s food to be replaced by plant foods whenever possible.
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Traditionally, the Japanese are Buddhists and, as such, they did not eat animals at all. However, they did eat fish, often raw. By Western standards, it was a high consumption, around 90 g (3.15 ounces) per person per day (four times as much as the average American). From this, they got a high consumption of fish oil, notably the essential fatty acid eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). Even so, their overall consumption of fat was very low—no more than 10% of calories—which is much lower than the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommended (but rarely achieved) maximum of 30%.

The largest percentage of their fat came from rapeseed (canola) oil. East Asians have cultivated rapeseed for millennia, and the Japanese have used rapeseed oil in frugal amounts for at least 2,000 years. To a lesser extent, they used soybean oil. Consumption of saturated fats, hydrogenated fats, and trans-fatty acids was almost zero.

The idea of dairy farming had never reached Japan and dairy products never formed part of their traditional diet. Rice was the staple and other cereals were virtually unknown. The Japanese traditionally did not eat wheat, barley, rye, or oats. And they did not eat potatoes either. So, when we say that Japanese consumption of rice was 6 ounces per day, that is it: no other carbohydrate fillers such as bread, pasta, pizza, or French fries existed in their diet.

The Japanese traditionally had to husband their resources and they ate much more sparingly than is our custom in the West. They had a high consumption of salt (from soy sauce) of 14 g per person per day. This is a great deal worse than government recommendations of 8 g per day maximum. The Japanese also smoke a lot: 70% of men and 45% of women smoke some form of tobacco.

Japanese Longevity and Health

Japanese men have a life expectancy four years greater than Americans and their health expectancy is 4.5 years longer than Americans. But studies show that this only applies as long as the Japanese stay in Japan. When Japanese migrate to America and adopt the American way of life, including its diet, their life expectancy drops to the American norm and they get the same diseases.
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This suggests that Japanese health and longevity are not about genes but about the way the Japanese live their lives, notably the foods they eat and do not eat.

At home, by a fluke of culture, geography, and luck, the Japanese have hit on a good lifestyle, but even so, it is not perfect. For example, they smoke too much and they consume too much salt. More than in most other countries, the Japanese die of strokes and heart disease. The diet of raw fish means that they absorb the live eggs and larvae of intestinal parasites, so that worm infestations of the gut, virtually unknown in the West, are quite common in Japan.

Within the general statistics for Japan are buried even more startling results. The archipelago of Okinawa is remote from the Japanese mainland and its population has an even more enviable record for health and longevity. They have one of the highest proportions of centenarians in the world: their chances of living to 100 are 12 times those of an American.

A study carried out in the remote and tiny Okinawan island of Kohama found that the inhabitants eat even more fish, 144 g (about 5 ounces), and far less salt, about 6 g, per day.
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They eat seaweed and herbaceous plants and also sweet potato and tofu (soybean curd). They have adopted some Chinese practices from nearby Taiwan, eating some pork and drinking green tea. And they exercise a lot: 95% of the 80-year-olds studied led active lives, working long hours every day in their fish-farming paddies.

The Okinawans are a poor people, but even the poorest precinct has better longevity—two years more—than the already stellar performance of Japan as a whole.
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They have the lowest incidence of cardiovascular disease in all of Japan, even though they smoke the same amount. At age 59, only 8% of the population had high blood pressure, 2.3% had heart disease, and 1.2% had diabetes. These figures are two to three times better than mainland Japan. However, the Okinawans had
double
the incidence of senile dementia (later, we will find the explanation for this interesting result). In a study
of 80-year-olds, 90% were fully functional human beings without any disability; only three had impaired hearing and only four had fading eyesight.
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The remarkable health and longevity of the Okinawans has generated a number of diet programs. However, as we shall see, it is still not ideal. How do we interpret the eating patterns of a poor, agro-fishing Japanese community? Do the types of fish make a difference? Is the green tea significant? Is their “sweet potato” like our sweet potato and does it matter? As we will see later, these matters have a prime importance.

The Cretans

Similar observations have been made with the peoples of the Mediterranean northern rim. The people of the Greek island of Crete had one of the highest life expectancies in the world, in spite of a hard lifestyle. Indeed, although half a world away, there are many similarities with the Okinawan way of life. The Cretans ate frugally; they ate fish but virtually no meat (just the occasional goat’s meat, as beef was nonexistent); they ate plenty of plant food (notably an unusual salad-green called purslane); and they consumed very little dairy, pastries, or sugars. Unlike the Okinawans, they ate bread—a rough-ground, whole-wheat variety—and they had a moderate fat consumption through the sparing use of olive oil in the kitchen. They also had an extraordinary custom: for the Cretan, traditional breakfast often consisted of a jigger of olive oil downed in one gulp, and that was it until lunchtime. Wine was also commonly drunk but in moderation.

