Re-Indigenizing Our Diets I

I was nineteen when I was diagnosed with my first ulcer. The doctor looked at my family’s medical history with dismay, noting both my parent’s struggles with chronic stomach problems and suggested I start taking medicine to counteract the acidity of my stomach and the cramping in my lower intestine. The following year was a battle between myself and my rebellious stomach. Despite subsisting on what the doctor’s claimed was the safest diet, a blame regime of bananas, yogurt, and bread, nothing seemed to get better. On a desperate visit to the college acute care clinic, the middle-aged doctor told me that his entire family had the same problems, and like him, I should expect to be on my medication for the rest of my life. Food became my enemy and the thought of dinner was one of dread.

I was no stranger to medical disorder. Like my mother, I had also suffered from severe asthma and like my father I had a congenitally misaligned jaw. I accepted these inheritances as my lot in life and thanked my lucky stars that I had been born in modern times.

The first inkling I got that I might not be so lucky was my sophomore year of college, when I was assigned an essay called The Worst Mistake by Jared Diamond. I had read several of his books, but I had never encountered such an infuriating idea. He dared to imply that agriculture, the foundation of all modern society, was a mistake. To me, agriculture was the mother of all I loved. It had allowed us to break free of our state of nature, which Hobbes famously called “nasty, brutish, and short.” Because of agriculture, Chopin had played his etudes, Michelangelo had painted the sublime Sistine chapel, Homer had written his epics…and I had my very thick glasses that allowed me to read them. I set out to prove him wrong.

A dramatic and unintentional experiment on the effects of modern agriculture is being played out right now. The subjects are the native peoples of America and while the results may be more exaggerated than what happens to the average person, they may hold the key to the disorders that plague modern society.

The most prevalent disease that accompanies civilization is sometimes simply called “Syndrome X,” a deadly cocktail of high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high cholesterol and obesity that is linked with heart disease and diabetes . In indigenous populations, this Syndrome X has reached epidemic levels. While it has also increased in the general population, the increase in indigenous populations has been much larger. Native Americans have two times the heart disease and seven times the rates of diabetes . It affects nearly every Native American population, from the Ojibwa-Cree in Northern Canada with the third highest rate of type II diabetes in the world to the Pima in the American Southwest who are the second most obese people in the world to Native Hawaiians who have twice the national level of heart disease .

The end result of Syndrome X is type II diabetes, a disease of chronically high blood sugar . In a healthy person, sugar stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin, which leads to sugar being absorbed by the cell, but in a diabetic, but the process has stopped working because so much sugar has been consumed that the receptors malfunction. The sugar remains in the blood stream and in high levels it can become toxic. Even with treatment, diabetics can suffer from high rates of vision problems, kidney failure, cardiovascular disease, and in the worst cases, gangrene. On a visit to a Pima reservation, reporter Malcolm Gladwell described the carnage: 300-pound pre-diabetic teenagers, young women confined to wheelchairs, and middle-aged men dependent on kidney dialysis. In most towns in America the same scene of carnage is repeated, but typically only in homes and hospitals catering to the elderly.

The stark fact is that when Native Americans first made contact with Europeans, no such illnesses existed. They emerged only as their societies adopted western foods such as white flour and sugar.

Foods like white flour and sugar have been connected with disease in every society on earth. However, for Native Americans and other indigenous populations, it seems these foods are more toxic than normal. These foods were a product of thousands of years of agriculture in Europe, whereas as Louis LaRose, a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, describes it: “we’re only two or three generations removed from picking berries, we were not designed to do all our hunting in aisles A, B, and C. ”

In reality, no human was designed for the modern diet. Humans have not changed much since the Paleolithic, when all humans lived as hunter-gatherers . It is commonly believed that hunter-gatherers live short, harsh lives, but science come to different conclusions. As I researched the effects of agriculture, I learned that studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that they not only obtain an average of 2116 calories a day, but they only have to work 4-5 hours a day for their food . While they are unable to accumulate possessions like shiny cars or ipods, disease is rare. Modern hunter-gatherers have usually been pushed to marginal land, so it’s possible that ancient hunter-gatherers lived in even greater abundance. In a seminal essay on the subject, Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called it “the original affluent society,” challenging the notion that wealth is about possessions, instead connecting it to health.

