Summary
Wellness is not a transient thing it is a lifetime's program. The aliments we associate with aging are by-and-large not "natural" to us, but are the result of a lifetime's exposure to nutritional deficiencies.
Deficiencies which cannot be effectively corrected whilst living on the accepted Western diet (organic or commercial) nor cured by Medical intervention.
However, intervention by a suitable nutritional supplementation regime (the earlier in life the better) can prevent the conditions we ascribe to old age, and to some degree reverse conditions already apparent.
Now read on........
Ageing Quality-of-Life
WELLNESS - A Perspective
At one level Wellness can be though of as present good health, vitality and mental well-being. One definition being:-- Wellness is NOT just the absence of Disease
- Wellness is about having the energy to live life to the fullest
- Wellness is about getting up in the morning with energy
- Wellness is about sleeping well
- Wellness is about navigating life's stressors with relative ease
- Wellness is about the ability to make choices without a hindrance from your body
Dr. Marcia Smith
However, I prefer to extend this to see Wellness as an investment in future health and quality of life, in retirement in one's senior years.
It has become conventional wisdom to believe that the debilitating conditions we associate with ageing (these are well enough known, maybe through personal family experience, to need me to elaborate here) are a normal condition and nothing can be done about it apart from palliative care, to manage symptoms and give the best quality-of-life possible in the circumstance.
This is not, in fact, the case and I will return to this subject later.
The WHO (World Health Organisation) tracks the effect of health in the elderly and publishes a statistic - called The Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy (DALE. The interpretation of this term is strictly - a complex function - but in simple terms can be thought of as defining the population's "healthy" life expectation, as distinct from the normal Life Expectancy figure, often used as a measure of national health.
Survivorship!!!The term is illustrated diagrammatically above. The zone on the left labled "A" can be considered as the expectation of healthy life span- the zone on the right, marked "C", indicating of course death. The shaded zone marked "B" is usually called the Disability Zone - A period of life where health is impaired to the extent that independent living is no longer possible and daily care is required from family or increasingly institutional care - in Aged Care Facilities.
In the Western countries the average DALE is around 72 years this is in contrast to the normal life expectancy of around 80 years. This implies that on average around 8 years of life coping with serious disability is to be expected.
So is the degeneration with age a natural consequence of the design of the human body? The answer would appears to be clearly no. Both archaeological and anthropological research shows that the primitive hunter gatherer societies from which we spring do not exhibit anything like the same degree of health problems as the people age. Sure these societies experienced high levels of infant deaths (possibly infanticide) and deaths from infection and trauma - but for the survivors - old age did not being the health problems we experience (until- that is they are exposed to the Western diet).
It has taken millennium for Public Health and Medical science, to undo (in part) the damage done by the agricultural and industrial revolutions - to restore the stature and life expectancy (in the more affluent Western Societies) to those experienced by the Hunter Gatherers. So its only in recent decades that serious improvement has been registered. Unfortunately current statistics do not fully represent the effects of the post-industrial diet of fast and packaged foods - experimental high intensity and GM farming practices.
It has been remarked that we are using our children as guinea pigs and for the first time we have a generation of children who are not expected to match our life expectancy.
The diagram above gives an illustration of what has happened. Although representing the Netherlands - this can be taken as typical of Western Societies. This diagram shows (in orange) the effect of lifestyle factors (diet) on life expectancy - this study attributes something in the region of 8 years to (preventable) lifestyle factors. But until relatively recently the lifestyle effects have been masked by the impact of infective diseases in earlier years. Now over the last few decades Public Health solutions have swept these away exposing the effects of these lifestyle issues.
This study has been fairly neutral in predicting the future effects of our lifestyle - it does not suggest that improvements are possible nor that we may in fact be continuing to exacerbate the problem. Certainly it has been commented that we are treating our children as guinea pigs and current children are unlikely to live as long as their parents - for the first time ever
So what's wrong? Basically we are not genetically adapted to our staple foods (wheat, potatoes, beans etc). The potential for our health problem has existed for millennium since the first settlements with farming and domestication of crops and animals).
Compounded by industrial age food processing (milling of flour and rice, canning. preserving etc) then in more recent years - intensive farming practices - selection of crops for appearance and transportability rather than nutrition, green harvesting, increased processing.
The underlying problem being the need to feed an increasingly urbanised population - which requires the transportation of food to the urban centres from increasing distances (even half way round the world) with disaterous consequences to actual nutrition. And of course the chronic decline in nutrition and its effects have been hidden until the last few decades by the high level of deaths from infectious diseases. The effects of centuries if not millennium of degradation of our diet is now exposed.
