Take a look at the back of a bag of dog or cat food, and here are the ingredients you’ll see: corn meal, soy meal, (occasionally) wheat, partially hydrogenated soy or corn or other vegetable oil, meat and protein meal, and a few synthetic vitamins. But guess what? The animal pushing the shopping cart is buying foods with the same list of ingredients for himself. The main differences between donuts, breads, and Cheerios are the quantities of hydrogenated oil and sugar. Cheerios,
in turn, are nearly identical to Ramen noodles. Throw on a little salt, and you’ve got snack chips. Add tomato flakes and bump up the protein powder and—bam!—it’s Hamburger Helper with noodles. Add a pinch of meat byproducts, take away some tomato powder, and we’re in the pet food aisle again, holding a twenty-pound bag of grade A Puppy Chow.
We already know why manufacturers make food this way: it’s cheap and convenient to reformulate the basic ingredients of protein, starch, and fat (there are those words again!) into a variety of shapes and textures, coat them in sugars and artificial flavor enhancers, and ship them just about anywhere. That’s why they make it. But why would we eat it? Same reason: it’s cheap and convenient. These days, a busy parent can buy a frozen lasagna dinner heavy enough to feed a family of five for about what it would cost to make from scratch. It comes in its own disposable aluminum pan, so—no fuss, no muss—the dinner riddle is solved. Like other foods in the supermarket, it keeps forever (or at least a really long time) in the freezer, so if we don’t eat it tonight, it’ll be ready when we want it. And thanks to the fact that these convenience foods contain protein, fat, and carbohydrates, plus some synthetic vitamins, we can survive on them—at least for a certain amount of time.
But that doesn’t mean these foods aren’t changing us. They are.
As I described earlier, whenever our ancestors moved from one place to another, their diets changed and, in turn, so did their physiologies.
And, as you’ll recall, each time they relocated from one natural locale to another, though that relocation influenced their stature and relative prominence of certain facial features, their skeletons generally remained perfect examples of function and proportionality. They didn’t think of food in terms of carbs and protein and fat. They thought more in terms of good soil, healthy animal, freshly picked. And for this reason, their traditional cultural practices, and the foods they took into their bodies, kept them firmly tethered to the natural world. In other words, they stayed connected.
For eons, human beings maintained that connection, thanks to the guidance of their cultural wisdom. But they couldn’t have known all the possible consequences of cutting those natural ties. How could they?
Until recently, the people of this planet benefited from a relatively stable climate without knowing how easily it could be thrown into chaos; we never had to think about it until it all started breaking down. Indeed, we might have remained blind to the underlying cause had it not been for a handful of prescient climatologists and geologists who, at great professional cost, made certain their warnings were heard. As a result, most of us are fairly well versed in the concepts of climate regulation and instability.
We know, for example, that the Industrial Revolution and subsequent commercial growth created massive carbon dioxide pollution, which magnified the greenhouse effect and is now making global climate warmer. What we don’t yet appreciate is the extent to which the Industrial Revolution polluted the food we eat, leading to so many changes in our health and physiologies that it has altered the way we look. Over the past 100 years, we have completed the single most comprehensive dietary shift in the history of our race. This shift, a major dietary migration over vast nutritional territory, has gone on largely unnoticed—even by the medical community—for the following reasons:
The shift didn’t involve moving from one geographic point to another; only our food has changed.
Except for the very well-off and the recently urbanized, few of us in America have been exposed to the products of culinary tradition and therefore don’t know what we’re missing.
Since the migration from real to fake food has occurred over five generations, even our parents were likely born into an environment bereft of culinary tradition.
Cheap and convenient products catch on quick, and we tend not to ask where they were made or what they were made of, so the easier and cheaper our food gets, the less we think about it.
The merging of business and science into one corporate body means
that medical science can no longer countenance advice incompatible with the interests of commerce.
A constant stream of new technologic fixes continues to buttress our collapsing physiologic infrastructure, which has so far masked what would otherwise be obvious maladaptive consequences of that
collapse.