Through bones and other human remains, anthropologists have been able to paint a picture of the diet humans evolved to eat and the effects of agriculture on human diet and health. It’s impossible to perfectly reconstruct the original human diet, but a few tenets have emerged. Scientists have concluded that the Paleolithic diet was low in sugar, high in “good” fats, high in micronutrients, low in acid, high in potassium, and high in fiber . Very few grains and tubers were consumed, and milk, eggs, beans, alcohol, and refined sugar were entirely absent.
Modern diet gurus often vilify certain macronutrients like fat or carbohydrates as “bad,” but hunter-gatherer diets were healthy no matter the composition. That composition varies from the Eskimos, who ate an astonishing 185 grams of fat a day, to the Yanomamo, who primarily subsisted on high-carbohydrate plant foods .

The food itself was the difference. Meat from a wild animal is not the same as the ground beef from a fast-food burger. Wild game is typical lower in total fat, especially saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease . However, wild game is higher in the “good” fats such as omega-3 fatty acids. Recent science has shown that omega-3 fatty acids are vital in heart and brain health . Unfortunately, in the western diet, omega-3 fatty acids have literally been literally out-competed by their cousins, omega-6 fatty acids, which are present in high levels in seeds, a staple of western diets in the form of grains and oils. The receptors that process these fats work best when the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 is 2.3:1, but in the western diet the average ratio is 15:1. This explains why Eskimos, who still consume large amounts of seafood rich in omega-3 fatty acids now suffer from symptoms of omega-3 deficiency -- the fats in the new foods cancel them out .

Even the plant foods were different. Overall, more leaves were consumed than seeds. Some peoples consumed staple foods, but overall they relied on hundreds of diverse plants . The plants they consumed were rich in complex secondary compounds, which are known to affect genetic expression and metabolism Little is known about the effects of having a diet less rich in these secondary compounds we evolved to consume, but scientists suspect their absence is connected to diseases such as cancer.

Most sugar consumed by early humans was in the form of fruits, but fruits were also different. Wild fruits contain more fructose and glucose, whereas cultivated varieties contain more sucrose. They are also higher in fiber and those secondary compounds.

The dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago left its mark on human skeletons. Agriculture developed independently in as many as seven places and archeologists who survey skeletons find that as civilizations increased their reliance on agriculture, their bone-health deteriorated. This does not exempt American civilizations. The Mayans heavy reliance on corn, a food that lacks important nutrients and impedes absorption of others, led to shrunken skeletons deformed from pellagra. At Dickson Mounds in Illinois, studies show that first farmers in the area had lived an average of 19 years compared to the 26 years their hunter-gather predecessors enjoyed.

One of the more dramatic illustrations of the effect of agriculture came from a paper by an intrepid dentist named Weston A. Price, who traveled the world in search of the cause of poor dental health. In his work, he juxtaposed pictures of traditional hunter-gatherers, smiling with straight white teeth, with those who had adopted “modern foods” like sugar and boiled potatoes, who had crooked jaws and blackened teeth. The changes happened in as little as one generation, squarely laying the cause on food, not genes. I started wondering if my crooked teeth were really all my father’s fault.

Some links, a full bibliography at the end

Price, Weston. 1945. Nutrition and physical degeneration a comparison of primitive and modern diets and their effects

Interesting article about food detectives, but I found this part scary (emphasis mine):

A few years ago, they received a utility blade that a consumer claimed to have found in a canned tomato product. The case fell to Jim Charboneau, a chemist who has been with the lab for more than 40 years. Through the processor's records, he was able to determine that it had been packed and sealed a year earlier. The blade sported a few stains but still looked new. So Charboneau wanted to see what an identical blade would look like if it sat in a can of tomato sauce for a year and compare it to the sample. He put identical blades in different cans of sauce and sealed them. After a month, he opened one can and found the blade had etching on its surface. After two months, he opened another. That blade had deteriorated more than the first. When he opened another can after three months, he couldn't find a blade. It had been eaten away by the natural acidity of the sauce.

