50 Diet Wise
If you pause to think for a moment you will realize that grains,
dairy food and other farm produce such as eggs have only been in our diet
since we settled the land and became civilized. Whereas there are many
who would argue that civilization has not yet arrived, scholars would date
this only from about ten thousand years ago – far more recently than you
would think. In biology, where evolutionary changes take place slowly over
millions of years, such a short time span is a drop in the ocean. In other
words, we simply haven’t had time to adapt to these new foodstuffs and as
a result don’t handle them well on ingestion. They are still alien foods so far
as the cells of our body are concerned: our palate may be in the twentieth
century, but our constitution is still that of a forest-dwelling higher ape.
(This may be shocking to dedicated gourmets!)
The adulteration of food
But we have been eating cereals and milk for centuries, you say. True. And
probably this has enabled most of us to tolerate such foods, all other things
being equal. But additional factors have now been brought into the equation.
Look at what has been happening to food in the last fifty years, especially the
last twenty-five: now we have chemical food additives. Most of these have
come into use only since the last World War, yet in just a few decades this
adulteration of our basic foods has reached absurd proportions. Take a walk
round any supermarket and look at the products on the shelves: it is almost
impossible to buy simple, plain food. There are added colorants, emulsifiers,
preservatives, flavor enhancers and scores of other alien ingredients that no
one has had time to adapt to.
But before we consider those in a little more detail, do remember
toxic substances, such as insecticides and fertilizers, that are sprayed onto
crops before harvesting and eating and chemicals administered to livestock
before slaughter for meat. There is a vast array of chemicals in the armament
of the modern farmer or market gardener, almost all of which are as inimical
to human life as they are to six-legged forms.
One of my patients was a farmer’s wife, and she told me that she and her
family wouldn’t dream of eating the food they send to market for others to
consume. “It’s poisoned!” she declared, and she should know, since she and
her husband were only too well aware of the abuses concerned. Instead,
they grew their own food in a special plot without using chemicals. Like
many farmers, they felt a keen economic pressure to use artificial methods
to increase their yield. The irony of this is that ‘organic’ farming methods