M
Michael Langston
Guest
Natural Eating
by Michael Langston
When was the last time you thought seriously about your diet? If you're like most busy people in our harried society, you probably don't have time to give it much thought. We tend to read the morning paper as we crunch on our cereal, chat with our friends while nibbling french fries for lunch, and watch TV in the evening while gobbling our pizza. It seems that our food is the last thing we think about in the midst of all of life's other distractions.
But are we overlooking a fundamental truth about the nature of our diet that could enhance our life beyond our wildest expectations? Sometimes the hardest thing to see is the thing that's most obvious, and so it is with the truth about our diet.
Cultural conditioning, more than any other factor, is the force that determines the foods that we eat. We eat as we do primarily because we've grown up eating that way, and when we see others in our society eating a certain way, we tend to eat as they do. We eat cereal for breakfast because we were given it as children and we saw it advertised while watching our Saturday morning cartoons. We eat french fries for lunch because that's what we saw all our teenage friends eating. We eat pizza for dinner because it's easy to have it delivered and we grew up eating and liking it. We have no better reasons than these for eating as we do. In making all these important nutritional choices, we simply follow the lead of our popular culture.
But in the process of thoughtlessly swallowing what the food industry provides us and failing to make our own true decisions, is it possible that we're being dangerously led astray by forces that are acting against our best interest?
Consider for a moment the purpose of food and consider as well what we're commonly eating. The purpose of food is not merely to provide pleasure, although eating can certainly be a pleasurable experience and there is nothing wrong with that pleasure if it's enjoyed in the right context (in the context of good nutrition). Although too easily forgotten in our hedonistic culture, food's principal purpose is to provide nourishment and sustenance.
But are the foods that we're commonly eating performing this function? Is that breakfast cereal, french fries, and pizza doing its job of nourishing the body, or is it only supplying us with a transient dose of nutritionless pleasure?
To answer this question and to assess the quality of the food we are eating, we need to think about the fundamental nature of food itself. What exactly is food, anyway? We must look to the natural world for the answer.
Food is the tissue of living organisms that animals (and some plants) ingest in order to acquire raw materials or energy for survival. This ingested tissue can be of either plant or animal origin, depending on whether the ingesting organism is a herbivore or a carnivore. The fact that this ingested tissue was once itself alive implies that all the substances needed for life are present in precisely the right amounts. This ensures that the organism ingesting this tissue will be properly nourished.
This is an extremely critical point and bears repeating. Plant and animal tissue (as food), because it was once alive, contains all the substances necessary to sustain and nourish other life. It is inherently nutritious and life-giving. This is what is meant when we say that a food is natural. It is derived from nature in an unaltered state.
There's another aspect of the ideal of "naturalness" as it relates to our food that's equally important. One must also consider the type of food most appropriate for any given species. Grass, for example, though natural in one sense, is not a natural food for a lion, just as meat is not natural for cattle. In order to determine what's natural for humans, we must look back in time to our hunter-gatherer past.
The term "hunter-gatherer" tells us a lot about what our ancient ancestors ate over millions of years, and thus tells us which foods are natural for humans. Ancient hunter-gatherers were omnivores, in the sense that they ate foods from both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. They both hunted wild animals and gathered wild plants.
But they were not omnivores in the sense that they ate absolutely everything. Hunter-gatherers ate meats, fruits, and vegetables, but they had no grains, beans, or dairy products, which were introduced into our diet after the invention of agriculture. And, even more significantly, they ate none of our modern-day processed foods.
Do the foods that we commonly eat today meet these criteria of being natural and appropriate for the human species? Some of them do (such as meat and vegetables), but, sadly, most of them do not. Lets look at perhaps the most egregious example of a "processed" food (which is really not a food at all) and examine how it differs from a food that is natural.
Recall that a "natural" food, because it was once living tissue, is a complex mixture of all the various substances that are required for life: amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, etc. Then imagine, if you will, its total antithesis, a pure chemical compound providing none of these essential nutrients, only empty calories to fatten us like cattle. Unfortunately, this nutritional nightmare (called refined sugar) is all too real in our "civilized" culture and makes up a substantial portion of the average person's diet: over one hundred pounds per person per year.
Other processed foods are similar to sugar in that they are devoid of nutrition and extremely prevalent in the modern diet. Refined white flour, polished white rice, packaged breakfast cereals, refined vegetable oils, margarine, and other hydrogenated, man-altered fats are major examples. Refined white flour, though unable to sustain even rats in the laboratory, has become the dominant staple in the human diet. Why, you may wonder?
