Primal Nutrition

Paleolithic and Ancestral Diets for Optimal Health

Ron Schmid

• Publisher: Healing Arts Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781620555200
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Nutrición, dietética y bariatría

Explores how the traditional foods of ancient cultures can naturally help prevent and treat degenerative disease and chronic conditions • Examines the protective nutrients inherent in primal foods, such as wild seafood, grass-fed meat, and raw dairy, explaining how they differ from Western refined foods • Explains how to create your own commonsense primal diet, tailored to your specific needs and conditions, such as allergies, eczema, arthritis, and even cancer • Builds upon the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, Dr. Francis Pottenger, and other nutritional health pioneers The human body's innate mechanisms for healing and immunity extend beyond the mending of cuts and broken bones or recovery from colds and flu. Given the foods we evolved to thrive on, foods our ancestors knew well, the body can naturally prevent and overcome a host of degenerative conditions and chronic illnesses, from allergies, eczema, and arthritis to dental caries, heart attack, and even cancer. Drawing on the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, Dr. Francis Pottenger, and other nutritional health pioneers, Dr. Ron Schmid demonstrates that the strongest and most disease-resistant indigenous cultures around the world lived on whole, natural foods--seafood, wild game, healthy grass-fed domestic animals, and, in some cases, whole grains and raw dairy. He explores how modern refined diets differ from ancestral ones, the dramatic declines in health seen in indigenous cultures that adopt modern diets, and the steps you can take to build health with traditional foods. He observes that the foods considered essential and "sacred" in native cultures--the foods around which rituals and ceremonies evolved and that were emphasized prior to and during pregnancy--were invariably animal-source foods such as seafood, liver, and raw milk products, thus underscoring the importance of these foods to overall health and immunity, a fact that modern nutritional science has overwhelmingly proved true. Blending the wisdom of traditional eating patterns with modern scientific knowledge, Dr. Schmid explains how to apply these principles to create your own commonsense primal diet, tailored to your specific needs, to rebuild health and improve longevity.

PART 1

AN ANCESTRY OF PRIMAL NUTRITION

Diets of Traditional Societies and a Legacy of Health

Every popular diet book presents different theories and opinions about the food we eat. What should we eat and how much? What are the effects of cooked and raw vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish, cholesterol, fats and oils, eggs, dairy foods, and grains? Is sugar really harmful? What about refined flour? Which “experts” are right—those who say cholesterol is killing us, or those who tell us it is not the real culprit in heart disease? And which foods help prevent chronic disease? Which foods will enable us to enjoy the robust good health we sense has been partly lost to modern living and a modern diet?

These questions have no simple answers. My approach is to seek answers by first asking several other relevant and related questions: What was the health of people in traditional and so-called primitive cultures existing into the early twentieth century—people eating only traditional natural food? What about the health of isolated cultures that still survive, and the health of the few remaining hunter-gatherers living and eating primitively today?

If the health of such people is superior to ours, could this be directly related to their diet? If so, which foods did and do such people eat? What differences exist between their food and modern food? How do their vegetables, grains, meats, dairy products, fish, and fruits differ from ours? And do the differences help explain the existence of our modern diseases—diseases that anthropologists and researchers agree by and large did not exist in traditional cultures?

Might the concept of “sacred food,” common in so many native cultures, provide important clues about what kinds of food are most important in maintaining physical and spiritual health? What about the effect of traditional, primal foods—seafood, for example—on people with chronic diseases? What evidence has been published in the medical literature? (Plenty, as we’ll see.)

Although people of our modern world may appear jovial despite poor health, this is often a mask used in attempting to hide underlying unhappiness or denial of the fact that a problem exists. Others who are very ill truly do adapt, and lead emotionally fulfilling lives in the face of great pain and suffering. Perhaps they think one must accept one’s lot in life, that they have no alternative. But such an attitude sadly relegates to fate a small part of the world you may control—your own body.

