posted about 1 year ago
This is an excerpt from a new book called for Champions by Michael Colgan. I've been a long time reader of Dr. Colgan. He changed my life.
Please comment on his ideas. If you want information on the book. Please contact me.
"Our Food is Killing Us
A little over 10,000 years ago, the advent of agriculture began to make fundamental changes in our food. Since that time, until the last century, gradual development of crop production, animal husbandry, food processing, and transport slowly, almost unnoticeable, distorted the nutritional make-up of food. Acceleration of food technology over the last 100 years worsened the distortions beyond measure, and has presented us today with a vast selection of edibles that bear little relation to our ancient nutrition.1-2
Our genome, however, evolved on that ancient nutrition over at least six million years, from the hominin, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, to the emergence of modern man, Homo sapiens, some 50,000 years ago. About 99.92% of our present genetic heritage, was already developed long before there was agriculture. Genetically, we have had insufficient time to adapt to modern food. Our genetically determined biology is now in direct conflict with most of the food we are offered to eat.1-3 Supermarkets bursting with taste delights, are hard put to supply us with the biochemical essentials for healthy Homo sapiens.
At best this conflict between our genetic design and modern food hampers physical and mental performance. At worst, numerous researchers now believe it is responsible for most of the chronic degenerative diseases of Western life.1-7
The Foods that Cause Disease
Among many other research facilities worldwide, over the last 20 years the Colgan Institute has identified eight key detrimental changes in our food.
First came the introduction of cereal grains, a rare item in our ancient diet. Worse, as technology advanced, rough breads and flours deteriorated into highly processed flours, breads and cookies, cakes, chips and bits; from which most of the micronutrients and fiber have been removed.2 Cereal grains not only robbed our diet of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, but also changed our mix of macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, fats) dramatically, by adding a grain carbohydrate load never before experienced in our evolution.
The second big change in our food came from animal husbandry. Domestication of animals produced dairy foods and cultivated meats, non-existent items in our ancient diet. Cheeses, butter, and cultivated meats changed the composition of our fat intake with the addition of large amounts of saturated fats, which also displaced essential fats.
The third change was sugar. Even with the occasional honey and the sugars in seasonal fruits, sugar was a minor item in our ancient diet. Refined sugars were non-existent. Refined sugar and its 1970s’ progeny, high-fructose corn syrup, pushed our glycemic load into the stratosphere, and distorted our macronutrient mix even more than cereal grains. It also distorted the acid/alkaline balance of our food, greatly increasing acidity.
The fourth change was salt. As we will see ahead, except for occasional ingestion of seaweed and saltwater, ancient man rarely used salt, and did not mine it or put it in food. Now over 80% of the salt we ingest has been added to food.
Salt did a real number on us by reversing the sodium-potassium ratio (Na-K ratio) from low sodium-high potassium in our ancient diet to high sodium-low potassium in modern foods. Our kidney function and blood pressure are genetically programmed for the low sodium intake of our ancestors.
The fifth change in our food was the introduction of processed vegetable oils, another non-existent item in our ancient diet. As we “progressed” technologically, these fats became more and more artificial. Now, most processed vegetable oils are high in trans-fatty acids, which are worse for your health than saturated fats. As they replaced fresh vegetables and nut oils, the fat composition in our diet veered wildly from high essential fats to high saturated and trans fats.7
The sixth change was loss of fiber. Fiber totaled about 100 grams per day in our ancient diet. It came almost exclusively from roots, fruits, nuts, and other bits of vegetation.
Now we are lucky to get 20 grams of fiber a day, and from a very narrow range of sources.9 No surprise that deadly colorectal cancer is rampant. There are 60,000 deaths per year in the US and 150,000 cases, even though research shows clearly that colorectal cancer is more than 90% preventable, by a diet high in fruits and vegetables and low in saturated and trans fats.10
Seventh came the loss of micronutrients. At the University of Auckland in the 1970s, I was on the research team that first found systematic reduction or removal of vitamins, minerals and polyphenols in over 70 common foods.6 We documented how processing removes and destroys nutrients. It seemed like a revelation then, but is now accepted without question.
The final change that damages us is increased acidity. Our ancestors ate a basically alkaline diet of mostly unprocessed vegetarian foods. The modern combination of cereal grains, processed carbohydrates, dairy foods, cultivated meats, salt, sugar and processed vegetable oils, and very low levels of micronutrients and fiber, overwhelms our genetically programmed mechanisms that regulate acid/alkaline balance. Now our gut is far more acidic. Acid reflux disease and indigestion make a $7 billion dollar industry in the US alone, but it’s a lot more costly than that for your health.
This book shows you that the ideal nutrition is the food on which our genome evolved. The closer we can get to that today, the better our health and performance. As Stephen Hawking explains so eloquently in, The Universe in a Nutshell:
There has been no significant change in human DNA in the last ten thousand years. Our nutritional needs therefore, were encoded into DNA before agriculture began. Technology has now changed most of our food so that it bears no relation to the ancient diet upon which we evolved. That pre-agriculture diet is the only food which can fully support our genetic design. It is the only diet which will enable us to live 130 healthy years."
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