Chapter One
Re-Discovering the Natural and Healthy Rhythm of Eating Up until roughly 10,000 years ago, our ancestors roamed the earth as hunter-gatherers without a permanent home. They collected berries, seeds, roots, and mushrooms, hunted rabbits or buffalo. Gathering was more essential than hunting, because fruit, seeds, and insects covered most of their daily calorie needs and provided important vitamins and minerals. It is believed that meeting this daily caloric requirement took three to six hours of work.
Once humans harnessed the power of fire, they were able to consume many parts of plants that had previously been inedible, broadening their diets immensely. Though scientists haven’t been able to determine exactly when mankind learned to light fires, it’s likely that even prehistoric humans such as
homo erectus were able to utilize natural fires caused by lightning as early as a million years ago. In any case, heating plants dissolved fibrous components and destroyed many toxins. It seems plausible, therefore, that many foods were made more digestible by being heated, and that this was beneficial to a person’s health. Which is still true today.
Raw Foods Nutrition experts and naturopaths have long been debating whether raw foods are healthy, and if so, in what quantity. The fact is that heating, chewing, and insalivating food relieves the gastro-intestinal tract from a large share of its work. Heating food has likely protected people from infections in the past, and has therefore prevailed throughout evolution. But it is doubtful that, given the optimal storage and refrigeration options we have in our modern world, we still need to heat up everything we eat. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note that the bacteria required in our intestine to digest raw food are different than those needed to digest cooked food. Where raw foods are concerned, my opinion is that everyone should decide for themselves, depending on their physical constitution, health, and tolerance. If, for example, your body is weakened due to an illness, your digestive tract is usually also affected. In that case, I would advise eating steamed or warmed-up meals rather than raw foods to relieve the stomach and the intestine.
For a long time, it was undisputedly assumed that the consumption of meat was of vital importance for the brain to increase in size and therefore a crucial step in mankind’s development. This was suggested by archeological discoveries in Africa, which showed that the brain increased in weight just as early man left the African jungle behind and relocated to steppe-like regions. Where our ancestors had mainly been following a plant-based diet before, they now had to change their diet according to their new environment. In this new environment, they consumed desert hares and other animals, because these dry regions lacked fruit-bearing trees and bushes. This, at least, was the assumption for a long time. Since then researchers have come to the realization that this reasoning was faulty: Nowadays, we classify the regions to which early man migrated as steppe or even desert. But at the time, these regions were in fact covered by forest. As a result, the theory linking meat consumption and growth in brain size is no longer very convincing. It seems reasonable to now say that even if prehistoric man was an omnivore, meat was a rarity on his menu.
The diet of our ancestors was ideal from an evolutionary point of view: It was mainly plant-based, and, above all, it was highly diverse. Excavations have shown that the hunter- gatherers of the Stone Age hardly suffered from malnutrition--they were larger in size and of better health than their descendants who had settled down. Moreover,
homo sapiens of the time were highly flexible. If there was a draught in one area, they simply moved on; if one food item became inedible due to a pest infestation, they just ate something else. For this reason, the hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age were “the original affluent society,” as they say, because they lived exceptionally well. In addition to their balanced diets, they lived in communities without any major stress factors—at the very least, they never had to work to the point of burn-out. They were in the fresh air all day and got plenty of exercise.
Of course this doesn’t mean that life wasn’t hard, especially in regards to the lack of medical care. Nevertheless, I’d like to draw special attention to the dietary habits of the hunter-gatherers: largely plant-based and diverse. This is similar to the traditional diets in the so-called “Blue Zones”--regions of the world where people live to an unusually old age while still remaining healthy.
It’s also important to note the natural rhythm of food intake followed in the Stone Age. Nature dictated what and when people ate. If you found a bush laden with berries, you ate as many berries as you could; if you killed an animal, you ate it straight away. Once an area had nothing more to give, you moved on. Sometimes you had to manage without food for days. Once the sun set, you would go to bed. After sunrise, there was no breakfast waiting for you. You had to go out and procure breakfast. The nearest source of food could be far away and hard to reach.
Allowing Your Digestive System to Rest For tens of thousands of years, humans had to grapple with short and long periods of hunger. But this didn’t seem to be a problem for our bodies. In fact, today we know that our cells recover and initiate repair mechanisms when our body is denied food for an extended period of time.
When humans started to settle down—cultivating land, farming livestock, storing food for winter—they gained the ability to counter nature’s unpredictability. Questions such as “What are we going to eat?” and “When are we going to eat?” became less of an issue. Even though people were plagued by famine due to occasional crop failures, and life became more exhausting because they had to toil in the fields and the stables from morning to night, there were now more regular meals than before. However, through the systematic cultivation of agricultural crops, food diversity was gradually lost. At the same time, people ate more animal protein (meat and dairy products).