As we seek to understand what aspects of our health we can control and what aspects we cannot, we will, in this first part of Primal Nutrition, review the historical, anthropological, and evolutionary aspects of traditional primal foods. We will also detail the current and historical research into the health effects of these foods, and discuss my clinical experience relating to the use of these foods in the treatment of acute and chronic diseases.

Good health is your birthright and if you do not presently enjoy it, there is no better time than the present to set that aright.

1

SACRED PRACTICES OF ANCIENT ANCESTORS AND CONTEMPORARY HUNTER-GATHERERS

The history and evolution of the human diet is a subject rife with opinion and conjecture. Be that as it may, evidence exists, and anthropologists are generally in rough accord about, what our ancestors ate, if not precisely when they ate what. A consensus also exists about the fact that people who eat a traditional diet today—one similar to an ancestral diet—generally enjoy the same good health that their forebears did. An examination of the evidence, inferences, and conclusions of anthropologists and medical researchers sheds light on why contemporary cultures that follow a traditional diet tend to enjoy excellent health.

THE INTIMATE CONNECTION BETWEEN DIET AND DISEASE

Controversy surrounds the story of the evolution of early humans. What is clear, though, is that the diet of all humans contained substantial amounts of meat and other animal foods until roughly ten thousand years ago.

Whatever our beginnings, the agricultural revolution—the cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals—of the past ten thousand years is thought to have had little effect upon our genes. One exception is that, in some parts of the world, people have evolved the ability to digest milk as adults. As regards more recent trends (masses of people leaving the countryside to live in cities; the development of modern commercial agriculture; the refinement of much of our food), not enough time has elapsed for the effects of these trends to cause changes in our genes. Thus we are genetically equipped to eat foods our hunter-fisher-gatherer ancestors ate: the preagricultural-revolution diet.

Many of us are descendants of ancestors who settled into agricultural life less than two thousand years ago; for others, their agricultural roots go back some fifteen thousand years. Agriculture markedly affected human diets, with a shift to more vegetable foods (grains especially) and a decline in animal consumption (particularly wild animals). The effect on the size of humans was profound: European big-game hunters of thirty thousand years ago were an average of six inches taller than their farmer descendants. A similar change occurred in the Americas among Indians shifting to a more agricultural way of life in the period just before the Europeans arrived.

Over the past two hundred years, the larger amounts of animal-sourced foods in Western diets have resulted in an increase in average human height, so that we are now almost as tall as our big-game-hunting ancestors. Today, diseases that plagued neither the hunter-gatherers nor the agriculturalists have become major health problems. As mentioned in the introduction, writing in the January 31, 1985, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine under the title “Paleolithic Nutrition,” S. Boyd Eaton, M.D. and Melvin Konner, Ph.D. reported that heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic intestinal disease, and most types of cancer have been reported by medical authorities to be virtually unknown in hunter-gatherer cultures surviving today. Those cultures include the Hadza of Tanzania, the !Kung and Kade San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari, the Philippine Tasaday, the Aché of Paraguay, the Australian Aborigines of Arnhem Land, and the Arctic aboriginal Eskimos, among others.

The publication of this information in this particular professional journal, long a bastion of conservative medical opinion, was an important milestone. For many years other medical journals and professional publications had carried articles linking diet, health, and specific diseases, yet the U.S. medical establishment has steadfastly ignored the evidence. With the appearance of “Paleolithic Nutrition” and related articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, more American physicians became aware of the intimate connection between diet and disease.

It has been noted by the medical community that chronic diseases in America around the turn of this century were relatively rare. Paul Dudley White, who was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal physician during the years the former president suffered his two heart attacks, wrote in 1943 in his textbook, Heart Disease: “When I graduated from medical school in 1911, I had never heard of coronary thrombosis, which is one of the chief threats to life in the United States and Canada today. . . . It is now responsible for more than 50 percent of all deaths.”

