The Diet That Founded a Species

Unfortunately, it’s been about a week since my last post.  I have been meaning to crank up the production of posts since the Holidays ended, but I got a bit side-tracked the past week.  This distraction was not a negative, luckily, but a very good one: I finally decided to read Nora Gedgaudas’s wonderful book Primal Body-Primal Mind.

While there are a plethora of excellent topics to convert into posts within this book, the hour I currently writing at has grown quite late.  Thus I will keep things a bit on the short side, or make an effort to.

You see, as Nora puts so beautifully in her book, we humans have been around for quite a long time; 2.6 million years according to Science.  And for all of those 2.6 million years, around 10,000 of them involved humans incorporating grains into their diet.  You may be thinking, “Ten thousand years! Geez whiz, we’ve been eating grains forever!”.  Well, when compared to the average human lifespan, yes, that is a long time.  But when you compare it with the the lifespan of human existence, that’s roughly 0.00385%  of the time we’ve been walking around this planet.

Not a very long time at all, my love.

You see, for those roughly 2,590,000 million years inbetween agriculture and the suppose first year of the human, we’ve been eating a very different diet than that of which agriculture has come to provide us with (I’m talking about grains here, people!).  The diet of which I speak is, of course, a consisting of moderate-protein, moderate-high fat, very low-carbohydrate diet.

The reason for this?  Because fat and protein were the most common thing around for us humans to eat back in the Ice Age.  We were called hunter-gatherers for a reason; that reason is we were always on the hunt!  And when a week of hunting wasn’t too productive, we went on the gather.  But what we gathered was certainly not wheat, legumes, or rice, unless I suppose the poor fella was starving to death.  But if they even did eat grains out of desperation, these primitives would have had to eat the plant forms of these foods; not the wonderful breads, beans, or rice that we have come to cherish (or despise) today.

And according to Primal Body-Primal Mind, the benefits of a diet based in fat and protein may have just-so-happened to help humans gain an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom; intelligence.  A.k.a: bigger brains!  Nora talks about how the excessive availability of Omega-3 Fatty Acids in the human diet actually may have contributed to the “three-fold increase in the size of the human brain”.

Pretty fascinating stuff, huh?

Unfortunately, our current dependence on grains and processed foods has been chipping away at that lovely brain size our ancestors worked so hard to develop.  Nora follows up with the statistic that roughly 10% of the human brain has been lost in the last 100 years alone because of EPA and DHA deficiencies (which are essential fatty acids obtained through Omega-3 Fats).

A bit of a strange note to end on, but hopefully enough to contemplate about. There is so much more to cover when it comes to the consequences of what we eat, but I have seemingly failed in my attempt to keep this post brief.  If you are interested in learning more, I HIGHLY recommend reading Primal Body-Primal Mind.  It’s basically the modern-day equivalent to the fictitious Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (not the book series, but the actual guide) when it comes to healthy eating/living in a world continuously falling apart.

And on those comforting words, I wish you all a wonderful day.

E.M.R