Finding Your Ideal Dietary

Categories: Diet and Nutrition
Sources: How And When To Be Your Own Doctor

Anyone that is genuinely interested in having the best possible

health should make their own study of the titles listed in the

bibliography in the back of this book. After you do, award yourself

a BS nutrition. I draw certain conclusions from this body of data. I

think they help a person sort out the massive confusion that exists

today about proper diet.



First principle: Homo Sapiens clearly can posses ex reme health

while eating very different dietary regimens. There is no one right

diet for humans.



Before the industrial era almost everyone on Earth ate what was

produced locally. Their dietary choices were pretty much restricted

to those foods that were well adapted and productive in their

region. Some places grew rye, others wheat, others millet, others

rice. Some places supported cows, others goats, others had few on no

domesticated animals. Some places produced a lot of fruits and

vegetables. Others, did not. Whatever the local dietary, during

thousands of years of eating that dietary natural selection

prevailed; most babies that were allergic to or not able to thrive

on the available dietary, died quickly. Probably of childhood

bacterial infections. The result of this weeding out process was a

population closely adapted to the available dietary of a particular

locale.



This has interesting implications for Americans, most of whose

ancestors immigrated from somewhere else; many of our ancestors also

"hybridized" or crossed with immigrants from elsewhere. Trying to

discover what dietary substances your particular genetic endowment

is adapted to can be difficult and confusing. If both your parents

were Italian and they were more or less pure Italian going way back,

you might start out trying to eat wheat, olives, garlic, fava beans,

grapes, figs, cow dairy. If pure German, try rye bread, cow dairy,

apples, cabbage family vegetables. If Scottish, try oats, mutton,

fish, sheep dairy and cabbage family vegetables. If Jewish, try goat

dairy, wheat, olives and citrus. And certainly all the above ethnic

derivations will thrive on many kinds of vegetables. Afro-Americans,

especially dark-complexioned ones little mixed with Europeans, might

do well to avoid wheat and instead, try sorghum, millet or tropical

root crops like sweet potatoes, yams and taro.



Making it even more difficult for an individual to discover their

optimum diet is the existence of genetic-based allergies and worse,

developed allergies. Later in this chapter I will explain how a body

can develop an allergy to a food that is probably irreversible. A

weakened organ can also prevent digestion of a food or food group.



One more thing about adaptation to dietaries. Pre-industrial humans

could only be extraordinarily healthy on the dietary they were

adapted to if and only if that dietary also was extraordinarily high

in nutrients. Few places on earth have naturally rich soil. Food

grown on poor soil is poor in nutrition; that grown on rich soil is

high in nutrition. People do not realize that the charts and tables

in the backs of health books like Adelle Davis's Lets Cook It Right,

are not really true. They are statistics. It is vital to keep in

mind the old saying, "there are lies, there are damned lies, and

then there are statistics. The best way to lie is with statistics."



Statistical tables of the nutrient content of foods were developed

by averaging numerous samples of food from various soils and

regions. These tables basically lie because they do not show the

range of possibility between the different samples. A chart may

state authoritatively that 100 grams of broccoli contains so many

milligrams of calcium. What it does not say is that some broccoli

samples contain only half that amount or even less, while other

broccoli contains two or three times that amount. Since calcium is a

vital nutrient hard to come by in digestible form, the high calcium

broccoli is far better food than the low calcium sample. But both

samples of broccoli appear and taste more or less alike. Both could

even be organically grown. Yet one sample has a very positive ratio

of nutrition to calories, the other is lousy food. (Schuphan, 1965)

Here's another example I hope will really dent the certainties the

Linda Clarkites. Potatoes can range in protein from eight to eleven

percent, depending on the soil that produced them and if they were

or were not irrigated. Grown dry (very low yielding) on semiarid

soils, potatoes can be a high-protein staff of life. Heavily

irrigated and fertilized so as to produce bulk yield instead of

nutrition, they'll produce two or three times the tonnage, but at 8

percent protein instead of 11 percent. Not only does the protein

content drop just as much as yield is boosted, the amino acid ratios

change markedly, the content of scarce nutritional minerals drops

massively, and the caloric content increases. In short, subsisting

on irrigated commercially-grown potatoes, or on those grown on

relatively infertile soils receiving abundant rainfall will make you

fat and sick. They're a lot like manioc.



Here's another. Wheat can range from 7 to 19 percent protein. Before

the industrial era ruined most wheat by turning it into white flour,

wheat-eating peoples from regions where the cereal naturally

contains abundant protein tended to be tall, healthy and long-lived.

Wheat-eating humans from regions that produce low protein grain

tended to be small, sickly and short-lived. (McCarrison, 1921, 1936,

1982; Albrecht, 1975)



Even cows have to pay attention to where their grass is coming from.

Some green grass is over 15 percent protein and contains lots of

calcium, phosphorus and magnesium to build strong bodies. Other

equally or even better looking green grass contains only six or

seven percent protein and contains little calcium, phosphorus or

magnesium. Cows forced to eat only this poor type of grass can

literally starve to death with full bellies. And they have a hard

time breeding successfully. The reason for the difference: different

soil fertility profiles. (Albrecht, 1975)



When people ate local, those living on fertile soils or getting a

significant portion of their diet from the sea and who because of

physical isolation from industrial foods did not make a practice of

eating empty calories tended to live a long time and be very

healthy. But those unfortunates on poor soils or with unwise

cultural life-styles tended to be short-lived, diseased, small,

weak, have bad teeth, and etc. The lesson here is that Homo Sapiens

can adapt to many different dietaries, but like any other animal,

the one thing we can't adapt to is a dietary deficient in nutrition.



So here's another "statistic" to reconsider. Most people believe

that due to modern medical wonders, we live longer than we used to.

Actually, that depends. Compared to badly nourished populations of a

century ago, yes! We do. Chemical medicine keeps sickly, poorly

nourished people going a lot longer (though one wonders about the

quality of their dreary existences.) I hypothesize that before the

time most farmers purchased and baked with white flour and sold

their whole, unground wheat, many rural Americans (the ones on good

soil, not all parts of North America have rich soil) eating from

their own self-sufficient farms, lived as long or even longer than

we do today. You also have to wonder who benefits from promulgating

this mistaken belief about longevity. Who gets rich when we are

sick? And what huge economic interests are getting rich helping make

us sick?