In Defense of a Native Diet

I have been reading Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food where he has some thought-provoking observations about our current attitude about good food. It is not a primal book at all (Pollan is in favor of whole grains), but he does recommend eating real food, not processed junk.  I will probably write another post or two about some of his ideas that are worth considering. (Actually the whole book is pretty interesting.)

Here is a story I excerpted that shows the health benefits of a traditional native diet. I'm not saying I want to live in the bush and eat grubs, but it once again reinforces the harm in our common "western diet" (highly processed, packaged, preserved, sugary, bad oils, refined grains).  Also, this experiment would not have been possible if the people did not already know how to live in the wild.

 

from In Defense of Food: In the summer of 1982, a group of ten middle-aged, over-weight, and diabetic Aborigines living in settlements near the town of Derby, Western Australia, agreed to participate in an experiment to see if temporarily reversing the process of westernization they had undergone might also reverse their health problems.

Since leaving the bush some years before, all ten had developed type 2 diabetes; they also showed signs of insulin resistance (when the body’s cells lose their sensitivity to insulin) and elevated levels of triglycerides in the blood — a risk factor for heart disease. “Metabolic syndrome” is the medical term for the complex of health problems these Aborigines had developed: Large amounts of refined carbohydrates in the diet combined with a sedentary lifestyle had disordered the system by which the insulin hormone regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats in the body. ...Some researchers believe that metabolic syndrome may be at the root of many of the “diseases of civilization” that typically follow a native populations adoption of a Western lifestyle and the nutrition transition that typically entails.

The ten Aborigines returned to their traditional homeland, an isolated region of northwest Australia more than a day’s drive by off-road vehicle from the nearest town. From the moment they left civilization, the men and women in the group had no access to store food or beverages; the idea was for them to rely exclusively on foods they hunted and gathered themselves. (Even while living in town, they still occasionally hunted traditional foods and so had preserved the knowledge of how to do so.) Kerin O’Dea, the nutrition researcher who designed the experiment, accompanied the group to monitor and record its dietary intake and keep tabs on the members’ health.

The Aborigines divided their seven-week stay in the bush between a coastal and an inland location. While on the coast, their diet consisted mainly of seafood, supplemented by birds, kangaroo, and witchetty grubs, the fatty larvae of a local insect. Hoping to find more plant foods, the group moved inland after two weeks, settling at a riverside location. Here, in addition to freshwater fish and shellfish, the diet expanded to include turtle, crocodile, birds, kangaroo, yams, figs, and bush honey.

The contrast between this hunter-gatherer fare and their previous diet was stark: O’Dea reports that prior to the experiment “the main dietary components in the urban setting were flour, sugar, rice, carbonated drinks, alcoholic beverages (beer and port), powdered milk, cheap fatty meat, potatoes, onions, and variable contributions of other fresh fruits and vegetables” — the local version of the Western diet.

After seven weeks in the bush, O’Dea drew blood from the Aborigines and found striking improvements in virtually every measure of their health. All had lost weight (an average of 17.9 pounds) and seen their blood pressure drop. Their triglyceride levels had fallen into the normal range. The proportion of omega-3 fatty acids in their tissues had increased dramatically. “In summary,” O’Dea concluded, “all of the metabolic abnormalities of type II diabetes were either greatly improved (glucose tolerance, insulin response to glucose) or completely normalized (plasma lipids) in a group of diabetic Aborigines by a relatively short (seven week) reversion to traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle.”

O’Dea does not report what happened next, whether the Aborigines elected to remain in the bush or return to civilization, but it’s safe to assume that if they did return to their Western lifestyles, their health problems returned too. We have known for a century now that there is a complex of so-called Western diseases — including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and a specific set of diet-related cancers — that begin almost invariably to appear soon after a people abandons its traditional diet and way of life. What we did not know before O’Dea took her Aborigines back to the bush (and since she did, a series of comparable experiments have produced similar results in Native Americans and native Hawaiians) was that some of the most deleterious effects of the Western diet could be so quickly reversed. It appears that, at least to an extent, we can rewind the tape of the nutrition transition and undo some of its damage. The implications for our own health are potentially significant.

 ----------------

What can we learn from this? It seems obvious that this is a "primal" diet that is impossible for us in the US. However, the Primal Blueprint recommendation to eat pasture-raised meat, eggs, chickens, fresh organic produce, olive and coconut oils, nuts, and no sugars, grains, or anything processed and preserved offers a way to get as close as we can get to a native diet.