(This is Part 6 of a series. Go back to Part 5.)
In my opinion, there are three great criteria for judging whether a given food is a natural part of the human diet and thus supportive to the body's efforts to attain and maintain its highest possible level of health and vitality, that is, its natural level:
1. Is the food attractive to us as nature presents it?
2. Could you make a meal out of this food?
3. Is this food as nature presented it?
Let's take each of these in turn:
1. Is the food attractive to us as nature presents it?
One of the most noticeable qualities about fruits is their bright colors—a riot of beautiful reds, oranges, yellows, blues, purples and so on. They are designed by nature—by the evolution of fruit trees and fruit bushes—to appeal to the human eye.
Evolutionary biologists have strong evidence that humans and fruit-bearing plants evolved in symbiosis, where each serves the other. When we eat a piece of fruit in nature, we tend to scatter the fruit seed or seeds some distance away from the mother tree or bush.
In return for this service, fruit-bearing trees and bushes evolved so that their fruit provided the optimum nutrition to their human symbiots, and were supremely attractive to us in nature. And on the other side of the ledger, humans evolved over millions of years to be optimally adapted to the fruits provided by the fruit-bearing plants.
Now imagine that you're smelling this fruit in nature. It has a very attractive smell, it makes your mouth water. Not only that, but the fruit is very easy to obtain—we just pluck it. We and the other primates evolved the opposable thumbs that make it easy to do so. And as noted, our eyes can see in color so that we can easily spot fruit among the predominant greens and browns of jungle and savannah.
In fact, it takes large amounts of energy and computation in the brain to process colors. Most animals don't see in color for that reason—no need to. Scientists now theorise that we developed the ability to see in color so that we could easily pick out the bright colors of fruit in nature.
Now imagine yourself in a field of potatoes. The "food" is underground, not exactly attracting itself to us. And even though we do not have claws for rooting in the ground, suppose we did dig up a potato. Neither its color nor its smell nor its taste are appealing to us in a state of nature. It's not a natural food for us.
The second criteria:
Could you make a meal out of this food?
One of the trendy "magic foods" now is wheatgrass juice. But wheatgrass juice is a refinement of wheatgrass itself, so let's inquire about wheatgrass itself. Could we make a meal out of wheatgrass?
Imagine yourself in a field of grass. As Douglas Graham says, are you tempted to get down on your knees and graze? No. Grass is not a natural food of humans, and we certainly could not make a meal out of it. If grass of any kind is not a food for humans, why do we believe that the juice of grass would be good for us?
Onions and garlic are other popular "magic foods" these days. But let's apply our test: Could we make a meal out of onions or garlic? Can you imagine yourself in nature biting into an onion with the same relish with which you would eat an apple? No. A "meal" of raw onions or garlic would be harsh, irritating, repellent. We must conclude that onions and garlic are not part of our natural diet.
Why do we ask about one food for a meal? Because, as Doug Graham points out, that is how animals in nature eat: They eat one food for a meal until they are full.
What about grains? Well, imagine yourself sitting down to a plate of wheat flour for a meal. Not too appetizing, hmm? In fact, even a tablespoon would be too much. Or let's imagine ourselves in a huge field of wheat, rye, rice, etc. and that this was the only food available to us in a state of nature. In fact, we would starve.
Grains only really came into the human diet with the advent of agriculture and predominantly cooked foods about 11,000 years ago. But 11,000 years is merely the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. It can scarcely be compared to the many millions of years in which our bodies optimized for fruit.
Moreover, cooking food seriously impairs its value to
our bodies since it damages the structure of the fats and proteins, renders many of the vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals less available and destroys the natural enzymes in the food. In a state of nature we'd consume only raw foods, as every other animal in nature does.
(This is the end of Part 6. Go to Part 7.)
—jim sloman, 1.5.06
|