I think I'll pass on the canned food unless there has been a hurricane and I'm stuck without supplies for weeks...or something.

Chive-Goat Cheese Drop Biscuits

Chive-Goat Cheese Drop Biscuits
I adapted this recipe to use local goat cheese and chives. Really delicious and easy.
Adapted from Epicurious

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
6 oz crumbled young local goat cheese, usually called chèvre
8 local chives
1 cup well-shaken buttermilk or 1 cup milk + 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl, then blend in butter with your fingertips until mixture resembles coarse meal. Stir in cheese and chives. Add buttermilk and stir until just combined.

Drop dough in 12 equal mounds about 2 inches apart onto a buttered large baking sheet. Bake in middle of oven until golden, 18 to 20 minutes.

Working on the farm

With Migrant Workers in Short Supply, a Farmer Looks to Machines

NYT Readers respond with a great deal of ignorance, suggesting we substitute criminals and teenagers for immigrants

There was an article in the NYT a few weeks back about the poor job market for teens. But what people don't realize is that the problem with industrial ag jobs is not that they are dirty or menial, it's that they are downright dangerous. The machines can crush you and the pesticides are toxic. Most farm kids I know who come from large farms won't work in their own fields because of this. It's a job with high potential costs.

Small organic farms? Many ag student compete to do "menial" things like pick spinach as interns. The best organic farms turn down interns because they have so many applicants.

Another reason to eat label-free

I think one of the best diet tips I ever heard was that if it has a label, you shouldn't eat much of it. Apples, spinach, and turnips? They don't need labels.

Turns out, in New Zealand, those labels aren't very accurate anyway. Given our government's track record, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most U.S. labels are inaccurate too.

Agricize

Since I started working in agriculture, I've met a great deal of farmers. On of the farmers I've worked closely with called farming "nature's gym." He, like many farmers who practice labor-intensive small scale agriculture, was about as fit as many elite athletes I know. This contrasts with the larger farmers I know, who are easier picked out because...well they are much larger.

Underscores the fact that while "saving" labor is economically efficient, there are costs and benefits that aren't often factored in. Most farmers labor much less than their counterparts in the past, but perhaps they pay for it in terms of health problems.

Last week I worked on his farm and while my muscles may be uneven (it's much harder to hoe with my puny left arm), they sure are large. The other farmer, a woman, told me that just like any sport, it's important to have good technique on the farm if you want to prevent injuries.

I say this because I find it interesting that so many people spend hours and hours in smelly boring gyms...when they could get a garden instead. I personally have shied away from gyms after I realized that the cleaning chemicals many gyms use seem to bother my lungs. I've felt much better since I've stopped going.

Small farms should market "exercise agri-tourism" or something. Suburbanites get skinny, farmers get free labor.

Foie Gras

So foie gras is now legal in Chicago again. PETA says:

Foie gras is a diseased, rotting organ of an abused animal with a high price tag slapped onto it. The aldermen -- who voted overwhelmingly for the ban (48 to 1) -- were right the first time in banning this hideously cruel product. With foie gras bans already in effect in more than a dozen countries and a growing of number people learning about the cruelty of foie gras production, this industry's days are numbered.

I have no problem with the part about people learning about the cruelty and thus buying less, effectively killing the industry. I do have a problem with one group imposing its fringe philosophy on another. With their logic, lots of other products would be banned as well. I might not like foie gras, but I'm not going to tell others they can't eat it.

Actually, I had never heard of it before the ban and ordered it after I read about it because I wanted to be rebellious. They say no publicity is bad publicity. I'm sure the ban made many people curious.