The refinement of grains; the production and consumption of excessive amounts of sugar, white flour, industrial vegetable oils, and alcohol; confinement farming; and the decline in the quality of food from both plant and animal sources are the major causes for the emergence of chronic disease as a major threat. Around 1900, new methods of milling flour were introduced that completely stripped out the very perishable wheat germ from the grain. By 1910, these methods were in general use, and as a result, many people lost their major source of vitamin E and an important source of other nutrients, including the B vitamins and several minerals. Trends since then have been toward the use of refined foods and more refined foods. Confinement animals have been injected with chemicals, drugs, and hormones, as the mechanization of agriculture has transformed them into meat, milk, and egg machines.

We turn now to evidence pertaining to the appearance of species that may have been ancestors of the human species, and to preagricultural humans who roamed the earth as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before the agricultural revolution began to end their way of life.

THE DIETS OF EARLY MAN AND CONTEMPORARY HUNTER-GATHERERS

Early relatives of humans lived in trees probably more than five million years ago, eating fruit, eggs, and nestlings. Changing climatic patterns in Africa near the equator are thought to have driven these creatures down from the trees in times of drought to forage for food in grasslands. Certain relatives of early humans, classified in the genus Homo, and other creatures of the genus Australopithecus, appear in the fossil records of two to nearly four million years ago.

Australopithecines were similar to our ancestors in many ways; both are thought to have descended from the same ancestral line, and both walked with feet nearly identical to those of modern humans. Though the head has undergone drastic changes, particularly in the size of the brain, they walked upright. We know this from the position of the foramen magnum, the hole in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes en route to the brain.

Australopithecus was first named by anatomist Raymond Dart when skeletal remains of the creature were discovered in 1924. For many years, it was thought to be the direct ancestor of humans. Recent discoveries, however, indicated Australopithecus was a vegetarian cousin of the genus Homo, the line believed to lead to modern humans. The jaw and teeth are heavier, more suited to chewing and grinding roots. The teeth of Homo species of the same period are smaller and lighter, more suited for tearing and chewing meat. While Homo developed, Australo pithecines became extinct between five hundred thousand and one million years ago.

Almost two million years ago, Homo erectus appeared; it was believed to be the first human. Meat consumption increased during this time, as evidenced by the animal bones that litter the caves that Homo erectus inhabited. Additionally, they had tools for hunting and cleaning animals, and they lived in areas well populated with large game. These people spread far from central Africa, where they most likely had originated. A classic find of this species is Peking man, who lived approximately four hundred thousand years ago and was the first to use fire.

Further changes led to Neanderthal man, considered the first of the Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). These people ate a diet estimated to have been perhaps 50 percent meat. But as Cro-Magnon man and other modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) appeared, they improved their weapons and communications skills, and groups became more efficient at hunting big game. Meat assumed an even more dominant role in human nutrition.

This trend was reversed in the period shortly before the beginnings of agriculture. Need for fresh hunting grounds had spread humanity all over the globe, and by the eve of the agricultural revolution we numbered some three million people. Together with changes in animal populations and climate, this human population growth may be the reason why hunting large animals became less important for many cultures. Fish, shellfish, and small game assumed increasing importance, and a new pattern emerged. Tools for processing plant foods became more common at this time (some ten to twenty thousand years ago). Trace-mineral analysis of strontium levels in bones has shown vegetable consumption increasing as meat consumption was decreasing.

A mixed diet was typical of the estimated three hundred thousand contemporary hunter-fisher-gatherers who survived into the 1970s. Animal food was estimated to constitute, by weight, an average of 35 percent of the diet of several cultures studied. A similar range was found among cultures that Weston Price studied, though some used even more animal-sourced food much of the year.

THE SANCTITY OF FOOD TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

The diet of the Australian Aborigines today is in many ways typical of both ancient and contemporary hunter-gatherers. Thought to be the oldest surviving culture on Earth, the Aborigines depend on plants, seeds, small reptiles, mammals, insects, fish, and birds. Although men spend much time hunting for larger animals, overall their diet is 70 to 80 percent vegetarian.

In Robert Lawlor’s book, Voices of the First Day, the author discusses the spiritual aspects of food in Aboriginal life.

