Why we should stick to eating what our ancestors ate
Don't depend too much on science
A recent book written by a biological anthropologist Stephen Le makes a lot of sense. The main idea running in this compelling book is that our optimal diet is what "our" ancestors ate, not what the ancestors of another ethnic region did. And that we must eat unfettered by cultural boundaries and geographical displacements, sticking thus, as far as possible to what our parents eat, or better still to what our great-great-great grandparents did. That he feels, is what our body needs even today - to keep disease away!
It was personal tragedy - death of his mother due to cancer - that prompted Stephen to start researching ancestral diets and food-related illness in an effort to figure out why his mother died in her 60s, a good three decades earlier than her own mother who died in her 90s. And everything he uncovered during his research and fact finding travels around the world, from rural China to southern India to remote places like Papua New Guinea, he has documented in his book: 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today.
Even though Stephen is not a trained nutritionist, I think what he is saying makes a lot of sense. It's wrong to assume what works for someone else is good for you too, as even though it is fairly new science, it is increasingly getting clear that there are explicit interactions between our genes and the food we eat.
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| Tasty as it may be, you don't know how this Mediterranean diet will act with your system. (www.webmd.com) |
Simply put: what works for one ethnicity might not work for another. For example the much feted Mediterranean diet, for instance that rides on consumption of lots of olive oil that confers longevity and low cardiac disease on that population, might not work that effectively for populations that are not equipped genetically to handle to high-fat diets (as this depends on the kind of lipoprotein gene we carry in our body). Similarly, the ghee consumption our Indian bodies can handle might not be that good for say a Japanese body type.
So even though eating ancestral might not seem that exciting (when compared to digging into Italian takeouts), the fact is this "actually" might be the missing puzzle that could be driving up our disease/disorder graphs.
Not all nutrition transitions (that is move from a particular kind of diet to another) I believe are good, so it is best to stick to what our body knows already. A good example here is Okinawa, a region in Japan, which was till recently (1995) lauded for having the highest life expectancy in the world, thanks in part to its traditional diet of vegetables, tofu and miso soup. But now owing to increasing consumption of deep-fried food (introduced by US troops stationed there after the Second World War) the rates of diseases like type 2 diabetes have spiked there, and life expectancy has come down. There!
Well, here are a few rules that tilt towards traditional eating, that I believe never go wrong:
1. Don't depend too much on science - It keeps changing; today's hot news gets brandished as wrong by another set of researchers soon enough. As long as you are eating an adequately balanced diet, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that - there's no fear of non-nutrition, or going wrong. 'Coz a little of nothing can cause harm, good or bad. And a lot of anything ain't good, good or bad.
2. Eat as close to natural as possible. Why juice a fruit, when it is meant to be had whole - along with the fibre, which helps the body use its goodness at the right pace, unlike in the case of juice, which only delivers a jug load of concentrated fructose, that our body scampers to use up, and ends up messing its insulin resistance along the process.
3. Finally, while it is good to experiment and get a hang of other tastes, every now and then, especially when travelling (how can one not eat what a place is famous for), but for our daily diet it is best to stick to familiar - and follow the traditional route. 'Coz berate it if you must, but our ancestors sure did far better than us (health wise) thanks to the lack of choice they had. Maybe it is time to limit our choices too.