It can be argued that the situation we are now in is a direct result of our path to civilisation and culture - and is the price we have to pay for the enhanced lifestyle we now have. Is this situation inevitable?
Modernization Disease Syndrome
"Four lines of evidence - laboratory, clinical, epidemiological and biochemical - indicate that much, if not most, of our illness in modern societies during the past 100 years - excluding the effects of normal aging - has resulted from changes in lifestyle factors involving exercise, stress, smoking, drugs, pollutants and especially a multiplicity of interacting dietary modifications which have not heretofore been evaluated for their collective effect."
He names the collection of illnesses which result from these changes the modernization disease syndrome since these conditions do not emerge in traditional societies "until one or two decades after they undergo modernization." A variety of dietary deficiencies "can produce the diverse set of illness manifestations comprising what I call the modernization disease syndrome, which now dominates our health picture and is our current #1 public health hazard lying behind a wide variety of illnesses weakening the fabric of society."
"This is not a minor problem. The real costs - economic and human - of the modernization disease epidemic exceed that of any World War."
Quotations from "Unsafe on Any Diet: Medical Monopoly and the Modern Health Disaster" written by Donald O. Rudin, MD. Dr. Rudin, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, was long-time Director of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in Philadelphia.
It is clearly not feasible to return to the hunter gather diet we are genetically adapted to - it would just not be practical to produce and deliver enough such food to meet the demands of our population. Nor given our sedentary life style could we actually eat enough such food to gain the nutrition our ancestors did.
However, dietary intervention is possible - the nutritional deficiencies can be made up by suitable nutritional supplementation.
the diagram above illustrates the results on an on-going (now in its 13 year) longitudinal study into intervention with a glyconutrient based supplementation regime. The study is conducted by Gilbert R. Kaats, Ph.D. and shows that the decline in the biomarkers of vitality (aging)
* - Lean body mass
* - Strength
* - Basal metabolic rate
* - Body-fat percentage
* - Aerobic capacity
* - Blood-sugar tolerance
* - Cholesterol/HDL
* - Blood pressure
* - Bone density
* - Body-temperature regulation
can be arrested and even reversed by dietary intervention.
This diagram uses a somewhat relaxed form of the DALE - one which recognises health impacts on life without actually defining total dependency. This measurement accommodates still independent people, maybe suffering from chronic pain, depression, maybe not too mobile, or able to hold down a full time job. This condition is reached on average some 10 years earlier than the full blown DALE. The upper line (green) shows the trend line determined from testing thousands of volunteers over a 13 year period. These results suggests that early intervention has the potential to add many years of quality life and counter the health problems associated with ageing. This research is continuing and additional analysis of available data being undertaken.
The above dissertation is my own interpretation of the information I have considered. You may or may not agree with my assessment - just leave your comments in the Guest Book. The evidence suggests starting intervention early, 40s & 50s, gives the best results - I left it a little late - still better late than never - what about you?
Living longer or dying longer?
It has been argued that extensions to life expectancy are only condemning us to an increasing period of frailty and Ill health.
Are we destined for a frail old age?
Most people would jump at the chance of living longer. After spending 40 years working the thought of a long, relaxing retirement seems appealing.
But if a longer life meant an increase in the length of ill health would people still feel the same?
The over 80s population is predicted to double to 5m by 2031, according to the Office of National Statistics.
If the health of the elderly population follows current trends that will mean people spend more of their lives fighting various illnesses.
According to government healthy life expectancy tables published in the summer, the amount of time women can expect to live in poor health increased by 15% to 11.6 years from 1981 to 2001.
For men, the length of poor health rose even more - 34% - to 8.7 years.
See below for more information....
Healthy lifestyles
Sir John Grimley Evans, emeritus professor of clinical gerontology at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said US research suggested people can remain fitter for longer.
"The encouraging thing that has been found in America is that healthier lifestyles have meant people are living longer but dying faster.
Are we destined for a frail old age?
Most people would jump at the chance of living longer. After spending 40 years working the thought of a long, relaxing retirement seems appealing.
But if a longer life meant an increase in the length of ill health would people still feel the same?
The over 80s population is predicted to double to 5m by 2031, according to the Office of National Statistics.
If the health of the elderly population follows current trends that will mean people spend more of their lives fighting various illnesses.
According to government healthy life expectancy tables published in the summer, the amount of time women can expect to live in poor health increased by 15% to 11.6 years from 1981 to 2001.
