Healthy Intentions

Most of us have healthy intentions when it comes to the food we eat. But it can be tough. Especially when you consider that our bodies haven't properly adapted to our highly processed fast food diets.

One hundred years ago, the leading causes of death in the industrial world were infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia. Since then, the emergence of antibiotics, vaccines, and public health controls has reduced the impact of infectious disease. Today the top killers are noninfectious illnesses related essentially to lifestyle (diet, smoking, and lack of exercise). The major causes of death in the United States in 1997 were heart disease, cancer (of the breast, colon, and lung), and stroke. Chronic health problems such as obesity, noninsulin-dependent diabetes, and osteoporosis, which are not necessarily lethal but nonetheless debilitating, are steadily increasing, and our psychological health appears to be deteriorating at an alarming rate.

In the United Kingdom, suicides by young men have increased by 176 percent since 1985, and according to the World Health Organization, depression currently disables 20 percent of the global population. Economic and technical progress is no assurance of good health.

Humans are qualitatively different from other animals because we manipulate the flow of energy and resources through the ecosystem to our advantage, and consequently to the detriment of other organisms. That is why we compete so successfully with other species. But with this success come some inherent failings, particularly in terms of our health.

Image Credit Influenza virus (an Orthomyxovirus) is responsible for acute upper respiratory disease, usually accompanied by fever and myalgia.

According to physician Boyd Eaton and his anthropologist colleagues, despite all our technological wizardry and intellectual advances, modern humans are seriously malnourished. The human body evolved to eat a very different diet from that which most of us consume today. Before the advent of agriculture, about ten thousand years ago, people were hunter-gatherers, living on fruit, vegetables, and lean meat. The foods varying with the seasons and climate, and all obtained from local sources. Our ancestors rarely, if ever, ate grains or drank the milk of other animals. Although ten thousand years seems a long time ago, 99.99 percent of our genetic material was already formed. Thus we are not well adapted to an agriculturally based diet of cereals and dairy products.