For the Aborigines, eating is a sacred act; it represents humanity’s deepest communication and kinship with the life-giving forces of the earth. . . . Hunting and gathering are considered the basis of developing the physical and spiritual potential of human nature. The great hunt is the means by which the spiritual powers of the earth and sky educate humanity. Animals and plants nourish the body, and the process of hunting, foraging, and preparing imparts dexterity, physical skills, and intellectual and spiritual knowledge. (p. 302)

I find this concept of “sacred food” fascinating, and it’s interesting to note that half of aboriginal society—the men—spends its time securing 10 to 20 percent of the calories in the form of meat. Why? Though this is controversial, their culture has been said to be egalitarian—men and women function as equals in theory and in practice. Lawlor writes that “the natural male-female complementarity forms the basic unit of Aboriginal society. . . . Men and women as a group decide the clan’s food-gathering strategy for the day, depending on weather conditions, locality, and the direction of their wanderings.” Apparently they believe that meat is of sufficient importance that its procurement is worth a highly disproportionate amount of effort.

Native Americans also had a concept of “sacred food.” In Of Wolves and Men Barry Hoistun Lopez writes that sacred food is “earned” by hunting in a very specific way, and it nourishes the soul along with the body. Without this kind of food, the body merely survives and the spirit suffers. Hunting tribes called meat “medicine” (and in the Pacific Northwest, salmon assumed this central role in the culture). This meant that it was sacred because it came from a sacred ceremony—the hunt and its aftermath (just as in the Aboriginal tribes). It also meant that the meat contained the power of the plants (that the animal had eaten) to cure and to soothe. This was one reason why Native Americans did not eat wolf meat: wolves primarily ate meat, not plants. Nor did Native Americans wish to eat cattle once the white man came—it was not sacred to hunt cattle.

It’s clear that in these and other native cultures, the connection between food (particularly mammals and fish) and well-being was at least as much a spiritual connection as a physical one. The capture of wild animals, together with the procurement of plant foods, was at the very heart of the spiritual and physical lives of the people.

Lawlor also noted that “The spiritual dimension is also respected in cooking and food preparation.”

Ideally, an animal is cooked and eaten as close as possible to the place where it was killed; all things, including food, are more sacred by virtue of being in place. When a kangaroo or other large animal is roasted whole on an open fire, it is first exposed to roaring flames for ten minutes, during which time the spirit of the animal escapes to the metaphysical abode of its species. After the initial roasting the carcass of the animal is removed from the fire, its fur is scraped off, and its intestines removed with a sharp stone. It is then returned to a bed of hot coals and cooked on each side for twenty minutes. The warm, partly cooked blood is thought to have magic properties; the men drink it in a post-hunt ritual and rub it on their spears for continued accuracy. . . . Other cooking methods, such as baking in ashes, steaming in ground ovens, or boiling in seawater and tortoise shells, all have ritual and Dreamtime connotations. (p. 310)

It is noteworthy that the meat was cooked. Clearly, a modern primal diet that reflects ancestral ways need not be entirely raw.

In the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, about two hundred members of a contemporary hunter-gatherer tribe, the !Kung, still carry on their ancient way of life. Like all remaining hunter-gatherers, they occupy a marginal area that modern civilization has not yet cla...

Table of contents

• Cover Image
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Sally Fallon Morell
• Foreword by Nora Gedgaudas, C.N.S., C.N.T.
• Preface: Healing, Health, and Wholeness
• Introduction: Primal Diets, Weston Price, and Healing
• Part 1: An Ancestry of Primal Nutrition
• Part 2: Diet and Disease
• Part 3: Primal versus Modern Foods
• Epilogue: Toward a Philosophy of Natural Living
• Appendix 1: The All-Meat Diet of Arctic Adventurer Vilhjalmur Stefansson
• Appendix 2: An In-Depth Look at Seafood Selection
• Appendix 3: Understanding Laboratory Tests
• Appendix 4: Movement, Games, and Sports
• Footnote
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
• Books of Related Interest
• Copyright & Permissions
• Index