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But humans are perverse, not sensible. Deciding on the basis of artificially-created flavors, preferring incipid
textures, we seem to prefer junk food and become slaves to our food addictions. For example, in tropical
countries there is a widely grown root crop, called in various places: tapioca, tavioca, manioc, or yuca. This
interesting plant produces the greatest tonnage of edible, digestible, pleasant-tasting calories per acre
compared to any other food crop I know. Manioc might seem the answer to human starvation because it will
grow abundantly on tropical soils so infertile and/or so droughty that no other food crop will succeed there.
Manioc will do this because it needs virtually nothing from the soil to construct itself with. And consequently,
manioc puts next to nothing nourishing into its edible parts. The bland-tasting root is virtually pure starch, a
simple carbohydrate not much different than pure corn starch. Plants construct starches from carbon dioxide
gas obtained the air and hydrogen obtained from water. There is no shortage ever of carbon from CO2 in the
air and rarely a shortage of hydrogen from water. When the highly digestible starch in manioc is chewed,
digestive enzymes readily convert it into sugar. Nutritionally there is virtually no difference between eating
manioc and eating white sugar. Both are entirely empty calories.
If you made a scale from ideal to worst regarding the ratio of nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc and
most fats are at the extreme undesirable end. Frankly I don't know which single food might lie at the extreme
positive end of the scale. Close to perfect might be certain leafy green vegetables that can be eaten raw. When
they are grown on extremely fertile soil, some greens develop 20 or more percent completely digestible
balanced protein with ideal ratios of all the essential amino acids, lots of vitamins, tons of minerals, all sorts
of enzymes and other nutritional elements--and very few calories. You could continually fill your stomach to
bursting with raw leafy greens and still have a hard time sustaining your body weight if that was all you ate.
Maybe Popeye the Sailorman was right about eating spinach.
For the moment, lets ignore individual genetic inabilities to digest specific foods and also ignore the effects
stress and enervation can have on our ability to extract nutrition out of the food we are eating. Without those
factors to consider, it is correct to say that, to the extent one's diet contains the maximum potential amount of
nutrition relative to the number of calories you are eating, to that extent a person will be healthy. To the extent
the diet is degraded from that ideal, to that extent, disease will develop. Think about it!
Lessons From Nutritional Anthropology
The next logical pair of questions are: how healthy could good nutrition make people be, and, how much
deviation from ideal nutrition could we allow ourselves before serious disease appears? Luckily, earlier in this
century we could observe living answers to those questions (before the evidence disappeared). The answers
are: we could be amazingly healthy, and, if we wish to enjoy excellent health we can afford to cut ourselves
surprisingly little slack.
Prior to the Second World War there were several dozen sizable groups of extraordinarily healthy humans
remaining on Earth. Today, their descendants are still in the same remote places, are speaking the same
languages and possess more or less the same cultures. Only today they're watching satellite TV. wearing
jeans, drinking colas--and their superior health has evaporated.
During the early part of this century, at the same era vitamins and other basic aspects of nutrition were being
discovered, a few farsighted medical explorers sought out these hard-to-reach places with their legendarily
healthy peoples to see what caused the legendary well-being they'd heard of. Enough evidence was collected
and analyzed to derive some very valid principles.
Chapter Five 74
First lets dismiss some apparently logical but incorrect explanations for the unusually good health of these
isolated peoples. It wasn't racial, genetic superiority. There were extraordinarily healthy blacks, browns,
Orientals, Amerinds, Caucasians. It wasn't living at high altitude; some lived at sea level. It wasn't temperate
climates, some lived in the tropics, some in the tropics at sea level, a type of location generally thought to be
quite unhealthful. It wasn't a small collection of genetically superior individuals, because when these peoples
left their isolated locale and moved to the city, they rapidly began to lose their health. And it wasn't genetics
because when a young couple from the isolated healthy village moved to town, their children born in town
were as unhealthy as all the other kids.
And what do I mean by genuinely healthy? Well, imagine a remote village or a mountain valley or a far island
settlement very difficult to get to, where there lived a thousand or perhaps ten thousand people. Rarely fewer,
rarely more. Among that small population there were no medical doctors and no dentists, no drugs, no
vaccinations, no antibiotics. Usually the isolation carried with it illiteracy and precluded contact with or
awareness of modern science, so there was little or no notion of public hygiene. And this was before the era of
antibiotics. Yet these unprotected, undoctored, unvaccinated peoples did not suffer and die from bacterial
infections; and the women did not have to give birth to 13 children to get 2.4 to survive to breeding
age--almost all the children made it through the gauntlet of childhood diseases. There was also virtually no
degenerative disease like heart attacks, hardening of the arteries, senility, cancer, arthritis. There were few if
any birth defects. In fact, there probably weren't any aspirin in the entire place. Oh, and there was very little [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]