Healthy Intentions

NASA Photo by Tony Landis Monkeys on a film set

Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies still eat in the traditional way and, like our prehistoric ancestors, have far less cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis than those of us who forage in supermarkets. "Sickness is much more prevalent, pervasive, and diverse among agriculturists than among hunter-gatherers," explains anthropologist Michael Logan, and it is not because the hunter gatherers die before these ills can develop. A decline in health is seen with the transition to agriculture. As native tribes of what is now the south central United States abandoned their hunter-gathering lifestyle some fifteen hundred years ago, their worsening health was indelibly recorded in their skeletal remains. Although more of them survived the famines than did their ancestors, they were not as healthy. They were less robust and showed signs of deficiencies of vitamin B, iron, and protein. Agriculture overcomes the vagaries of seasonal food supply, but at a price. And as contemporary hunter gatherers change to an industrialized diet high in fats and sugar and low in fiber, they too develop the diseases of the industrial world.

Agriculturists select and domesticate plants for ease of cultivation and palatability. Over time they have chosen plants with fewer bitter-tasting or astringent secondary compounds, and these plants are inevitably more susceptible to disease. Modern crops, therefore, need more chemical intervention than wild plants, which retain their own defensive pesticides. Consuming modern crops is consequently very different from consuming wild plants, and when we eat the meat of domesticated animals fed on these domesticated plants, our total intake of beneficial plant compounds is far lower than if we had eaten wild game.

NOAA Native tribe in the southern Philippines - Hundreds of tribes and over a 100 dialects were found in the Philippines during the 1930's

Furthermore, agricultural biodiversity is shrinking as fewer species and varieties are made available for cultivation. Today 75 percent of the global food supply comes from a mere twelve crop species. Not only are we losing species diversity but we are losing varieties within those species. The demise of dietary diversity is exacerbated by modern processing, in which artificial chemicals instead of herbs are used to preserve, enhance the taste of, and add colour or other properties to food. Our industrial diet is greatly weakened thereby in both nutritional and medicinal attributes, providing us with only the bare essentials of energy and protein.