48 Diet Wise
techniques, have shown continuous habitation there by the earliest modern
Homo sapiens taking place for over 37,000 years. Cro-Magnon Man (Homo
sapiens sapientis, the wisest of the wise) may have come out of Sri Lanka and
not “out of Africa” at all! Known locally as the “Balangoda Man,” after
the district of the same name, these were very sophisticated people. Their
fine microlithic tools pre-dated comparable artifacts of central Europe by
almost 20,000 years. From skeletal evidence they were a very healthy lot,
averaged almost 6 feet in height (174 cm.) and often lived to a great age.
Balangodans ate a diet of plants, animals and seafood (oysters, molluscs and
other gastropoda), typical of today’s fashionable “detox” plans.
Farmer foods are unnatural
In Stone Age times there were no cereal products such as bread (from
wheat); dairy produce was unknown beyond infancy; and stimulant drinks
(such as tea and coffee), sugar and other modern foods of course did not
form part of this very healthy diet. We are not programmed by genes to deal
with these items.
Yet today we consume predominantly cereal foods (bread, cakes,
cookies, pastry, and so on), dairy produce (milk, butter, cream, cheese and
yoghurt), sugar, eggs and stimulant drinks, which do not belong in Man’s diet
and are therefore unnatural, whatever you may have heard to the contrary.
I call these “farmer foods” and they have been in our diet only since the
development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago; this is a blink of the
eye in evolutionary terms. It would therefore not be surprising if eating as
we do tended to cause ill health. Adverse reactions to foods would occur in
direct proportion to the level of farmer foods in our diet, and that seems
to be precisely what has happened: the less ‘biological’ food we eat, such as
meat, fruit and vegetables, the more illness we are prone to.
The grass family
Grains are probably the worst offenders (biological classification Graminacaea):
foods such as wheat, corn, rye, oats and barley (note buckwheat is not in
this family of foods, see appendix A). Even the poet Chaucer referred to
“blakke bread” as a cause of depression; that was probably made from rye
in his day. Wheat is probably the number one allergy or intolerance food
across the boards. Yet the propaganda runs high that wheat is a fine natural
food. It isn’t, as you can now understand.
Gluten enteropathy (celiac disease) is only a small part of this,
despite the fact that around 1.5 million Americans now suffer from celiac