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general interest
article
Intelligent Nutrition
by Jeff D Leach
Paleobiotics Lab
Cultural impresario John Brockman and his
wily band of third culture intellectuals over at the online magazine
Edge.com, recently posted over 100
essays responding to this year’s Edge question, “What is your dangerous
idea?”
This newly emerging annual event – last
year’s question was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot
prove it?” – asked our leading
scientific and forward thinking minds to ponder what dangerous ideas might
just play out in the future – no matter how far fetched they may seem to
us mere mortals.
Some dangerous ideas from this
Who’s Who of modern thinkers included
“we have no souls,” “science
must destroy religion,” “being alone in the universe,” and my favorite
“you can't keep that newborn
unless you are 21, married and self-supporting.”
Assuming my electronic invitation from Mr.
Brockman to contribute to this heady group of essays was swallowed up in
some multi-dimensional black hole in cyberspace, I wanted to make sure my
dangerous idea made it into the fold. Given all the hoop-la in 2005 over
the word “intelligent,” I figured it was time we considered the dangerous
idea of Intelligent Nutrition.
At its core, Intelligent
Nutrition assumes that our ancestors diverged from our tree swinging
cousins between 5 to 7 millions ago and that the first member of our genus
Homo appeared about 2 million years ago – give or take. Intelligent
Nutrition further assumes that throughout our long, evolutionary march to
mammalian dominance, humans lived off wild plants and animals foraged from
the landscape. This means our genome and accompanying physiological and
metabolic parameters that make us human were conditioned on a diet of
wild, nutrient rich plants and lean meats.
Such things as agriculture
and domesticated animals (that means dairy) came very late in our
evolutionary history – roughly between 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Evolutionary biology 101 teaches us – and Intelligent Nutrition adheres to
– that the cultural adaptations of agriculture and animal domestication
occurred too recently in our evolutionary past for our genome to adapt.
While we currently drive around in hybrid cars and live in comfortable
surroundings, our nutritional needs are genetically rooted in our ancient
lifestyle.
If we fast forward to
2006, we see that the average American diet is in discordance with the
nutritional landscape in which our genome was originally selected. Based
on the evolutionary biological principles that underpin Intelligent
Nutrition, the current epidemic of obesity and accompanying maladies and
chronic diseases plaguing Americans were predictable.
Take the US Food Pyramid
for example. Based on this graphical piece of nutritional wisdom and the
recommendations used to build it, added sugars can comprise “up to” 25% of
daily calories. That means it’s appropriate to get a full one quarter of
your caloric intake from soft drinks and donuts. This modern wisdom
further suggests that “up to” 35% of daily calories may come from added
fats, “half” of your grains can be from highly-processed, insulin-spiking
and nutrient and fiber-poor sources, and that you should get 2 to 3 “cups”
a day of dairy products.
Based on these modern
recommendations, the average American promptly consumes nearly 40% of
daily calories from added sugars and fats. Adding “refined grains” to the
mix means that the average American consumes nearly 60 to 70% of daily
calories from foods not part of our evolutionary determined Intelligent
Nutrition plan. Considering dairy products just makes things worse.
Nutritional guidelines for
Americans built on the dangerous idea of the principles underlying
Intelligent Nutrition would require that everyone involved in the creation
of these guidelines and accompanying Food Pyramid, that means lobbyists,
Congressional aids, food industry, agribusiness, scientists, and various
other special interests, would be required to understand the basics of our
evolutionary past and its role in conditioning our very specific
nutritional needs coded in our genome. Intelligent Nutrition as a guide
would point to the rapid cultural (agriculture) and technological (steel
roller mills, packaged foods and snacks) advances as occurring to recent
in our past for our genome to adapt and consequences of such behavior
would be maladaptive.
Only time will tell if
this dangerous idea will retake its position in human health. In a little
over 2 million years and at 6 billion strong it seems to have worked so
far. Let’s not screw it up too much.
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