Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly – an Enlightened Resolution

In our last email we added a third strategy for making supportive, reasonable, and sustainable new year’s resolutions that energize rather than add to your stress.

In addition to the first two:

We added: do what comes naturally, as the song suggests…

There is a joke about nutrition science. If you ask six nutritionists what people should eat you get seven different responses. I once went to a conference where one eminent researcher presented extensive information about how a diet rich in animal protein provided all sorts of extensive health benefits, and the next eminent researcher talked about the study he organized that demonstrated the same panoply of benefits from a vegetarian diet. Those of us in the audience were allowed to ask questions, so I waited my turn for the mic and asked them how they reconciled such diverse and potentially contradictory results. They both actually shrugged, but had no answers. Maddening!

Many years ago I read a book about the traditional diets of populations that experience less incidence of the “diseases of civilization” like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc. Confusingly, the diets varied considerably. When I boiled down the commonalities, I concluded that all the groups studied ate the widest possible variety of foods available in their environments, in the least processed form they could prepare them in. Most of the cultures ate animal protein, but except for the Eskimos, not in large amounts. They ate lots of plant-based foods, more than are found in most modern Western diets.

Several eminent dentists who grew tired of “drilling, filling, and billing” looked for the cause of tooth decay and were drawn to the study of nutrition. In 1939 Dr. Weston Price published his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, after traveling around the world twice, checking lots of teeth. He examined diverse traditional societies who ate their traditional diets, and showed photographs of beautiful healthy teeth in mouths with perfect bites without any hint of the need for orthodontia, set in well-developed faces.

Then he went back and examined the same groups of people some years later after they had been exposed to modern civilization and adopted modern Western diets. The new photographs demonstrated rampant tooth decay, crooked teeth with terrible bite occlusion, and narrow, poorly developed facial structures. The people he studied also showed signs of the “diseases of civilization” that they didn’t previously suffer from. He attributed the changes he found all to the adoption of the modernized diets.

Price drew on the previous work of a scientist named Francis Pottenger, who was a physiologist who wanted to do experiments on cats. When he set up a breeding program to supply cats for his experiments, he noticed that the cats raised on processed cat food developed many of the same problems that Price later found in the populations he studied who adopted modernized diets, dental problems, facial structural changes, constipation, diabetes, etc. The cats fed unprocessed natural food did fine.

There is now a Price-Pottenger Foundation that carries on their work.

Professor Loren Cordain, at Colorado State University, is one of many researchers who champions what is called Paleo-style eating. The Paleo concept is based on the understanding that, like the rest of life on earth, we evolved in the natural world, and we evolved to eat what was around and available to us in stone age times. The researchers postulate that early humans were hunters and gatherers, and that our digestive machinery evolved long before the advent of agriculture. Therefore, animals and plants are good for us, but concentrated agricultural products like grain crops and dairy foods, and things made from them, are not things we have the ability to successfully metabolize. And, of course, artificial chemicals and additives were not around in evolutionary times.

The Paleo people believe that the so-called “diseases of civilization,” like cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, dental problems, digestive disorders, etc., are primarily associated with dietary choices that are not in accord with our evolutionary requirements. They also believe that shifting to a Paleo-type diet can help with many of these problems.

The major elements I have found to be missing in the diets of my patients have been vegetables. This is true for both meat eaters and vegetarians. In this way I believe in the Paleo eating approach. Based on laboratory testing, it seems like some people can eat modest amounts of whole-grain-based foods and not show signs of illness, but many people can’t. The compounds that provide for colors in vegetables also provide nutrients, so a “rainbow-style” selection of vegetables is advisable.

Most people seem to do better eating some meat, but maybe not in the large amounts Americans are used to. It is absolutely possible to be a healthy, successful vegetarian, but it takes consciousness and work. An old book titled Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappe, describes how to combine plant foods to get adequate protein. However, her diet is incompatible with Paleo eating principles.

For me, the best plate of food consists of lots of differently colored vegetables, both raw and lightly cooked, together with a modest amount of protein, and, if you can tolerate it without creating health problems, some unrefined carbohydrates.

The reason organic food is preferable is that it contains fewer compounds that our bodies didn’t evolve with and are thus less able to process.