on the islands we now refer to as Japan, were experimenting with cooking food and learning which combinations worked best. They used fire and clay pots.
In recent years the microwave has been a boon to our fast lifestyles...or has it? Has it been in use long enough for us to know? More on that later.
It seems that our nutritional problems started with the Agricultural Age.
NUTRITION AND DISEASE
The WHO (World Health Organisation) has not been able to find a degenerative disease that is not linked to nutrition.
The ‘Agricultural Age’ commenced in the Fertile Crescent of present-day Iraq about 12,000 years ago. In South America it started 5000 years ago and in Northern Europe some 2000 years after that. We have not had time to adapt to these rapid changes.
In 1788 the agricultural age started in Australia. We can see the deleterious effects of this to the health of the aboriginal peoples. This has compounded in the last hundred years with the advent of food processing.
Dr.Philip Goscienski, author of “Health Secrets of the Stone Age”, writes: Since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution …… not even an eye-blink within the cosmos …. our body chemistry has not had time to adapt to foods such as processed cereal grains and dairy products. It’s even less likely for us to have adapted to the foods that have become available in the past few generations.
When cereal grains replaced fruits, vegetables and animal protein, the average persons stature diminished by several centimetres and his lifespan by several years. Infant mortality climbed. Bone and tooth disorders increased as did infectious diseases and iron deficiency anaemia. In addition we lost 10% of our brains.
Oral health influences our overall health. DNA samples show that 5000 years before the Agricultural Revolution reached Northern Europe the bacterial ecosystem found in the mouths of our meat-eating ancestors benefited from diversity. Since the start of the Agricultural Revolution there has been a decrease of between 30-40% in this rate of diversity with a much greater representation of disease-causing bacteria. Apart from the mouth oral bacteria is also associated with diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
Heart disease was first diagnosed in 1908. Now one in three Australians suffer from heart disease, diabetes, and, or cancer. This is apart from problems like alzheimer's, dementia, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome amongst other degenerative ills.
What’s happened?
Let me remind you of the summary from “The Stuff Mans’ Made Of”: ‘the incidence of degenerative diseases can be linked to modern agricultural practices and food manufacturing’.
As a result of these practices it has been estimated that some foods currently contain as little as 20% of the nutrition available to our ancestors three or four generations ago.
For many decades numerous diets have been introduced to attempt a remedy for this increase in degenerative diseases. One of these was the low fat diet.
This diet was originated by a Dr Ancel Keys. As a result of his population studies he claimed there was a link between heart disease and saturated fat consumption. We have also been advised that reducing saturated fat consumption is necessary to reduce weight.
However, when I looked at the Australian statistics I found that since the start of the low fat diet the incidence of cardiovascular diseases had nearly trebled, deaths from cancer had increased by a third and we are experiencing an obesity epidemic.
It did not seem credible that there could be a link between saturated fats and heart disease.
Even though Ancel Key’s research has been shown to be badly flawed the low fat diet continues to be promoted.
During an ABC interview in August 2011 a professor with expertise in nutrition quoted a recent fifteen year study which showed there was no link between saturated fats and heart disease. Yet in the same breath he advised against using coconut oil - presumably because of its ‘saturated fat content’. More on that later.
I then looked at food consumption in Australia to find out what may have changed: In the last half of the last century, sugar in manufactured foods doubled; the consumption of vegetable oils increased by 84% and butter consumption slumped to a fifth of what it had been 70 years before; the consumption of fizzy drinks almost trebled and breakfast foods increased by 60% with a surge in the last 20 years.
Breakfast foods have a high level of sugar and the level in fizzy drinks is, what one might call, toxic.
During this period the consumption of beef, a major source of saturated fats, dropped 40%.
This indicated to me that our health problems were more likely to be linked to sugar and vegetable oils than saturated fats.
Let’s examine how this has influenced food manufacturers.
FOOD MANUFACTURING
Vegetable Oils
Margarine, made from vegetable oils, was invented at the end of the 19th century and marketed in the early part of last century as a poor man’s butter.
Food manufacturers and the vegetable oil industry took advantage of the low fat diet to promote the use of vegetable oils as a replacement for butter, lard, some tropical oils and other saturated fats. These vegetable fats and oils were used to produce salad dressings, biscuits, pastries, snack foods and fried foods.
The hydrogenation process made it possible to create cheap fats and oils that were resistant to heat and rancidity. These were low cost good tasting substitutes for the traditional fats. But the nutritional qualities of these new fats and oils are different from the ones they replaced:
• Omega-3 has been reduced
• Omega-6 has risen to record levels
• A group, known as trans fatty acids (TFA’s), or synthetic fats, have been introduced to the human diet for the first time in large quantities. They damage cell membranes and are linked to heart disease and cancer.
Both the lopsided ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 and the man-made synthetic fats have had a profoundly negative effect on human health.
Insufficient or disproportionate amounts of Essential Fatty Acid (EFA’s— Omega-3 & Omega-6) in our diet can have a devastating effect on the nervous system. This influences the development of the brain in foetuses, infants, and children. It can cause mood problems such as violence, aggression, social isolation and self-mutilation. (Appendix B for more information)
A Healthy ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 is between 1:1 and 1:3. Many vegetable oils have an excess of omega-6 Essential Fatty Acids: soy is 1:7, corn 1:57 and sunflower 1:71. Olive oil, on the other hand is 1:3.
The hunter gatherer consumed a ratio of 1:1.
It is estimated that we now, on average, consume 1 part omega-3 to over 20 parts omega-6.
The reduction in the size of our brains since the start of the Agricultural Age is likely linked to insufficient consumption of omega-3. It has been identified as the most serious nutritional deficiency in the Western Diet.
Let’s take a look at another culprit.
Sugar
The fructose component of sugar, which makes up about half any sugar declared on labels, has been linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
You might ask “what about the fructose in fruit?” The fibre in the fruit helps to counteract the problem but our early ancestors would not have eaten a lot of fruit and certainly would not have drunk fruit juice whence the fibre has been removed.
Our genes remember a ‘sugar hit’.
Australian research has found that genes remember a sugar hit for two weeks. Prolonged poor eating habits are capable of permanently altering DNA. A study on