Now that we have established that we have deviated from our original hunter-gatherer lifestyle, what are the implications of this. The most important part of your diet is what macronutrients are you consuming on a daily basis and where this food comes from. And for most people in the United States, Carbohydrates are king.
Just look at the grocery store shelves, the list of products that contain some form of carbs far outweighs those items that do not contain them. You are almost guaranteed that if it is in a box, a can, or is a prepared frozen food it has a laundry list of chemicals, preservatives, and added sugars. With all these products that are easy to fix and readily available it’s no wonder that our diet has drastically changed. And I say changed and not for the better. We continually consume cabs that make us burn glucose and store fat. Our bodies which are designed to switch between burning glucose and burning fat for energy never gets to the point where it needs to burn the fat that we have stored. This has led to a population that is getting more overweight with every year.
There are also other things that are affected when we constantly consume carbs. Let’s take a look at Vitamin D. Our bodies produce Vitamin D when our skin is exposed to sunlight. During the winter when our skin is less exposed to the sun, because we are usually inside more and wear more clothes to stary warm our vitamin D production goes down. In a natural seasonal diet, we would not be consuming a lot of carbs in the winter so our body would switch over to burning fat for energy. And with the burning of this fat the available vitamins that are stored in fat would be available for use. So, we would get our required Vitamin D from the fat we are burning. That makes us Vitamin D deficient in the wintertime because with the availability of food we are always burning carbs instead of fat. And Vitamin D is not naturally available. When we look up Vitamin D with Wikipedia it discusses the role of vitamin D and all the issues that are caused by a deficiency. It kind of looks at the idea that the Vitamin D stored in fat is available, but it does not tell the story of how to access this resource. Read about Vitamin D on Wikipedia Here. I believe that our bodies are designed to cycle between burning glucose and burning fat for energy during specific times of the year, coinciding with the availability of foods in the various seasons and the environmental aspects like more sunlight.
The idea of Vitamin D deficiency is just one instance where not cycling our diet with the seasons causes havoc with our health. There is a huge list of conditions that are affected by a deficiency in Vitamin D. And with a diet that is more in tune with nature we can relieve many of the issues with our health.
The medical establishment does not look to nature and our diet to solve the health issues that pop up. Doctors have not been taught to look for the cause of diseases that they encounter, they only look at the symptoms and try to manage these rather than looking for the cause. Instead, they look for pills to “Fix” the issue. but these pills only deal with the symptom. Either with pharmaceuticals or supplements, but I think that our bodies and evolution are far better equipped to handle these issues with the idea that evolution has created a body to deal with these issues naturally. We only have to follow nature and the rhythms that have been around for millions of years.
And there are lots of “Natural remedies” out there they say add things like turmeric because it is anti-inflammatory or eat more Omega-3 foods. But these too are reacting to a symptom. I am not saying that these natural remedies are not beneficial, I am saying that they don’t necessarily look at the cause of the issue in the first place.
Example: yes, turmeric is anti-inflammatory but if we look to the cause of the inflammation in the first place like how sugar and carbohydrates are inflammatory, and we adjust our diet there might not be as much of a need for the anti-inflammatory substances like turmeric. Or they say to eat more foods with high Omega-3s to make the balance of Omega-6 to Omega-3 more of a 1 to 1 ratio. As with most highly processed foods they are full of “vegetable oils” and I say this loosely as vegetable oils are actually seed oils, are high in Omega-6s which are inflammatory and low in Omega-3s that are anti-inflammatory, so they say to add Omega-3 rich foods to offset the high Omega-6s. When in fact if you stop consuming all the “vegetable oils” and foods that have a high 6 to 3 ratio and eat more foods that have a natural balance of these fatty acids you would not struggle to add more omega-3 rich foods into your diet or resort to supplements to create this balance. If you go looking at foods that are high in omega-3s you soon find out that there are not really that many of them and the amounts that they contain, make it difficult to balance out the massive amount of omega-6s that we consume.