It seems that every day there’s a new article or new report published about a diet being good for us or a diet we thought was good suddenly turns out to be bad. A study suggesting that a vitamin has newfound health benefit is published the same week another tells us it harms the health of certain people. Is the entire world confused or do we just not understand the context into which all the information, even that which appears contradictory, fits?
It seems logical that nutrition should be incredibly simple and yet this deluge of information leads us to conclude that it isn’t possible for anyone to understand what is good for us and what is bad for us. By being able to put information from this field into context it is possible to navigate the sea of data and understand why information on nutrition appears to have become so complicated.
In the beginning nutrition was incredibly simple. We didn’t need to know anything. Pieces of plants were picked and eaten immediately. Some of those plants would make us a very ill. Sometimes only certain parts of the plant made us sick and other parts were tasty and nourishing. We simply avoided what we learned to be bad and, in an adaptation unique to humanity, we taught others to avoid bad foods through commandments and lore. Everything else was good by default.
Eventually humankind moved from being simple hunter-gatherers to basic farmers. Some estimates are that this move alone increased food production efficiency by over 50 times. This sparked the rise of civilization because some people were able to stay in one location and develop skills and crafts which benefited the rest of the tribe while others produced enough food to feed everyone else. Because the nutritional value of food is at its maximum when it is ingested directly from the moment of harvesting, the nutritional value of the food lowered slightly as the delay between harvesting and eating increased. Even so the food was still very nutritious and contained very few preservatives apart from brine used to preserve some foods for long-term storage.
Around this time different societies began to develop the understanding that certain foods were beneficial depending on a person’s state of health. Sometimes these foods contained phytochemicals that controlled symptoms and other times they simply contained high concentrations of nutrients that were specifically beneficial for a person’s particular needs at the time of illness.
For example, women would eat iron rich foods during menstruation to counteract iron deficiency during the period of blood loss. At the time they didn’t realize their lack of energy and other symptoms were due to iron deficiency. They simply knew that if they ate certain foods they’d feel better. What some regard today as so-called old wives tales actually represent the first understanding of the relationship between diet and an improved quality of life.
The further humankind moved away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the more important this information became.
Fast-forward to the mid-20th century. At this point society had made a major shift from an agrarian lifestyle to an industrial age lifestyle. The percentage of the population directly involved in the production of food was approaching the 2% it is today.
In the United States children were no longer getting up early and working on farms until sundown. Instead they were getting up, having the same large breakfast their parents and their parent’s parents had every morning before going out to work on the farm, and yet they would go to a public school where they would sit at their desks for several hours a day. After school, they would go to the local diner and have a burger and French fries and a malt, only to come home and eat a large dinner with the family.
The cardiovascular disease rate went through the roof. The medical community responded by blaming the massive fat intake associated with all of the foods. These commonly eaten foods once provided large amounts of calories to people working hard labor on the farm. They did not serve a person working a desk job, an assembly line or while attending school. Unfortunately the available research at the time did not differentiate the negative effects that certain fats had on the body over others. The resulting fat-free diet hysteria did not result in a lowering of the obesity rate or cardiovascular disease rate, but people followed these guidelines just the same. As food products such as margarine, vegetable shortening and processed oils were introduced to the market, the available medical data simply could not recognize the detrimental affect these fats would have on long-term health compared to the fats they were replacing.
Another area of confusion involved naturally occurring versus artificially made compounds. In the field of nutrient study, scientists believed that they could duplicate anything in nature more efficiently and more effectively than nature could do so itself. While some researchers continued to study naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other forms of nutrients in their natural state, other researchers studied the artificial forms of these compounds. Only those able to read the specific data behind the studies were realizing the growing picture that is validated more and more each day. Artificially created nutrients simply were not as effective in the body as naturally occurring ones. In fact in some cases they were actually harmful.
To the untrained eye, naturally occurring and artificially made compounds appear to be the same. To many journalists these differences are not apparent in the published studies unless it is explicitly stated. This leads to a great deal of confusion when the journalists are often regurgitating study information through the media without a complete understanding of the underlying issues or context. Their inability to properly filter this information only makes it appear more self-contradictory and confusing.
While to some it may appear obvious that naturally occurring compounds are more bioavailable and efficacious than artificial ones, such assertions could not be logically proven until the data was available for review. This does make it seem as though the past several generations of humankind have been guinea pigs to trial and error and all of the errors involve humankind attempting to synthesize nature, or to drastically narrow the food supply and selection for the sake of economic efficiency.
When we look back on some of these mistakes, it is apparent that they were largely made due to incomplete data and a certain amount of hubris was mixed in as well. Moving forward, we must realize that the further humankind moves from the hunter-gatherer that we were designed to be, the more important the study of nutrition will become. For the past hundred years, the basis of that study has been a simple categorization of what is good for us and what is not good for us down to the molecular level. In the future, nutritional science will also need to embrace the synergistic effects, both good and bad, of what we put in our body.
At the heart of the confusion is a desire for simple answers. We would all be comfortable with a simple recommendation to eat a certain way, and be done with it. Given the right context, this sort of information is possible, but we need to balance how we were designed to receive nutrition originally with the reality of modern life and modern agriculture. What can you do? Understand that we need to be aware of nutrition because we no longer live the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer.
As a National Speaker and Holistic Health Consultant, Dave Saunders has dedicated his life to helping others understand how the body is capable of restoring, protecting and defending itself against the effects of injury and disease to achieve better health and a better quality of life. You can learn more today by visiting glycowellness.com glycowellness.com
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antioxidant,
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Heart,
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obesity,
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