These people were poor and complained that they felt hungry most of the time. They were obliged to be physically active on their land until an advanced age. Yet, the Cretans had the longest life span in Europe and their incidence of heart disease, colon cancer, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and diabetes are all much lower than the peoples of northern Europe and North America.

American researcher Ancel Keys, who first investigated the fabled Cretan longevity and health in the 1950s, wrote a book about his findings which became popular as the so-called Mediterranean diet.
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But this Mediterranean diet has nothing in common with the kind of meal you will find in an Italian, Spanish, or French restaurant. It contains no spaghetti, paella, pizza, or blanquette de veau; even less does it contain their rich cheeses and cream sauces.

With the advance of prosperity and the crumbling of old traditions, the Cretans are now adopting Western eating habits, and their deterioration in health is being documented.

Testing the Cretan Diet

In the meantime, the baton has passed to researchers who investigated the Mediterranean diet with well-controlled clinical trials. These trials are studies where large groups of people are divided into two test groups. One group is the “experimental” group: they are given the new diet to eat over several years. The second group is the “control” group: they continue to eat their normal diet. At the beginning of the study, both groups are tested for various health indicators, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, weight, and so on. They are then retested at intervals as time goes by. Often these studies go on for five or ten years, during which there will also be some deaths.

Thousands of clinical trials have tested various hypotheses about food and how it affects health and life span. The results of such studies give us very clear indications as to what is right for human beings to eat and what is not. Quite understandably, we have not the space here to go into the detail of all these studies. We will therefore cite one powerful example and then give a summary of the overall picture that the collection of studies paints for us.

Under chief researcher Serge Renaud, the Lyon Diet Heart Study involved a group of 606 heart attack patients living in Lyon, France, and was equally divided into a control group and an experimental group.
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The control group followed the conventional advice of the hospital dietitians based on the American Heart Association (AHA) diet. The experimental group was told to adopt a Cretan-type diet: more green vegetables and root vegetables, more fish, less meat, and replace beef, pork, and lamb with poultry, no day without fruit, and replace butter and cream with a special margarine made from canola (rapeseed) oil. Olive oil and/or canola oil replaced all other fats. Moderate wine consumption was allowed.

After 27 months, the experiment was stopped early: members of the control group on the AHA diet were dying at a much faster rate than those on the Cretan diet. There were 16 deaths on the AHA diet compared to just three on the Cretan diet. The AHA group was also suffering a much higher rate of second heart attacks: they had 17 non-fatal heart attacks compared to just five on the Cretan diet.

It is not as though the AHA diet was bad—it was certainly better than how the patients were eating before the start of the study—but the Cretan diet proved to be exceptionally superior even to the conventional dietary treatment recommended by the American Heart Association. The committee charged with looking after the welfare of the groups swiftly decided to stop the trial early so that the AHA group of patients could benefit from the study’s insights and adopt the Cretan diet if they so desired.

The French Paradox

In most countries where the population has a high intake of saturated fat, there is a corresponding high death rate from heart disease. However, the situation in France does not conform to this pattern. The French have a high intake of saturated fat, particularly in cheese where they consume three times as much as Americans, but they have a low death rate from heart disease. It is the so-called French paradox.

Professor Serge Renaud dug deeper and found that there were strong regional differences. In Toulouse, in the southwest of France, a Mediterranean-type diet was practised. While not consuming much olive oil, the Toulousains did use duck and goose fat rather than butter. He found that they drank red wine copiously—up to one bottle per person per day (it is the Bordeaux region after all). In contrast, in the northern city of Strasbourg, on the border with Germany, the diet is more “Anglo-Saxon”: the population drank much more milk, used butter for everything, and drank beer rather than wine.

In comparison with the United States, Dr. Renaud found that the pattern of French alcohol consumption was quite different. For the French, wine is 58% of alcohol consumption (in the U.S., 11%), beer 23% (U.S., 57%), spirits 19% (U.S., 37%). Plus, the French mostly consume their wine as an agreeable accompaniment to a meal, whereas in many other countries binge drinking is common and alcohol is consumed in order to get drunk.

Paradoxes like this are useful tools to identify such mysterious factors. They are the clues we need in order to understand what really makes our bodies work properly. Paradoxes also remind us that nothing is as simple as it seems: that, in matters like health and nutrition, there is rarely a straight line from cause to effect. We will see later how the French paradox might be explained and how it gives us more clues about our ancestral, naturally adapted diet.

Summary—Population Study Clues

Researchers have carried out thousands of similar clinical studies on a huge range of different dietary factors. It is an exciting story in itself, but it is not the purpose of this book to relate them in detail. However, the results of such studies do fill in some important gaps in the “Owner’s Manual.” To save the reader so much detail then, we distill these results into generalized summaries. They highlight the foods linked to disease and the foods linked to health. This is a broad-brush approach, but the circumstantial evidence is pointing strongly to lifestyle patterns close to our ancestral, naturally adapted ones. In order to live in the modern world, we need to understand what to make of this evidence, which is the purpose of the latter part of the book.