This process continued until the industrial revolution radically changed our dietary habits even more. Electricity, refrigerators, and fast transportation gave people almost unlimited access to food. Today, people in many areas of the world have the means to eat whatever they want, whenever they want. At first glance this seems like a victory over the unpredictability of nature; a second glance, however, reveals that this is a major problem for the biology of the human body.
Modern progress, particularly in the food industry, has actually had a negative effect on our genes and cells. The ancient program—eating, followed by periods of starvation, followed by eating—is still deeply rooted within them. There are a few recent genetic adaptations and changes in our body, but they are rare. Europeans, for example, have developed the ability to digest cow’s milk over the last 10,000 years because of the advent of cattle farming. The enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose, enables many people of European descent to consume cow’s milk without getting stomach cramps.
Disregarding the Needs of Our Metabolism Other than a few adaptations, our digestive and metabolic systems have remained nearly unchanged for 100,000 years. Change simply wasn’t necessary. Over the course of evolution, the human organism has always been smart. It has continually tried to find the best path to remaining healthy both in periods of hunger and of abundance.
But our bodies are completely overwhelmed by our 21st century lifestyle. Modern methods of transportation and refrigeration allow for a permanent availability of food from around the world. At any time of the year. There has been a proliferation of industrially processed foods with numerous artificial additives, too much sugar, and too much salt. Moreover, consuming meat every day is another modern achievement our body’s ancient metabolic system is unable to handle.
The problem is not just excess supply, but also how often we eat. Most of us are accustomed to eating even when we’re not hungry, simply because we can. Food is always available in the affluent society in which we live: a little morning snack here, a coffee to go there, a piece of candy from the reception desk in the office, a slice of cake from the cafeteria in the afternoon, or a smoothie, because it’s “healthy.”
What’s perhaps most surprising is that in spite of the abundance of food available to us, what we’re consuming is not only not healthy enough but also not diverse enough. In other words, we’re eating too many carbohydrates, animal protein, unhealthy fats, and additives.
The Dramatic Increase of Chronic Diseases
We can all see and feel the consequences of our current way of eating. Cases of obesity and diet-related diseases like hypertension, arthrosis, diabetes, atherosclerosis, renal insufficiency, and back pains have been increasing dramatically for years.
The most common chronic diseases throughout the Western world--and increasingly also in Asia and Africa--are arthrosis, rheumatism, hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases such as coronary heart disease and stroke, respiratory disorders, and cancer. A study conducted by the Robert Koch Institute showed that 43 percent of women and 38 percent of men in Germany suffer from at least one chronic disease. With increasing age, the frequency of diseases increases. After the age of 65, there is often the possibility of having multiple chronic diseases, regardless of gender.
Diet-related diseases, however, are not a biological fate. They’ve only become an epidemic because of our lifestyle and dietary habits.
Healing Chronic Diseases through Nutrition There have been enormous successes in the medical field over the last 200 years. Through prevention, hygiene, vaccinations, and the effective treatment of infections and injuries we are now able to treat and cure many acute and severe diseases. Infant mortality has dropped drastically across the globe, and we’re generally living longer and with better medical care. On the other hand, modern medicine lacks sustainable treatment plans for the epidemic of chronic diseases that are connected to the way we eat. Countless researchers are trying to develop innovative medications to try and fight these effects. But medications are never as perfectly tailored to our bodies as healthy eating and exercise.
Doctors and pharmacologists, for example, have found ways to use medications to lower high cholesterol levels caused by poor diets. But statins, the group of medications that block cholesterol synthesis, cause the body to search for alternatives to produce cholesterol. Which leads to side effects. While for most people the benefits of using statins outweigh the risks, this is not true for all patients--especially when it comes to the elderly.
An ideal therapy looks different. For example, by changing your diet and exercising regularly, you can not only treat hypercholesterolemia, but also prevent it.
The root of the problem, ironically, is that our bodies are very good at utilizing food. In prehistoric times, the availability of food wasn’t always predictable. And so the body learned to build up fat reserves for times of scarcity. Good utilizers of food, i.e.
homo sapiens with more fat reserves that could tide them over times of need, were the winners when it came to procreation. The ability to store sufficient fat reserves was accordingly passed on to the following generation. But since famines are now rare in Western civilizations, our fat reserves make little sense; external circumstances hardly require us to use them. And so obesity, along with its related diseases, has long been on the rise.
Because evolution shaped our metabolism hundreds of thousands of years ago, there is little we can do about the way our bodies utilize food. What we can do is change how and what we eat. We must eat less, lighter, and healthier food (and fast at regular intervals), because we’re no longer walking around outside for six hours a day. Instead, most of us are sitting in offices for eight hours a day. Changing the way we eat is the only sensible solution.
In Ancient Greece, Hippocrates, the forefather of medicine, put
díaita (dietary and lifestyle habits) at the center of all therapy. Interestingly, to treat obesity, he recommended physical exercise and only one large meal within a period of 24 hours—which is essentially intermittent fasting!
Copyright © 2020 by Andreas Michalsen, MD, PhD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
