Humans are animals. The same forces of physiology, biology, climatology, geology, and sociology that determine health and prosperity throughout the animal kingdom apply equally to humans.
But unlike non-human animals, humans manipulate nature and their environment. The ability to "create reality” by means of our powerfully creative human minds is a double-edged sword.
Man can put reason to work to solve the problem of survival. He can build shelter, fashion clothing, generate heat and other forms of energy, rapidly transport himself over great distances, and even modify the environment to better suit his survival (such as building bridges and dams).
He can also invent or cultivate foods that 3.5 million years of evolution never adapted our genes to handle, or to handle in concentrations available today. When you look around and witness the increasing and alarming levels of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer, it becomes increasingly difficult to buy the notion that it's simply a matter of cheap food, sloth, and eating too much.
For the last 30–40 years, since the McGovern Commission and subsequent FDA Guidelines went into effect, people have replaced fat calories with sugar calories (that includes bread, pasta, rice, and so on), and the results have been an unmitigated disaster.
What We Can Learn From Animals
Non-human animals in the wild don't become obese or die from unnatural causes without human intervention. Pets and zoo animals under the stewardship of human animals become debilitated when they are fed the wrong foods and subjected to unsuitable environments. Humans become stressed, depressed, unfulfilled, unproductive, dependent, sexually starved, uncompetitive, and unhappy for the same fundamental reasons.
The human animal can live a long and productive life without the decline we now associate with age in modern society. It is possible to experience health, vitality, and happiness right up until the last few days, hours, and even minutes of life. Encoded in our genes is the ability to survive and thrive to the very end on a wide range of food sources.
Good health is natural. It’s not something that needs to be industrialized or drug-induced. By eating natural foods available to us, humans can enjoy good health and longevity. Technology should not separate us from or destroy the natural or man-made habitats we and non-human animals need to live and thrive in good health.
The key to being lean, strong, and healthy is in your head. Use your intuition, just like animals do. There is no definite prescription or proscription that will work for everyone. You must craft your own diet, health, and fitness paradigm from your own trial and error experience. You must learn to regulate your hunger and satiation. The burden is squarely on you. Modern institutions only want to sell you stuff. They don’t care about your belly or health. They care about their bottom line and your spending.
Eating Like Our Ancestors
My diet is omnivorous, and here's why: human animals are omnivores. This is a simple fact, accepted by the vast majority of biologists and anthropologists worldwide, and for good reason. Geographic and climatological upheaval over millions of years caused humans to migrate to and inhabit all corners of the globe, from equator to arctic, from seashore to elevations of 16,000 ft. It was essential for humans to evolve the capacity to exploit food sources from a wide range of plants and animals alike. I take full advantage of that.
We can also look to our ancestors to understand how to properly condition our bodies for natural, animal-like physical health. As Chris Shugart at T-Nation writes, quoting Art De Vany, “. . . you should live more like an animal, a human one whose long existence on Earth was spent as a hunter-gatherer. Train, eat, and play, but do it in an intermittent and unpatterned way, just as wild animals do.”
There are numerous examples of primitive people who have been studied, who equally enjoy good health. Their diets vary dramatically, but they all include animal products. The archaeological record is clear. We can also learn from examples of modern hunter-gatherers and other non-industrial people.
For a quick example of extremes, let’s consider the vastly different diets of the tropical Kitavans and the Arctic Inuit. Kitavans eat about 70% of their energy as carbohydrates, primarily in the form of starchy tubers. The Inuit, on the other hand, have a very low carbohydrate intake, instead getting 70% or more of their energy from animal fat. Both populations typically reach advanced age in excellent health, presenting with none of the diseases of civilization such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and others.
Is it true, what Hobbes wrote, that life for the primitive man was “nasty, brutish and short?” Back in the 1920s and 30s, an American dentist, Weston A. Price, concerned with the astronomical rate of tooth decay in his young patients, set out around the world to find out why. Rather than attempt to discover the cause directly, he devised a different approach. What if there were populations of peoples who didn’t have tooth decay? If so, then what is it they had that we didn’t? His world travels took him to remote places to visit populations of peoples with little to no contact or trade with the modern world, including the Lötschental in Switzerland, Native Americans, Polynesians, Pygmies, and Aborigines, among many others.
What he found was little to no tooth decay in every primitive population studied, at a time when teenagers were being fitted for dentures. His travels are documented in hundreds of photos and pages in his 1939 book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. The takeaway message? Modern foodstuffs, concocted largely of various clever proportions of cheap white flour and sugar, were crowding out the dense plant and animal nutrition “primitive” peoples had wisely learned to eat over hundreds or thousands of years of trial and error, in the pursuit of their optimal human animal existence.
For more information concerning the generally good health of “primitive” populations, consult this article by Sally Fallon Morell of The Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF): Nasty, Brutish and Short? And in regard to the distinction between a wild Paleo existence and that of Ancestral health that seeks to optimize nutrition in a specific environment, see Chris Masterjohn’s essay, Understanding Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom.
What's ideal? Who's to say? Your only task is to find what's ideal for you, and the options are open-ended. Don’t let anyone shame you, or make you feel guilty for your own desires and choices. You are a human animal with the freedom to contemplate using the widest array of plant and animal foods you can to find your own sweet spot.
The choice is yours. You can live a life of restriction, denial, hunger, and potentially far more serious long-term problems—or you can discover your own diet for life within the framework of a real-food paradigm.
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