It makes absolutely no sense that we would feed ourselves food that is unfit even for animal consumption, but, shockingly, that's just how crazy that our world has become. If rats can't live on refined white flour, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in laboratory experiments, how can humans be expected to thrive on it as a staple? If it's so nutritionally bankrupt that it has to be fortified with synthetic vitamins to prevent gross vitamin deficiency diseases, how is it that it is fit to be eaten in the first place? Even though it makes no sense nutritionally for the human race to be eating it, it makes great sense economically for the food industry to be selling it. And that is the reason for this continuing insanity!
The shocking truth that most people fail to consider is that these unnatural disease-causing foods, introduced for purely profit-seeking motives by an industry that is acting against our best interest, have largely displaced natural health-promoting foods in our diet. No one seems to care or to even take notice that foods such as sugary breakfast cereals, french fries, and pizza, which are in reality nutritional perversions, have stealthily replaced the meats, fruits, and vegetables that we desperately need to maintain our health. And what is even more appalling than this senseless indifference to the fundamentals of nutrition is that the awful consequences of this nutritional madness go largely unrecognized.
We tend to look at degenerative disease as an unavoidable fact of life or as an inevitable consequence of just growing older. We see so much heart disease, cancer, and other debilitating diseases around us that this pathetic infirmity is all that we know. We tend to regard such disease states as normal and inextricably linked to the human condition. What we think we can do nothing about, we prefer not to think about, like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand.
But think about this, if you will, for a moment. Heart attacks, which presently kill millions, were a medical oddity before the turn of the twentieth century. Degenerative diseases such as diabetes and cancer, which are now escalating at an exponential rate, were much less prevalent then as well. In primitive and traditional cultures, tooth decay and other such "diseases of civilization" were rare or nonexistent until "civilized" foods were introduced in their diet, and then such conditions began to run rampant.
It seems that good health is our natural birthright if we'll only make an effort to obey nature's laws. And one of the most important of nature's laws is that we should eat nature's food. We needn't eliminate foods of animal origin, as the vegans would have us do. What we must do instead, in order to be healthy, is to eliminate processed foods of HUMAN origin, through a program of natural eating as recommended in this article.
Yes, we can do something about the modern-day plagues that confront us, so aptly described as "diseases of civilization." Degenerative disease is not inextricably linked to the human condition. It is instead inexorably connected to a degenerate diet, imposed on unthinking people by cultural conditioning and by the self-serving practices of a corrupt food industry. What we desperately need is treatment for this insanity, and a sensible program of natural eating is just what the doctor SHOULD HAVE ordered.
by Michael Langston
When was the last time you thought seriously about your diet? If you're like most busy people in our harried society, you probably don't have time to give it much thought. We tend to read the morning paper as we crunch on our cereal, chat with our friends while nibbling french fries for lunch, and watch TV in the evening while gobbling our pizza. It seems that our food is the last thing we think about in the midst of all of life's other distractions.
But are we overlooking a fundamental truth about the nature of our diet that could enhance our life beyond our wildest expectations? Sometimes the hardest thing to see is the thing that's most obvious, and so it is with the truth about our diet.
Cultural conditioning, more than any other factor, is the force that determines the foods that we eat. We eat as we do primarily because we've grown up eating that way, and when we see others in our society eating a certain way, we tend to eat as they do. We eat cereal for breakfast because we were given it as children and we saw it advertised while watching our Saturday morning cartoons. We eat french fries for lunch because that's what we saw all our teenage friends eating. We eat pizza for dinner because it's easy to have it delivered and we grew up eating and liking it. We have no better reasons than these for eating as we do. In making all these important nutritional choices, we simply follow the lead of our popular culture.
But in the process of thoughtlessly swallowing what the food industry provides us and failing to make our own true decisions, is it possible that we're being dangerously led astray by forces that are acting against our best interest?
Consider for a moment the purpose of food and consider as well what we're commonly eating. The purpose of food is not merely to provide pleasure, although eating can certainly be a pleasurable experience and there is nothing wrong with that pleasure if it's enjoyed in the right context (in the context of good nutrition). Although too easily forgotten in our hedonistic culture, food's principal purpose is to provide nourishment and sustenance.
But are the foods that we're commonly eating performing this function? Is that breakfast cereal, french fries, and pizza doing its job of nourishing the body, or is it only supplying us with a transient dose of nutritionless pleasure?
To answer this question and to assess the quality of the food we are eating, we need to think about the fundamental nature of food itself. What exactly is food, anyway? We must look to the natural world for the answer.
Food is the tissue of living organisms that animals (and some plants) ingest in order to acquire raw materials or energy for survival. This ingested tissue can be of either plant or animal origin, depending on whether the ingesting organism is a herbivore or a carnivore. The fact that this ingested tissue was once itself alive implies that all the substances needed for life are present in precisely the right amounts. This ensures that the organism ingesting this tissue will be properly nourished.