For men, the length of poor health rose even more - 34% - to 8.7 years.
See below for more information....
Healthy lifestyles
Sir John Grimley Evans, emeritus professor of clinical gerontology at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said US research suggested people can remain fitter for longer.
"The encouraging thing that has been found in America is that healthier lifestyles have meant people are living longer but dying faster.
Chronic disease and our environment
Building a healthy future:
The Oxford Health Alliance has held four annual summits to bring together a diverse group of stakeholders to confront the global epidemic of chronic disease. The next summit will be held in Sydney, Australia, from 25-27 February 2008, on the theme of 'Building a healthy future: chronic disease and our environment'.
The Sydney Resolution - Preamble
The way we live now is making people sick. It is also making our planet 'sick'. It is not sustainable.
Four preventable chronic diseases - heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease and cancer - account for 60% of the world's deaths. Their underlying causes are tobacco use, physical inactivity and poor diet.
These preventable chronic diseases are at epidemic proportions. They are increasingly affecting people of working age and cause immeasurable disability, mental ill health and disadvantage to individuals and families, and insupportable costs to society in lost productivity and increased health services. They threaten economic stability in both developed and developing countries, and plunge families striving to escape the poverty trap back into disadvantage and despair.
Urgent action is needed. There is a clear way forward: prevention works. We have the evidence - we have the capacity - we have the tools - we know what to do. The four major chronic diseases can largely be prevented by tackling three risk factors: smoking, physical inactivity and poor diet. Many of the changes needed to prevent chronic diseases will also help to protect the physical environment.
To achieve real change, it is necessary to bring together government, civil society, business and industry, academia, planners, young people, funders, activists and environmentalists in a 'coalition of the committed' to work towards creating a world in which human and natural resources come first, and where social and physical environments are aligned with eradicating chronic diseases.
A GLOBAL fight against flab would save more lives than the war on terror now that obesity-related chronic diseases have emerged as among the world's biggest killers.
Lawrence Gostin, a US government adviser who helped draft laws in the US to combat bioterrorism, will tell a global health summit in Sydney today that he considers chronic diseases the greater of the two threats to humanity.
"The human costs are frightening when we consider that obesity could shorten the average lifespan of an entire generation, resulting in the first reversal in life expectancy since data collecting began in 1900," Professor Gostin said.
The Oxford Health Alliance of private and public sector groups that want to reduce obesity and smoking rates will issue a "Sydney Resolution" during the three-day meeting, which starts today.
The resolution will be sent toKevin Rudd ahead of the Prime Minister's own high-profile think tank, the 2020 summit, in April.
It will recommend ways to reduce sugar, fat and salt content in food, improve labelling, regulate advertising, make fresh food more affordable, workplaces healthier and cities more cycle- and pedestrian-friendly.
Summit facilitator Rob Moodie from the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne said that eating too much, exercising too little and smoking were proving ultimately more dangerous than the acts committed by terrorists.
They had contributed over time to global epidemics in heart disease, diabetes, lung disease and some cancers.
"It's in the hundreds of thousands times more deadly in terms of claiming victims," Professor Moodie said. "There are really three or four diseases that cause 50 per cent of the world's deaths, and a huge amount of it is preventable."
Professor Moodie said governments needed to control and reduce the economic incentives that were driving unhealthy lifestyle choices.
"Making fat is good for business," he said. "Unhealthy foods and unhealthy drinks sell far better than healthy ones.
"Inactivity is much more the norm - and it makes more money - whether it is cars, or e-entertainment or video games."
Professor Moodie said it would take "a lot of political guts" to pursue solutions to obesity such as imposing congestion charges, shifting money to public transport, parks and cycle ways, changing city planning practices, and regulating advertising to children.
However, it made no sense to spend just 2 per cent of the health budget on public health and similar measures to keep people out of hospitals, when unhealthy lifestyles accounted for about half the burden on taxpayers, he said.
The Sydney Resolution - Preamble
The way we live now is making people sick. It is also making our planet 'sick'. It is not sustainable.
Four preventable chronic diseases - heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease and cancer - account for 60% of the world's deaths. Their underlying causes are tobacco use, physical inactivity and poor diet.
These preventable chronic diseases are at epidemic proportions. They are increasingly affecting people of working age and cause immeasurable disability, mental ill health and disadvantage to individuals and families, and insupportable costs to society in lost productivity and increased health services. They threaten economic stability in both developed and developing countries, and plunge families striving to escape the poverty trap back into disadvantage and despair.
