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Introducing the Basic Elimination Concept
J
ust how common are allergies and intolerance? Did our ancestors have
them? These are questions I am often asked. The answer to the first
can be simply put: there are many individuals who have a few allergies
and a few individuals who have many allergies. It is the latter group who
tend to become ill, and most of my patients belong to it. But if you cared
to stop people in the street at random and questioned them closely enough,
most of them would be able to report at least one food that disagreed with
them in some way, whether so slightly as to cause no more than flatulence
or badly enough to cause vomiting. If the problem is a very minor one and
general health is good, few people give such reactions a second thought;
they are considered almost ‘normal.’ The answer to the second question will
take a little longer.
To understand this more fully it is necessary to inquire into what
we should eat. Dr. Richard Mackarness, in his 1976 book Not all in the Mind ,
called our attention to the archaeological view of diet. Since then a number
of authors have published on this theme, most notably S. Boyd Eaton MD,
Marjorie Shostak and Melvin Konnor MD PhD, [The Paleolithic Prescription,
Harper and Row, New York, 1988]. Konnor is an anthropologist MD and in
a very strong position to comment regarding what our ancestors ate.
A little study in this direction suggests that primitive man’s natural
foods were fruit, vegetables and – when he could get them – meat or fish.
This is called a “hunter-gatherer” subsistence. Incidentally, the joke is
somewhat on the men: the big hunters, feeding the tribe – a testosterone-
soaked archetype we are all familiar with. It turns out that over 60% of the
calories consumed by Stone Age man were gathered by the women, just
humble nuts, berries and seeds!
I myself did a little research while I lived in Sri Lanka. I was
fascinated by the Balangodans, an Asian Cro-Magnon man. Archeological
investigations, at several cave-dwelling sites, using accurate modern dating