If I were to tell you that these two young men were twins and that, throughout their school years, one was relentlessly bullied while the other was his protector, which of the two would you peg as the victim and which as his defender? Studies show that the overwhelming majority of us make the very same kinds of character assessments based on facial structure that you probably made just now. In reality, these are before and after photos of one man who underwent surgery to restore his underdeveloped maxila and mandible to more optimal geometry. I include them here because renowned behavioral scientists, most notably Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher, have shown how a lifetime of receiving such judgments begins with one’s parents and continues to influence face-to-face interactions every day of our lives. Though subtle, the cumulative effects shape our self-image and ambitions in ways that either impair or facilitate professional accomplishments. Parents who take diet seriously should take pride in their efforts to provide their children with the best chance of success in our highly competitive world.
THE TRADITIONAL STRATEGY FOR A HEALTHY
1970s were surprised to discover resistance to the building of more hospitals and clinics from—of all people—local village grandmothers.
It’s not that these women didn’t care about health or feared new technology. They felt that the influx of Western ideas had already caused harm to their children and grandchildren. The new order smacked of an insidious form of imperialism. So when these independently minded African women were politely asked to relinquish their roles as protectors of the community genome, they bridled at the idea. As one member of the Batetela tribe in the Upper Congo River region explained it:
Today we don’t make any decisions about spacing the births of our children…. Our ancestors had stronger children because they were not born too close together. Today parents no longer worry about their children getting sick. They think that they can always buy medicine and then the child will get well. This is why couples no longer separate their beds after the birth of a child, as they used to do in the time of our ancestors.169
When social workers examined how these traditions eroded, they uncovered an explanation not entirely irrelevant to us: Westerners, including mine owners, state officials, missionaries, and doctors working with these groups, judged the traditional practice of spacing childbirth to be at odds with their long-term goals of expansion and did not support its continuation.170 “Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925” suggests rather provocatively that when companies need workers, they care more about sheer numbers than the quality of workers’ lives or their longevity.171 Such concerns become irrelevant given a large enough pool of potential workers to draw from. And so the systematic spacing of children that was once an “important feature of the control of excellence of child life”172 is tossed aside as an anachronism, a fractured artifact of female empowerment. But it is not just a women’s issue, and it extends beyond the political. We all gain from children’s good health, which requires giving mom’s body at least three—preferably four—years to refortify her tissues with a generous supply of nutrients.
Nearly a century ago, Mahatma Ghandi preached self-sufficiency as a
prerequisite of self-government, reminding his countrymen that “to forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”173 Franklin Delano Roosevelt later echoed this principle, saying, “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”174 Two of the most important resources we have are the land that provides us with food and the farmers who work it on our behalf. If the idea of refortifying a mother’s body between births and doing the same with soil between crop cycles strikes you as related concepts, you’re right. Just as we are all custodians of the genome, traditional farmers are the frontline custodians of the land, going to great lengths to replenish the ground between crops and to replace all the minerals required for healthy growth of the plants—
even to the point of layering recycled outhouse waste over the ground to recapture nutrients that would otherwise become depleted. The modern technique is to replace only a few of the many nutrients crops draw from the ground each year. As a result, our food supply is of much lower quality now than it was before industrial farming, which in turn makes fortifying mom’s body a tougher task.
While the fact that we still produce bumper crops year after year makes for good press, in reality the nutrient content of American-grown plants and animals is far worse than it was during the dustbowls of the 1930s. Farmers call this the dilution effect—more pounds of produce from the same soil means less nutrition per pound of produce produced. One report showed that packs of sliced green beans have only 11 percent of the vitamin C claimed on the package.175 Another report comparing mineral levels of twenty-seven fruits and vegetables from 1930 and 1980 found modern produce to be depleted by an average of 20 percent, with calcium dropping 46 percent, magnesium 23 percent, iron 27 percent, and zinc 59 percent.176 Meat and dairy, which ultimately depend on healthy soil, have declined commensurately in quality between 1930 and 2002, with iron content in meat falling an average of 47 percent, 60 percent in milk, and lesser declines in calcium, copper, and magnesium.177, 178 When plants and animals are reared on mineral-deficient soil, not only are they missing nutrients, they’re not as healthy.
And their cells are, in turn, less able to manufacture the vitamins and
other nutrients that would benefit us. If we could somehow view these grocery staples as they now exist nutritionally, they would look like ghostly afterimages of their former selves, semi-transparent shapes of apples, cucumbers, the various cuts of beef. Of course, in real life it all looks relatively fresh and appetizing. It had better: most are grown and engineered with eye appeal in mind. These pretty displays hide the fact that it is more difficult to purchase nutritionally rich foods today than any time in recent history.
Without healthy soil to nourish them, plants are unable to use the energy from the sun to manufacture optimal levels of vitamins. Without vitamin-and mineral-rich plants for animals to eat, they can’t add the next layer of chemical/nutritional complexity we have evolved to depend on. We are here today because our ancestors taught their children how to garden, hunt, and prepare their food so that they could one day raise healthy children of their own. Their hard work and due diligence in building and maintaining a healthy environment to support a healthy human genome can, however, only take us so far. We are coasting along on the nutritional momentum left over from millennia of enacted nutritional and environmental wisdom. If our food is composed of far fewer nutrients than it was four generations ago, it’s a fair bet that our physiologies—our connective and nervous tissues, our immune systems, etc.—have taken a hit. What about our genes? Might they be affected as well? What might be the expected effect of generations of nutritional neglect on our own children?
That depends, in large part, on the choices each of us makes. But there is little doubt that physicians like me are going to be very, very busy.