Healthy Intentions

Not all agricultural societies have taken the same road. Many traditional agriculturists maintain the diversity of their diet by eating a variety of herbs and other plant compounds along with meat and grains. The Huasa people of northern Nigeria, for example, traditionally include up to twenty wild medicinal plants in their grain based soups, and peoples who have become heavily reliant on animal products have found ways of countering the negative effects of such a diet.When animal fat is metabolised in the body, it produces damaging free radicals that contribute to cardiovascular disease, cancer, and aging.

Masai Warrior

While the Masai of Africa eat meat and drink blood, milk, and animal fat as their only sources of protein (animal fat makes up 60 percent of their energy intake), they suffer less heart trouble than Westerners. One reason is that they always combine their animal products with strong bitter, antioxidant herbs-up to twenty-eight additives in each meat-based soup, and twelve substances added to milk! In other words, the Masai have balanced the intake of oxidizing and antioxidizing compounds. According to Timothy Johns, it is not the high intake of animal fat, or the low intake of antioxidants, that causes so many health problems in industrial countries; it is the lack of balance between the two.

Eating the right foods and natural medicines requires a sensitivity to subtle changes in appetite. Do I fancy something sweet, sour, salty, stimulating, or sedating? What sort of hunger is it? And, after consumption, has the "need" been satisfied? Such subtleties are easily overridden by artificially created superstimuli in processed foods that leave us unable to select a healthy diet. We need to listen more carefully to our body's cravings and take an intentional role in maintaining our health before disease sets in.

An abridged extract from Wild Health - How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn From Them by Cindy Engel (c) Used with permission. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK and Houghton Mifflin Company in the US Available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com Cindy Engel earned a PhD in animal behaviour from the University of East Anglia. As well as lecturing for the Open University, she is also a freelance radio and television science advisor.