Urgent action is needed. There is a clear way forward: prevention works. We have the evidence - we have the capacity - we have the tools - we know what to do. The four major chronic diseases can largely be prevented by tackling three risk factors: smoking, physical inactivity and poor diet. Many of the changes needed to prevent chronic diseases will also help to protect the physical environment.
To achieve real change, it is necessary to bring together government, civil society, business and industry, academia, planners, young people, funders, activists and environmentalists in a 'coalition of the committed' to work towards creating a world in which human and natural resources come first, and where social and physical environments are aligned with eradicating chronic diseases.
A GLOBAL fight against flab would save more lives than the war on terror now that obesity-related chronic diseases have emerged as among the world's biggest killers.
Lawrence Gostin, a US government adviser who helped draft laws in the US to combat bioterrorism, will tell a global health summit in Sydney today that he considers chronic diseases the greater of the two threats to humanity.
"The human costs are frightening when we consider that obesity could shorten the average lifespan of an entire generation, resulting in the first reversal in life expectancy since data collecting began in 1900," Professor Gostin said.
The Oxford Health Alliance of private and public sector groups that want to reduce obesity and smoking rates will issue a "Sydney Resolution" during the three-day meeting, which starts today.
The resolution will be sent toKevin Rudd ahead of the Prime Minister's own high-profile think tank, the 2020 summit, in April.
It will recommend ways to reduce sugar, fat and salt content in food, improve labelling, regulate advertising, make fresh food more affordable, workplaces healthier and cities more cycle- and pedestrian-friendly.
Summit facilitator Rob Moodie from the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne said that eating too much, exercising too little and smoking were proving ultimately more dangerous than the acts committed by terrorists.
They had contributed over time to global epidemics in heart disease, diabetes, lung disease and some cancers.
"It's in the hundreds of thousands times more deadly in terms of claiming victims," Professor Moodie said. "There are really three or four diseases that cause 50 per cent of the world's deaths, and a huge amount of it is preventable."
Professor Moodie said governments needed to control and reduce the economic incentives that were driving unhealthy lifestyle choices.
"Making fat is good for business," he said. "Unhealthy foods and unhealthy drinks sell far better than healthy ones.
"Inactivity is much more the norm - and it makes more money - whether it is cars, or e-entertainment or video games."
Professor Moodie said it would take "a lot of political guts" to pursue solutions to obesity such as imposing congestion charges, shifting money to public transport, parks and cycle ways, changing city planning practices, and regulating advertising to children.
However, it made no sense to spend just 2 per cent of the health budget on public health and similar measures to keep people out of hospitals, when unhealthy lifestyles accounted for about half the burden on taxpayers, he said.
Related Links
- Taking Control of Biological Aging
- Based on myths, common stereotypes, and misconceptions, prevailing media images of seniors reveal our hopeless expectations of the human aging process. For many, "old, and "senior", are synonymous with disease, disability, and frailty. Images of older adults using walkers, canes, and motorized scooters depict the weakness and dependency of old age. Discouraging images reinforce bleak expectations. While there are many seniors who conform to these conventional images, there is an older population far removed from the stereotypical rendering of advanced age. Spirduso, a medical researcher, identified six categories of older adults, based on functional ability.
- Journey to Forever - Watson Price
- Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, 1939, Paul B. Hoeber, Inc, New York, London
Weston Price (1870-1948) was truly "the Charles Darwin of nutrition". He discovered what health is made of, and proved it beyond any doubt. In the early 1930s Price travelled more than 100,000 miles to study the diets and health of isolated primitive peoples all over the world, at a time when such communities still existed -- people "who were living in accordance with the tradition of their race and as little affected as might be possible by the influence of the white man". What he found makes fascinating reading, turning many of our modern ideas on their heads -- far from living lives that were "nasty, brutish and short", these people were healthy, vigorous and happy, with few or none of the modern diseases of degeneration. Then Price compared these communities to other, less isolated groups of the same peoples, exposed to the "trade foods" produced by industrial society (processed foods grown by synthetic farming methods), in the shape of the "white man's store". He found it takes only one generation of eating industrialized food to destroy health and immunity. But he leaves us with the promise of regeneration -- thwarted health can be recaptured. - Small Farms Library
- Journey to Forever Online Library
- Organic food better than Commercial
- Early results of the £12 million 4-year Quality Low Input Food (QLIF) study indicate organic fruit and vegetables contain 40% more antioxidants (believed to cut the risk of heart disease and cancer) in organic produce compared to non-organic foodstuffs. There were also higher levels of other beneficial minerals such as iron and zinc. [1]
These latest findings underpin the founding philosophy and practices of the organic movement, which seeks to build positive health in the crops and livestock raised through organic farming - and thus of people eating that produce. [2] They reinforce the growing body of scientific evidence that indicates significant positive nutritional differences in organic food compared to non-organic food. - Agriculture is Difficult, Dangerous & Unhealthy
- The most glaring of these glosses is probably the assertion that agriculture is a risky, marginal and difficult means of acquiring food. Many readers would certainly object that agriculture provides a stable, secure and reliable source of food. After all, it was the bounty of agriculture that allowed us to give up hunting and gathering, constantly wandering and wondering where our next meal would come from, giving us the time to build civilization. That is the common picture we've all been told, but it is also the opposite of truth. In fact, the Neolithic Revolution was, to use Jared Diamond's turn of phrase, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."
