Quick Start Guide

What is the optimal diet for humans?

No other subject subject in the field of human health is filled with as much confusion and controversy. Should we be vegans, omnivores, or carnivores? To cut through all the noise around this subject we can use First Principles to guide us. The correct question to ask is what did we humans eat during the thousands of years of our evolution? Fortunately, we can get the answer from the fields of archeology and anthropology. We can also look to explorers like Weston Price, Vihljamur Steffanson, George Catlin, Lewis and Clark and many others who lived with indigenous people and documented how they ate, as well how healthy they were. By indigenous, I mean people who were eating a native diet and had not yet been introduced to “ modern” foods like sugar and white flour. We often think of these cultures as primitive, but outsiders who spent time with them found that these people were intelligent, healthy, happy, and had learned to adapt to a wide range of different environments.

We can also look at what happened to humans as they made the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers around 10,000 years ago. The archeological evidence shows that early farmers were shorter, had lower bone density, and were more prone to disease than hunter gatherers. Farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in tooth enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. Author Jared Diamond wrote an excellent article about our transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture titled “Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”

We can summarize how our ancestors ate based on archeological evidence ( looking at bones, seeds etc. in the their campsites), and from the observations of explorers like Price, Steffanson and others. All the evidence points to a few key things that were common across all hunter-gatherer cultures:

• Animal protein from mammals and/or seafood formed the dietary foundation for all these cultures.

• Organ meats were prized over muscle meat.

• All cultures had access to sources of saturated fats from meat, seafood, and milk.

• After animals, fruits, berries and honey were important foods when in season.

• Cultures that had access to honey prized it and went out of their way to harvest it.

• Plants were used as supplemental or “fallback foods “ when other foods were unavailable, or as medicine.

It’s important and instructive to understand what happened to indigenous populations when they abandoned their traditional diets and began eating “civilized” foods.

Weston Price was a dentist who traveled around the world in the 1930’s visiting indigenous populations from the arctic, Europe, South Pacific, to South America. In his book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” he writes:

“ Instead of the customary procedure of analyzing the expressions of degeneration, a search has been made for groups to be used as controls who were largely free from these affections. To accomplish this it became necessary to locate immune groups which were found readily as isolated remnants of primitive racial stocks in different parts of the world. A critical examination of these groups showed a high immunity to many of our serious affections so long as they were sufficiently isolated from our modern civilization and living in accordance with the nutritional programs which were directed by the accumulated wisdom of the group. In every instance where individuals of the same racial stocks who had lost this isolation and who had adopted the foods and food habits of our modern civilization were examined, there was an early loss of the high immunity characteristics of the isolated group.”

After traveling the world studying indigenous populations, Dr. Price concludes:

“ It is significant that I have as yet found no group that was building and maintaining good bodies exclusively on plant foods. A number of groups are endeavoring to do so with marked evidence of failure.”

Vilhjalmur Steffanson was an Arctic explorer who lived among the Eskimos from 1908-1910. He relates that he “had noticed a distinct and universal difference in health between those who wear white men’s clothing and who live in white men’s houses as opposed to those who keep the ancient customs in the matter of dress and dwellings. These same elements I have since found equally harmful among the Eskimo. although among them must be added the surely no less dangerous element , the white man’s diet, which is no more suited to the people than white men’s clothing or houses.”

In his book “My Life With The Eskimo” Steffanson relates:

“ They were not only interesting from a scientific point of view, as all primitive people must be to the student of mankind, but they were cheerful, self-reliant, and admirable companions …..people very much like you and me but with the social virtues rather more highly than than they have been among our own race. In a difficult struggle for existence under hard natural conditions they have acquired the ability to live together in peace and good will.”

He also notes that “ for any one who is compelled in winter to live for a period of several weeks on lean meat will actually starve…there are lacking from his diet certain necessary elements, notably fat…and eventually lose strength or become actually ill. The Eskimo who have provided themselves in summer with bags of seal oil can carry them into rabbit country and can live on rabbits satisfactorily for months.”

Stefansson documented the fact that the Inuit diet consisted about 90% meat and fish. Inuit would often go six to nine months a year eating nothing but fatty meat and fresh fish, which might currently be perceived as a 'zero carb' diet. Stefansson found that he and his fellow explorers of European, Black, and South Sea Island descent were also “perfectly healthy” on such a diet. To combat erroneous conventional beliefs about diet, Stefansson and his fellow explorer Karsten Anderson agreed to undertake an official study to demonstrate that they could eat a 100% meat diet in a closely observed laboratory setting for the first several weeks. For the rest of an entire year, paid observers followed them to ensure dietary compliance. There were no deficiency problems while eating only the kind of fatty meat they requested. The two men remained healthy; their bowels remained normal, except that their stools were smaller and did not smell.

George Catlin was an American lawyer and painter who traveled extensively painting and documenting many of the remaining tribes of American Indians from 1831-1837. From his book “North American Indians”:

I have roamed around from time to time during seven or eight years, visiting and associating with, some three or four hundred thousand of these people, under an almost infinite variety of circumstances; and from the very many and decided voluntary acts of their hospitality and kindness, I feel bound to pronounce them, by nature, a kind and hospitable people.”

Catlin records several instances where tribes coming into contact with traders and missionaries quickly succumb to disease and whiskey, and as they stop living by their ancestral ways, “ gradually sink to the most deplorable condition….where the genius of natural liberty and independence have been blasted and destroyed by the contaminating vices and dissipations introduced by the immoral part of civilized society.” …The system of trade and the small-pox have been the great and wholesale destroyers of these poor people.”

He records that disease was not observed in the tribes living by traditional ways. Infant mortality was rare, and many lived well into old age. “If there were anything like an equal proportion of deaths amongst the Indian children, that is found in the civilized portions of the world, the Indian country would long since have become depopulated..”

” People are fed by the food industry which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry which pays no attention to health.”

Wendall Barry