This is an extremely critical point and bears repeating. Plant and animal tissue (as food), because it was once alive, contains all the substances necessary to sustain and nourish other life. It is inherently nutritious and life-giving. This is what is meant when we say that a food is natural. It is derived from nature in an unaltered state.
There's another aspect of the ideal of "naturalness" as it relates to our food that's equally important. One must also consider the type of food most appropriate for any given species. Grass, for example, though natural in one sense, is not a natural food for a lion, just as meat is not natural for cattle. In order to determine what's natural for humans, we must look back in time to our hunter-gatherer past.
The term "hunter-gatherer" tells us a lot about what our ancient ancestors ate over millions of years, and thus tells us which foods are natural for humans. Ancient hunter-gatherers were omnivores, in the sense that they ate foods from both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. They both hunted wild animals and gathered wild plants.
But they were not omnivores in the sense that they ate absolutely everything. Hunter-gatherers ate meats, fruits, and vegetables, but they had no grains, beans, or dairy products, which were introduced into our diet after the invention of agriculture. And, even more significantly, they ate none of our modern-day processed foods.
Do the foods that we commonly eat today meet these criteria of being natural and appropriate for the human species? Some of them do (such as meat and vegetables), but, sadly, most of them do not. Lets look at perhaps the most egregious example of a "processed" food (which is really not a food at all) and examine how it differs from a food that is natural.
Recall that a "natural" food, because it was once living tissue, is a complex mixture of all the various substances that are required for life: amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, etc. Then imagine, if you will, its total antithesis, a pure chemical compound providing none of these essential nutrients, only empty calories to fatten us like cattle. Unfortunately, this nutritional nightmare (called refined sugar) is all too real in our "civilized" culture and makes up a substantial portion of the average person's diet: over one hundred pounds per person per year.
Other processed foods are similar to sugar in that they are devoid of nutrition and extremely prevalent in the modern diet. Refined white flour, polished white rice, packaged breakfast cereals, refined vegetable oils, margarine, and other hydrogenated, man-altered fats are major examples. Refined white flour, though unable to sustain even rats in the laboratory, has become the dominant staple in the human diet. Why, you may wonder?
It makes absolutely no sense that we would feed ourselves food that is unfit even for animal consumption, but, shockingly, that's just how crazy that our world has become. If rats can't live on refined white flour, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in laboratory experiments, how can humans be expected to thrive on it as a staple? If it's so nutritionally bankrupt that it has to be fortified with synthetic vitamins to prevent gross vitamin deficiency diseases, how is it that it is fit to be eaten in the first place? Even though it makes no sense nutritionally for the human race to be eating it, it makes great sense economically for the food industry to be selling it. And that is the reason for this continuing insanity!
The shocking truth that most people fail to consider is that these unnatural disease-causing foods, introduced for purely profit-seeking motives by an industry that is acting against our best interest, have largely displaced natural health-promoting foods in our diet. No one seems to care or to even take notice that foods such as sugary breakfast cereals, french fries, and pizza, which are in reality nutritional perversions, have stealthily replaced the meats, fruits, and vegetables that we desperately need to maintain our health. And what is even more appalling than this senseless indifference to the fundamentals of nutrition is that the awful consequences of this nutritional madness go largely unrecognized.
We tend to look at degenerative disease as an unavoidable fact of life or as an inevitable consequence of just growing older. We see so much heart disease, cancer, and other debilitating diseases around us that this pathetic infirmity is all that we know. We tend to regard such disease states as normal and inextricably linked to the human condition. What we think we can do nothing about, we prefer not to think about, like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand.
But think about this, if you will, for a moment. Heart attacks, which presently kill millions, were a medical oddity before the turn of the twentieth century. Degenerative diseases such as diabetes and cancer, which are now escalating at an exponential rate, were much less prevalent then as well. In primitive and traditional cultures, tooth decay and other such "diseases of civilization" were rare or nonexistent until "civilized" foods were introduced in their diet, and then such conditions began to run rampant.
It seems that good health is our natural birthright if we'll only make an effort to obey nature's laws. And one of the most important of nature's laws is that we should eat nature's food. We needn't eliminate foods of animal origin, as the vegans would have us do. What we must do instead, in order to be healthy, is to eliminate processed foods of HUMAN origin, through a program of natural eating as recommended in this article.
Yes, we can do something about the modern-day plagues that confront us, so aptly described as "diseases of civilization." Degenerative disease is not inextricably linked to the human condition. It is instead inexorably connected to a degenerate diet, imposed on unthinking people by cultural conditioning and by the self-serving practices of a corrupt food industry. What we desperately need is treatment for this insanity, and a sensible program of natural eating is just what the doctor SHOULD HAVE ordered.