- Diet, nutrition and chronic diseases in context:
- There is a vast volume of scientific evidence highlighting the importance of applying a life-course approach to the prevention and control of chronic disease. The picture is, however, still not complete, and the evidence sometimes contradictory. From the available evidence, it is possible to state the following:
* Unhealthy diets, physical inactivity and smoking are confirmed risk behaviours for chronic diseases.
* The biological risk factors of hypertension, obesity and lipidaemia are firmly established as risk factors for coronary heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
* Nutrients and physical activity influence gene expression and may define susceptibility.
* The major biological and behavioural risk factors emerge and act in early life, and continue to have a negative impact throughout the life course.
* The major biological risk factors can continue to affect the health of the next generation.
* An adequate and appropriate postnatal nutritional environment is important.
* Globally, trends in the prevalence of many risk factors are upwards, especially those for obesity, physical inactivity and, in the developing world particularly, smoking.
* Selected interventions are effective but must extend beyond individual risk factors and continue throughout the life course.
* Some preventive interventions early in the life course offer lifelong benefits.
* Improving diets and increasing levels of physical activity in adults and older people will reduce chronic disease risks for death and disability.
* Secondary prevention through diet and physical activity is a complementary strategy in retarding the progression of existing chronic diseases and decreasing mortality and the disease burden from such diseases. - The Paleo Diet
- Dr. S. Boyd Eaton of Emory University has published numerous scientific papers showing that contemporary hunter-gatherers are almost completely free of the chronic diseases that plague Western civilization. Wild lean meats, organs and fish are the mainstays of hunter-gatherer diets. How can these hunters and foragers be free of heart disease, hypertension and the sorts of cancers associated time and again with meat-eating in epidemiological studies?
- Healthy living 'can add 14 years'
- Taking exercise, drinking moderately, eating sufficient fruit and vegetables and not smoking can add as much as 14 years to your life, a study has found.
- Are we destined for a frail old age?
- Most people would jump at the chance of living longer. After spending 40 years working the thought of a long, relaxing retirement seems appealing.
Experts predict health care costs are going to rise over the coming years
But if a longer life meant an increase in the length of ill health would people still feel the same?
Comparative Diets
Diference between Hunter Gatherer and Modern Diets Explored
The most common criticism of the evolutionary hypothesis of diet and lifestyle involves comparative life expectancy. Assumptions are made that people live much longer and healthier lives today than Stone Agers did, and that Stone Agers did not live long enough to acquire the chronic degenerative diseases of modern civilization. The idea that hunter gatherers' lives were "nasty, brutish, and short" is actually an exaggeration that was popularized by Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. Dr. Cordain explains (as have others) the scientific findings that human life expectancies DECLINED when Stone Age hunter-gatherers adopted an agrarian lifestyle at the start of the Neolithic era. The later increases in life expectancy were mainly due to public health advances in sanitation, food safety, quarantine systems, immunizations and childbirth survival rates. Thirty three years was the estimated AVERAGE life expectancy of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer male, not the maximal lifespan of all hunter gatherers. A hunter gatherer who survived childbirth, infectious disease, accidents, battles, and wild animals could be expected to live as long as we do today. Moreover, archaeological and anthropological studies of Paleolithic records and contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures show much lower prevalence of heart disease, sudden cardiac death, cancer, stroke and even acne than in modern societies
The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain, Ph.D..
OK so what does this mean in practice? On way of looking at the change is illustrated below:-
This diagram shows the radical differences in the food sources (or types of food) in the two diets. Note the modern diet in primarily refined grains and sugar, whiles grains played virtually no part in the Hunter Gather diet, which was more natural, fresh and varied.
