March 13--GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- Today's human diet reflects our modern world. Human development, however, does not.
Bill Schindler, an anthropology professor at Washington College in Chestertown, spoke at Gettysburg College recently on how a look at prehistoric eating habits can improve our modern-day diets. Following his talk, he and students prepared a meal using many of the techniques he advocates.
Schindler is not preaching the paleo diet, which is all the rage in some circles. Rather, Schindler uses his archaeological background to examine the human body's connection to food.
"Our food choices, our diets, are dictated to us by other people," he said, addressing a packed room of students and professors. Meat, for example, is a good indicator of that. Although humans traditionally ate all parts of a cow, or other animal, today's diets focus on flesh meat because it's the easiest to transport over long distances. Flesh meat, however, is the least nutritious part of an animal.
"Biologically, we haven't changed in 200,000 years," he said. Yet, we've become dependent on grains and carbohydrates, and humans are not getting the protein and fat our bodies need.
"We are the only species in the world who has to ask each other what to eat," he said. Animals instinctively know what they should eat.
In 1982, the Unites States Department of Agriculture released its first dietary guidelines, cautioning people to eat less fat, especially animal fat. "The same year, obesity rates started to rise," he said. The number of obese adults was just under 15 percent of the adult population in 1980. Today, that number is well above 30 percent.
Food preparation
For humans, food preparation involves procurement, preparation, storage and consumption. We need the right tools to eat with, refrigeration to store food, and a place to prepare food, Schindler said.
Food, in its purest form, is all around us. Yet, as humans, we can't do much without our tools. "Nobody could live in Pennsylvania all year-round just using their bodies," he said. "I give my students this mental exercise. 'What do you do if you're starving and I drop a 150-pound deer in front of you? You're not getting into that deer.' Our primate ancestors used stones."
Without tools, humans are unable to render a deer edible. It's the tools that have made humans what we are today.
Humans learned to run prey to exhaustion, although the elderly and the young usually could not keep up, and were not able to indulge in the feasting on the carcass that was typical of prehistoric man.
Plants, even toxic plants, could be prepared in such a way that they provided early humans with nutrients they needed. An example of this is cassava, still a staple in South America and Africa, which produces cyanide, but if prepared properly, is very nutritious. It is the basis for tapioca pudding.
Fire, pots, the ax and stone tools gave early humans the tools they needed to prepare foods. "Now we can access more food, and make toxic food safe," Schindler said.
Biology
"What happens when food goes into our body?" Schindler asked. Chewed food travels down the esophagus into the stomach, then the small intestine. That's the organ that regulates which nutrients are absorbed. Liver has the role of detoxifying food, while the gallbladder breaks down fats.
Plants often contain varying degrees of toxicity, and an active liver helps to filter those toxicities. While too much of a toxic food is fatal, the liver in our modern-day diets may not have enough to do, Schindler said. The gallbladder, on the other hand, may not be breaking down the right kinds of fats, which could be why gallbladder problems are so common among modern humans.
With fire, we began cooking meats and vegetables, drying and fermenting them. "Potatoes were highly toxic, but cooking it dispels the toxins," he said. Tannic acid, which is found in tea, is safe when combined with water.
Ancient humans often engaged in geophagy, the intentional consumption of earth. "This is not the psychological condition," he said. "This was done to increase mineral intake."
The modern-day efforts to pasteurize food and remove all bacteria also remove vital functions our bodies perform, he said.
Technology
Technology helps us to process foods outside our body, he said.
Five to 7 million years ago, Australopithecus people were digging for roots. Successors to these early humans began storing food underground and fermenting food. When humans figured out how to track animals and catch them for food, the largest jump in brain size occurred. At the same time, our canine teeth shrank, because they weren't needed.
"Humans have been eating animals for 3.4 million years," Schindler said. For most of that history, humans ate every part of an animal's interior. Organs, blood, fat and marrow all have more nutrition than animal flesh. Yet today, little more than half of cows raised for food gets eaten. One reason humans began consuming more flesh is because it's cheap and easy to transport flesh meat over long distances. Other parts of a cow do not transport as well.
Until the middle of the 20th century, humans used every part of an animal that was butchered. That's not the case anymore. "If you have a problem with eating animals, OK. You should really have a problem with people eating half an animal and throwing the rest away," Schindler said. "I don't want to hear that we need CAFO (contained animal feeding operations) to feed the world when we're throwing away half the animal, and the most nutritious part," he said. A single pound of ground beef can come from 400 separate cows raised all over the country. The commercial process of grinding meat opens it to air, thus exposing it to many more pathogens than other forms of intact meat.
Schindler doesn't advocate returning to a hunter-gatherer form of existing. Most of us don't have the knowledge. He does recommend learning to hunt or fish, not for sport, but to appreciate how hard it is to forage for a meal and succeed. Learning how to identify edible wildflowers and prepare them is another challenge more people should take on.
Schindler, his wife and three children eat meat that is locally raised and butchered, as well as locally raised vegetables and eggs. They consume locally-produced honey and cheese. They buy chickens and cook the entire chicken, from meat to marrow. "You have not lived until you have cooked eggs in chicken fat," he said. He often uses liver and other organ meats in casseroles. Eating the fat is not unhealthy. Rather, it helps the body process the other parts of the meat.
He and his wife drink home brewed beer and mead, and homemade wine. They do not eat a lot of bread, but they do make sourdough bread, which provides the body with nutritious fermentation. "If it was just my wife and I, we'd probably be grain-free," he said. "People did eat seeds and grains, but not a lot."
Our grain- and sugar-rich diet may have led to allergies that were almost unheard of as little as two generations ago, including gluten intolerance, dairy, nuts and egg allergies.
"I'm not a big advocate of the paleo diet," he said. "We can go too far." Prehistoric people who gorged on meat often wouldn't see another meal like that for weeks.
Sugar is something that should be consumed sparingly. Sugar simply wasn't around for most of human history, and the human body has not evolved to deal with the amount of sugar modern humans consume.
Schindler said his theories are borne out by his own experiences. No one in his family is overweight, and in the past three years have almost never been sick.
___
(c)2013 The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.)
Visit The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.) at www.fredericknewspost.com
Distributed by MCT Information Services