64 Achieving pH Balance to Treat Specific Ailments
that humans began cooking with fi re, thus destroying the enzymes in
foods that prevent obesity. Enzymes keep weight down, because, like
workers at a construction site who use just enough bricks and mortar to
put a building together, they convert the food we eat into the exact
quantity of raw materials needed for maintaining and rebuilding the
body. The rest is eliminated.
However, in the case of enzyme-free cooked food, there is nothing
to prevent too many nutrients from being absorbed into the body’s cells.
What the body doesn’t need is stored in fat cells located in loose con-
nective (adipose) tissue. Cooked food also causes weight gain because,HOW THE ASHANTI KEEP SLIM
Was it possible, I asked my colleagues, for a group of people on
earth to remain insulated from the kind of chemicalized, processed
food that had spawned the obesity epidemic in the United States?
One professor, who came from Ghana, West Africa, said that the
Ashanti of Ghana were one such people. He said they were the
envy of neighboring tribes because of their slim, willowy fi gures.
He had been told by non-Ashanti Ghanans that there were no fat
Ashanti because they ate such huge quantities of plantains.
In fact, the plantain is just one of many foods that explain why
the Ashanti are not obese. The slimming effect of the Ashanti diet
is assured by the fact that, like their ancestors, many of them still
obtain their food by trapping and foraging.
The Neolithic era, characterized by a planned economy and
cultivation of the soil, had passed the Ashanti by, because the
territory of the Ashanti is forested. In the forest there is no grassy
savanna for cattle to graze on and no sunlit fi elds for planting
grains, so farming and herding are impossible. Instead, the Ashanti
trap small animals and deer, fi sh in streams, dig up such root
vegetables as wild yam and cassava, and pick plantains off trees.
Nothing that grows in the tangled vines, swamps, and dense
foliage of the forest fl oor has been enriched and fattened by
humans. The nutritional content of these wild foodstuffs is enough
for the Ashanti’s energy and the repair and regeneration of their
body tissues, but it is not enough to make them fat.