So what does the change mean, in terms of nutrition. Below is a chart comparing the nutrition content of the Hunter Gatherer in comparison with the Modern diet (what date. I wonder?). It will be seen that even taking the RDA amounts (do you) the Modern diet falls far below the nutrition input our bodies were designed to operate on.
The issue is further compounded by modern practices of cooking and preserving (pre-packaging) our food which further destroys the nutritional value of modern food.
The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain, Ph.D..
OK so what does this mean in practice? On way of looking at the change is illustrated below:-
This diagram shows the radical differences in the food sources (or types of food) in the two diets. Note the modern diet in primarily refined grains and sugar, whiles grains played virtually no part in the Hunter Gather diet, which was more natural, fresh and varied.
So what does the change mean, in terms of nutrition. Below is a chart comparing the nutrition content of the Hunter Gatherer in comparison with the Modern diet (what date. I wonder?). It will be seen that even taking the RDA amounts (do you) the Modern diet falls far below the nutrition input our bodies were designed to operate on.
The issue is further compounded by modern practices of cooking and preserving (pre-packaging) our food which further destroys the nutritional value of modern food.
Comparative Diet - Links
Exploring the differences between the Hunter Gatherer & Moder Diets
- Longevity & health ancient Paleolithic
- How does the health/longevity of late Paleolithic hunters-gatherers compare with that of the Neolithic farmers who succeeded them? Periodically one will hear it stated in online discussion forums devoted to raw foods and vegetarianism that Paleolithic peoples only lived to be 25 (or 30, or 35) years, or whatever age. (The lack of exactitude in such figures illustrates how substantiating one's "scientific facts" is not usually a very highly emphasized value in these forums.) The intended point usually being that those terribly debauched flesh-eating cavemen--and women, presumably--were not living very long due to their consumption of meat.
Closing thought:-
As related by Minerva (# Views. Minerva. Br Med J 1999;319:930.[Free Full Text]) as an example of resistance to change, "Health educators have a tough time persuading people to eat broccoli when chocolate, pop tarts, and sticky buns are everywhere, so US researchers have tried recruiting teams of trusted workers to pester their friends and colleagues to eat better. A lengthy and expensive programme of peer education, which included some intrusive sales techniques, led to participants eating about half an extra portion of fruit and vegetables a day. The authors don't say how many friends the peer educators lost in the process." In brief, no matter what efficacious lifestyle changes are recommended, whether they be derived from past or from present experiences of populations, they seem almost irrelevant because they will be very largely ignored. - Paleolithic Diet: How our bodies want to be treated.
- The human genome has changed little over the past 40,000 years . Our ancestors developed agricultural practices about 10,000 years ago (see a Timeline). The advent of agricultural marked a chaotic period for our bodies to adjust to these foreign foods. The fossil record shows a massive decrease in average height, health, and rapid increase in disease, obesity, and population for cultures that survived the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a agricultural dependent one.
- Paleolithic Nutrition: Your Future Is In Your Dietary Past
- Before the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, all people were hunter-gatherers: they gathered various fruits and vegetables to eat, they hunted animals for their meat. Of course, the ratio of meat and vegetables varied with geographic location, climate, and season, people were still hunter-gatherers. Until they began cultivating grains and livestock, they rarely if ever drank milk beyond infancy or ate grains .
With the spread of agriculture, people shifted from nomadic groups to relatively stable and larger societies to tend the fields. Culture and knowledge flourished. People also began consuming large amounts of grain, milk, and domesticated meat. And they became more sedentary as well.
With the industrial revolution, the diet changed even more dramatically. Beginning around 1900, whole grains were routinely refined, removing much of their nutrition, and refined sugar started to become commonplace. Reflecting on the changes in 1939, nutritionist Jean Bogert noted, "The machine age has had the effect of forcing upon the peoples of the industrial nations (especially the United States) the most gigantic human feeding experiment ever attempted.4 - Evolution, Diet and Health
- The nutritional requirements of contemporary humans represent the end-result of dietary interactions between our ancestral species and their environments extending back to the origins of life on earth. Primates of modern aspect are thought to have emerged about 50 million years ago and appreciating the basic range of primate nutritional patterns over this lengthy evolutionary period is critically important because only when the original simian baseline is characterized can subsequent dietary modifications within the hominid lineage be fully appraised. These nutritional changes have had significant evolutionary impact in the past and they now affect the health of contemporary human populations. The nature of these interactions can best be understood when the dietary alterations are measured against a fundamental primate benchmark.
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