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What is a natural diet for a human being?
© Bruce Tuten
In all our dietary confusion these days, surely this question is the one we should start with?
Researchers it seems, analyse the tiny details of this and that and very little attention is paid to the big picture…
“What is a natural diet for a human being?”
To answer this most important question we need to look at our genetic inheritance. In nature, an animal’s biology is exquisitely balanced with its environment.
Environments generally change slowly over millions of years and the creatures adapted to those environment have plenty of time to change…
The strongest or best adapted individuals are more likely to pass on their genes and so balance is maintained.
So this leads us nicely to the question…
“What is our genetic inheritance?”
There are two main areas we can look at to answer this question…
Genetic history
Firstly, we can look at our ‘recent’ genetic history, prior to agriculture – only 10,000 years ago (only 500 generations).
This is so recent in genetic terms that we can safely assume that genetically, we are the same today as we were then. This diet is usually referred to as a paleolithic (stone age) diet.
Closest living relatives
The second area we can look at is our closest living relatives — primates, who share up to 98% of our genes. The closest being the Bonobo and second closest, the more common Chimpanzee. Genetically similar species tend to thrive on similar diets so its useful to look at this to give us some clues about our genetic heritage.
Now a lot of people aren’t going to like me comparing humans to apes and of course there are a lot of differences between us and our furrier cousins!
Zoologist Desmond Morris understood the outrage people feel if you attempt to talk about humans as “naked apes” when, in the 1960’s he was attacked by many segments of society for challenging their belief systems. In his book The Human Animal he writes:
“What had nudged me closer to my zoological view of mankind were… our closest living relatives, the African Chimpanzees. I was astonished at how advanced they were, at how subtle and complex their behavior was, and I could see how easy it must have been to pass over the threshold from chimpdom to humanity.”
Without going into too much detail, we can easily see that these two diets contain very similar foods — fruits, vegetation (roots, leaves, flowers shoots etc), nuts, seeds and animal foods of various kinds — insects and small mammals mainly in the case of the Bonobo.
Where the two diets differ is in the quantity of the food types, with Paleolithic Man using far more animal foods than the Bonobo, where they make up only approximately 5% of the diet. But neither diet contains any grain or any dairy products.
We can also then safely assume that we have no biological need for cooked foods since Bonobos can’t cook and you don’t have to go that far back in history to the discovery of fire.
Since cooking destroys nutrients and deranges proteins it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Of the millions of creatures that share our planet, there is not one that needs a hob or oven to get good nutrition.
Our natural diet
So in answer to the most fundamental question of nutrition…
“What is a natural diet for a human being?”
…the simple answer is…
- fruit
- vegetable matter (leaves, roots, shoots, flowers, other edible parts)
- nuts
- seeds
- animal foods
Now that could come as quite a shock!
I know and I do hope I haven’t been too blunt about it. I understand that many who have given little thought to nutrition are going to be seriously reeling at this point. Well I didn’t say you’d like it, I just said it would be the truth… :-)
That doesn’t necessarily mean we should exclude grains and dairy products entirely, we need to tailor the information to both our modern world and our individual needs and philosophies — but they are not optimal, are not part of our natural diet and I contend that we would do better to reduce or eliminate these groups.
Many people do not do well with these two foods groups and see remarkable improvements in their health when they’re removed from their diet.
We can also look at the health of living hunter-gatherer peoples. The Australian Nutrition Foundation states:
“…among recent hunter-gatherer populations there is an almost total absence of the diseases that afflict so many of us in developed, Western countries. Heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis (chalkiness of the bones) and rheumatoid arthritis (among other diseases) were very rare among the Bushmen, Amazonian Indians and Australian Aborigines until they started to eat Western foods and adopt our lifestyles.”
What can we do with this information? Plenty! I feel the first step for everybody should be to eat whole foods wherever possible and as close to its natural state as possible.
This is the single most important change you can make, which will in turn avoid the biggest disaster of modern diets: refined carbohydrates. This would certainly be the recommendation of Weston Price — a pioneering dentist who travelled the world studying isolated “tribes” living natural lives.
He also discovered a lack of “Western” diseases caused by modern foods. His book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is a sobering read and shows many photos of the beautiful teeth of tribesmen in comparison to the deformed dental arches, crowded teeth and decay of “civilised” people.
Natural means uncooked…
Of course, when I say “natural state”, that would mean uncooked and so we can also take a big leap to improving our health by including lots more uncooked foods — fruits, veg, salads, nuts, seeds etc.
If you choose to eat meat, of course this must be thoroughly cooked, but where food can be eaten raw, it would be better to do so. After that you may decide to reduce the quantity of grains or dairy foods and so-on. There are many clues to be had by the study of nature and our genetic history.
Poor dietary choices eat away at the natural vitality we have as children, and we take this as being normal. But if you’re willing to take some steps towards a more natural diet, you may find your kids struggling to keep up with you!
All the best,
Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy
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“…among recent hunter-gatherer populations there is an almost total absence of the diseases that afflict so many of us in developed, Western countries. Heart disease, cancer…”
Not that I disagree with the nutritional ideas laid out here, but I’m not convinced that they will cure cancer. Cancer is a disease of age. It is not modern or new–we get it because we live much longer than we used to live. These bushmen may be very healthy, but what is their lifespan?
Hi Catherine,
Very good point. I’m not sure what these native people are dying of but they do seem to have a lack of Western diseases. It’s an area I want to explore much more deeply–looking at modern day hunter-gatherers.
The main take-home message is that neither apes nor hunter-gatherers eat grains or dairy. And they eat food taken directly from nature–fruits, veg, nuts, seeds and animal foods.
In the modern world the whole subject of eating meat has problems. What is the effect of cooking, farming, hormones and antibiotics and so on?
I am coming at this problem from a background of a raw vegan diet which mirrors the ape model more closely than the hunter-gatherer one. I felt amazing on that diet and that is a very powerful bench mark to have.
However I’m aware of long-term failures with such diets, so I’m keen to know the cause of these failures. Many can be explained by simply not eating enough, too heavy relience on fruit or nuts and even B12. The hunter-gatherer and evolutionary model could potentially give us clues as to the problems within raw vegan culture.
Given that cooked meats are heavily correlated to cancer in The China Study, even though correlation doesn’t prove causation, I think we’d be wise to minimize the use of meat as much as possible and look for alternatives.
The Okinawan diet did this successfully incidentally by the use of soya. Having the largest percentage of centenarians in the world, their diet is also one of importance.
Cheers,
Mike
This is valuable information that everyone should be practicing daily. There is no reason to be sick if we eat healthy foods.