Historical diets and cultures (notes & article)
Throughout human history a healthy diet for the vast majority was based
on foods of animal origin and high in fat. In Britain, the wealthy ate meat and dairy produce regularly and had average life spans
which were comparable with or better than those of today. It was the poor who could not afford such foods who suffered high levels
of disease, infant mortality, poor growth and shorter, less healthy lives. The poor ate largely a carbohydrate diet
such as bread and potatoes. A British researcher, John Boyd Orr noticed differences in the state run schools as compared to the private
schools that were paid for by the wealthy for their children. He found that those from wealthier backgrounds were significantly taller
than their poorer peers. He later concluded that the food intake of half the British population was seriously deficient in what he
called "protective constituents". In the late 1930's he proposed that the British people should drink more milk, and eat more
dairy produce and meat. The British government at the time recommended that milk consumption should be doubled and introduced free
school milk. The British Medical Association advised that the population should consume 80% more milk, 55% more eggs, 40% more
butter and 30% more meat. And later, with the advent of television advertising, the government actually sponsored its own (Go to work
on an egg campaign).
This new high fat diet was now standard in Britain. The Brits ate eggs and bacon for breakfast fried in lard, and the drippings
used on toast. They drank full cream milk and ate real butter. Only the poor ate margarine; and only the poor had high levels of disease.
Countless common ailments disappeared. Rickets, called the English Disease because it was so wide spread along with a number of deficiency
diseases largely disappeared. Child deaths from diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough also fell dramatically.
Diet
and other cultures
General Robert McCarrison, a colonial medical officer, studied the peoples of India. He noticed that the southern
Indians, who ate very little in the way of dairy produce, were of stunted growth and prone to disease. Their neighbors, the Sikhs
to the north drank a great deal of milk and were fit and healthy. Fortunately they didn't know what low fat factory made milk was.
In
Africa, the Maasai who lived almost exclusively on blood and milk from their cattle were seen to be considerably healthier and less
prone to disease than their vegetarian neighbors the Kikuyu.
Between the 1920's and 30's, a Dr. Weston A. Price spent 10 years travelling the world looking at diets and the health of populations
who ate their traditional foods and compared them with those of the same populations that had changed to eating our healthy
civilized way. Dr.Price first visited the Loetschental Valley in Switzerland in 1931. What he found was that these people had no real
need for physicians or dentists. The lack of illness he found was not confined to this area. He found this to be universal from the
islands of the pacific, through Australia, Asia, Africa, South and North America to Europe. What he found everywhere was that people
who ate their traditional diets had practically no disease at all. The only problems he found were among those populations that had
been influenced by missionaries and traders where they had adopted the eating habits of the modern industrialized nations.
If we do not learn from the past, we remain in the infancy of knowledge. Cicero
You don't need to be a doctor to be able to read, research, use common sense and look at history. You don't even need to look at history when it comes to good health - Just go to WalMart and observe what's in those baskets.
Two populations of Polynesians living on the Pacific atolls, the Pukapuka
and the Tokelau were studied in 1981. Coconut is the chief source of energy for both groups; being 90%+ saturated fat, the worlds
most saturated natural fat. The Tokelauans obtain 63% of energy from coconut, while the Pukapukans obtain only 34%. Blood cholesterol
levels in the Tokelauans were higher. However, cardiovascular disease was equally uncommon in both populations.
Heart attacks in the
U.S. today is the number one cause of death. Diabetes is now at least the 8th leading cause of death, and increasing every year
- Alzheimer's disease is now the second leading cause of death replacing lung cancer in 2014.