This last point is the most significant. If needing glasses killed us, we would no doubt pay keen attention to factors that render a child nearsighted. If having oral cavities killed us, we would steer clear of the things known to rot teeth as if our lives depended on it. If there were deadly consequences from inattention to nutritional detail, our nutrition science would be so advanced that it would be, dare I say, effective at preventing disease and capable of promoting health. In the past, when the knowledge of building healthy bodies with nutrition was, in fact, a matter of life and death, it was so highly valued that Dr. Price found many indigenous people reluctant to “disclose secrets of their race.”217 As Price discovered, “The need for this [reluctance] is comparable to the need for secrecy regarding modern war devices.”218 We don’t think that way anymore. And it’s ironic that the kinds of technological advancements that allowed for the mass production of nutritionally wanting processed foods are now necessary to address the physiologic consequences of their consumption.
CHANGING OUR DIET MAY CHANGE US
Big brains require brain-building fats like cholesterol, lecithin, choline, saturated fat, and long-chain polyunsaturated fats. These compounds are found in highest concentration in organ meats, cold-water fish, and fish eggs. Today these rich foods are primarily consumed by the wealthy, in high-end restaurants where foie gras, fresh oysters, lobsters, crab, and caviar are staple items. Our hominid ancestors consumed them in greater quantity than other primates.
That’s an irony I’d just as soon watch play out from a safe distance.
And I’m not alone. How do I put this delicately? If you think the wealthy—
members of the upper social class—would even touch the foods most Americans eat daily, the foods relentlessly touted as healthy, you’d be mistaken. No, the most privileged among us eat very much the way their great-great-great-grandparents did. If we could fly past the iron gates guarding the White House and peer through the dining room windows to see what the guests were eating at President Obama’s second inaugural lunch, we’d see this:
FIRST COURSE
Lobster Tails with New England Clam Chowder Cream Sauce
MAIN COURSE
Hickory-Grilled Bison [presumably pasture-raised] Tenderloin with Wild
Huckleberry Veal Demi-glace Reduction, Baby Golden Beets and Green Beans, and Strawberry Preserves and Red Cabbage
THIRD COURSE
Sour Cream Ice Cream and Artisan Cheeses219
Those dining on these sinfully rich foods represent the same government whose food pyramid forbids us regular folk from eating anything of the kind. And since we’re all supposed to be watching our sodium, we’d hardly risk touching our lips to something as salty as demi-glace or artisan cheeses. Have these culinary daredevils lost their minds, wandering so far outside the protective dietary shadow cast by the food pyramid? Or are their chefs the instigators, luring these susceptible victims over the cliff with the aroma of lobster and cream sauce?
Whether through daring, by calculated intention, or by virtue of the same felicitous winds of fate that have caressed other aspects of their lives, one thing is sure: by maintaining their diet of real, traditional foods, the well-heeled have managed to ensconce their genomes inside the walls of a nutritional fortress and defend their physiologic dynasties against the hoi polloi—the swelling masses of the sick and enfeebled.
Given that the privileged can, and frequently do, eat the way we all used to, and given that this shift in eating habits first occurred over a century ago and that the effects of continued nutrient deprivation are magnified with each generation, the widening gap between nutritional-physiologic classes should place the other issues of class differential well into the background. A hundred years ago, two nutritional roads diverged in an evolutionary wood. The less well-off took the one never before traveled, and—judging by the health statistics—that has made all the difference.
It is as if, at the beginning of the twentieth century, ordinary working families were rounded up and ordered to start packing their bags, leave their farms and fertile soil behind, and take their assigned seats in an enormous space cruiser headed for Mars. Most of us would not undertake such a journey without resistance, because we know instinctively that the consequences for our health, and for the health of
our children, might prove catastrophic. That is a good instinct, and even though our great-great-great-grandparents may not have known to follow it at the time, that instinct remains alive in every one of their descendants, and it will help get us back to Earth.