In the previous article (‘Primal Primer’*) we saw that
around 10,000 years ago there was the beginning of a revolution, one that would
become almost entirely global in the millennia to follow; that revolution was
agriculture.
Agriculture caused probably the biggest change in the diet
of the human population, a change whose consequences we are currently reaping
from what was sown.
As we have seen in previous articles your DNA code was laid
down over millions of years on a fairly limited diet of wild foods; at this
time there was no agriculture or food processing. In the 10,000 years since we
have had agriculture, we have corrupted the amount and form of our food supply
so that it no longer expresses our DNA correctly.
It takes about 50,000 years for a new environmental stimulus
to change DNA to suit, so the 10,000 year period is far too short for the DNA
code to change. Scientists call this the ‘genetic lag’. We are still
essentially 40,000 years short of being able to adapt to this new nutritional
environment. And that’s if it (our DNA) will change, as the food we eat now
doesn’t kill us outright or prevent us from bearing children, so it may not be
a strong enough selective pressure to cause us to adapt.
Although it’s not killing us immediately, it is shortening
lives, and reducing the quality of those lives, even though many of us do not
realise it. Our current diet keeps us alive, but it doesn’t keep us lively.
In subsequent pieces we will explore specific components of
our diet, how they have been changed from their original form by selective
breeding and how this has impacted human health, but for now I’d like to
introduce you partly to how your current nutrient recommendations have come to
be.
In 2007 the ‘EatWell Plate’ was launched to replace the old
‘Food Pyramid’ and, to be honest, nothing much changed. The old pyramid had a
base of Bread, Cereal, Rice, and Pasta, whereas the EatWell Plate now suggests
that a third of your plate should now be starches which essentially is the old
suggestion of Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta plus the addition of Potatoes from
the vegetable group. In fact if you read the documents that accompany the
visualisations of the EatWell Plate, they always begin with promoting the
starch group. This is not as innocuous as it appears.
The promotion of this group has nothing to do with human
health; in fact it is probably, apart from purified sugar, the group that can
be entirely avoided without detriment. But if this is so, why then would it
form the base of the old pyramid, and an overwhelming large percentage of the
new representation of the governments food policy? Like many features of human
society it has to do with power, and in our current rendition of civilisation,
money, and the industries that feed it are the basis of power.
Although there is a little debate over the details,
agriculture was thought to have first reached the British shores around
5,000-4,500 BCE, and then spread fairly slowly throughout the country taking
around 2,000 years to do so.
Prior to this time, the British inhabitants who had been living on the British Isles for approximately 35,000 years, lived as hunter-gatherers, as they would have throughout their exodus from the African motherland throughout this period. Although agriculture had been in the Middle East since approximately 11,000 BCE, ancestors of people from British or European descent had been absent from the area for about 30,000 years, so missed a good 5,000-7,000 years of exposure to this new environmental influence. (This will become more relevant in later articles)
So although agriculture has been adopted in Britain for about
5,000-7,000 years, it was a little different from what you will see today. We
will re-visit this as we explore the significant components of our diet.
Until the middle of the last century farmers returned
essential nutrients back into the soil by three main methods – mulching,
manuring and crop rotation; which ensured soil fertility. These methods were
the culmination of thousands of years of advancement in agriculture. However, the
advent of the industrial revolution, with its growing populace whom with
increasing alacrity now worked in factories instead of farmsteads, presented a
problem (and an opportunity) - how to feed them (and profit from doing so).
To understand the problem we need to look at a vital
component of soil fertility – Nitrogen. Life depends on nitrogen, the element
that Nature uses to assemble amino acids and proteins. To do so, the nitrogen
(found in the air) has to be “fixed”, that is, joined to atoms of hydrogen, and
is the essential rate limiting step in plant growth. Until 1909, soil bacteria
fixed almost all nitrogen on Earth, benefiting from the methods listed above.
Then Fritz Haber of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany developed a method to
do it synthetically in the laboratory; for this he was awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1920.
This discovery impacted human health in three major ways.
The first is that Haber went on to use this technology to invent poison gases
for war, directly in World War 1 and then developed upon by the Nazis in World
War 2. The second is that the technology is also used to make explosives along
with phosphate and potassium. It’s fairly easy to see how poison gas and
explosives are fairly incompatible with human health.
The third impact is a lot more subtle, but has a much wider
influence – fertilisers. It was known that plants will grow on a mixture of
just three minerals – Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K). After the
war the huge stockpiles of raw materials produced for explosive manufacture
were re-marketed as (NPK) fertilisers, which were cheap – compared to the
labour and time intensive old methods, and effective – in terms of yield. You
can grow a lot more with less investment.
Although these fertilisers produce impressive yields of
crops that look every bit as healthy as crops grown using the older methods,
this isn’t the case. As I’ve shown previously** your body requires a mix of nutrients
to constantly re-construct your body and allow for optimal DNA expression, if
any nutrient is missing then this cannot occur effectively.
Each crop grown on NPK uses the other available nutrients in
the soil to grow, which is not replaced after harvesting; so each successive
yield further strips and depletes the soil. If the nutrients aren’t in the
soil, they can’t be in the plants, or the animals grown on these plants, and by
virtue of this process, not in you. Your food, and you, are thus empty.
Synthetic fertiliser now dominates the agricultural business
worldwide. About one-third of the modern population of the entire world depends
on synthetic fertiliser in order to eat; it’s a particularly concerning
situation in China (population as of 2013 approximately 1.3 billion) not only
as a means to support the population, but as a consequence the greenhouse gas
emission from its use. As Michael Pollan puts it we’ve moved from eating
sunshine to eating (crude) oil.
The crops that benefitted most from synthetic fertiliser was
the grains (we’ll address the impact of this in respect to the individual foods
in future articles), which, by freeing the farmers from many natural limitations,
changed farming from an essentially rural occupation to an industrial
monoculture operation, essentially converting oil and coal into food.
The incorporation of cereal grains into the Human diet,
which were a rare item in our pre-agricultural diet, increased in the time
since agriculture came about, first as a result of learning how to use it to
our advantage and at a much more accelerated rate since the industrial
revolution which brought us means to amplify production and creative methods of
using the resulting product. The processed cereal grains today not only deplete
our diet of minerals, vitamins and fibre, but also create a detrimental change
to the mix of macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, fats) on which humans
thrive by adding a grain load that was never before experienced in our
evolution.
As we will see in future articles, this completely changed
the makeup of our diet in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.
It’s a tricky situation as, despite its inherent problems, without this mass
production the current world population could not be sustained. So this
article, and many like it, is not for everyone. If you are dependent upon cheap
(it’s not as cheap as it appears, another issue that we’ll address) food to
survive, unfortunately this will likely be the basis of your diet (again,
another issue we’ll cover – it’s not just about the grains themselves). If
however, you do have the luxury of being able to remove yourself from this
situation, even just a little bit, your health will reflect this step manyfold.
Despite advances in science and technology that allows us to
avoid certain diseases of our past and which still afflict less advanced
civilisations in the world, we seem to have traded one set of ailments for
another. We now suffer far less from communicable diseases but rates of what
are termed ‘diseases of civilisation’ or alternatively ‘diseases of lifestyle’
such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers and neurological disease have
exploded. The evidence is now rapidly growing that a big driver of these
diseases is our relatively new adoption of grain and grain products as the
basis of our diet.
Being a factor of lifestyle, if you have the means to choose
one over the other, I’d wholeheartedly encourage you to at least consider the
evidence that is available, and choose wisely.
www.hpc-uk.net
www.hpc-uk.net
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