Dietary Traditions – What’s Right for Us?By Karen Robinson
How can we know what to believe about diet and nutrition these days? Let’s first take a look at some of
information that’s simply confirming age-old principles that we'd overlooked or hadn't seen in proper perspective before.
Weston A. Price was a dentist and nutritionist who travelled to many remote areas of world in 1930’s to observe what kept non-industrialized cultures so healthy. What I think makes his work stand out as an important guide for us is that his research looked at such a wide variety of cultures and dietary traditions, and found some connecting threads that bring to light some general principles for healthy eating. There is no one right way to eat; human race is highly adaptable with a great deal of biochemical and metabolic individuality. Each school of nutritional thought may simply be attuned to a different subgroup of people, and like blind men in old story, be holding onto a different part of elephant.
But from another point of view, sense that we're all unique can lead us to look at so many different parts while not seeing broader needs that apply to whole. While one part of elephant isn't whole, I'd also say that some generalizations can be very useful. For example, we can say that in our diets, refined carbohydrates are generally poor quality food for everyone, and more nutrient-dense foods are going to serve us better.
The known categories of modern medicine often don't serve us well as catch-alls for complex, chronic conditions, and yet there are many ways in which universal principles of human nutrition can apply to all of us equally because we all evolved with same basic biological functions. Often approach of searching for answers under a microscope, in this age of specialization, misses some of more general approaches that can be very effective.
For example, humans didn't evolve to eat a low-fat diet, and overwhelming evidence from nutritional anthropology shows us that no group of people who were eating their native diet ever ate a low-fat diet, while all vibrantly healthy groups ate high fat diets.
As our culture became industrialized and we moved further from our dietary traditions that grew out of humans' intimate relationship with earth, we developed styles of eating that don't support health anymore. To see this, we don't need to pour over microscopic biochemical concepts, as vibrantly healthy groups of people never had to do in order to be well and free from myriad of modern diseases we're plagued with these days.
I've spoken to some folks in Europe, particularly a woman from Austria who says that in south of Europe especially, people are still widely in touch with dietary traditions and eat as their ancestors did with not a thought in world about nutrition. As you go further north, diet and connection to ancient traditions deteriorates, as does health status of people. There’s no doubt that modern scientific knowledge can certainly help enhance our understanding, and has its uses. But let’s look at where our emphasis on modern science and standard nutritional guidelines has taken us, regarding nutrition--even for those who are eating -relatively- good diets by those standards, are we robustly healthy? What do we mean by adapting -well- ?
I personally expect more from diet; I expect it can be powerful medicine and can support us in handling all our other mental, metabolic and environmental stresses so that we can function at a very high level. I've seen this happen, where a therapeutic diet has taken someone out of grips of crippling disease and literally transformed them, not just managed their symptoms, but brought them to radiant health and high-functioning wellness.
Maybe most of us have adapted to less than optimal ways of living and eating, and maybe some of us get by, even make progress within certain parameters. I'm looking to go further. I generally don't see people adapting well, and I think we can do better.
When people think they are doing well enough, I would question whether "well enough" is enough to prevent serious degenerative disease down road. These days we have so many choices about what to eat and what to use for medicine. We're not intimately connected anymore to a lush natural environment teeming with foods that are perfectly matched to our biological needs, so we have to seek them out deliberately, and sometimes figure out intellectually which ones those are. But I think there are many more ways that we're all same in those needs, than ways in which we're different. You could take someone on a Standard American Diet, give them a very generic "species-appropriate" diet for starters, and it would be a quantum leap in their nutritional status. Then you could tweak macronutrient ratios later, to accommodate their particular constitution. That's how I'd come up with diet that their body at that particular time would run best on.
Then those ratios might be adjusted, and different types of foods emphasized or deemphasized depending on need for specific therapeutic protocols (which we all need just by dint of living in modern world).
But point I want to bring out is that foods that form basis of human diet are more similar for all of us than they are divergent. Clearly cultural traditions have varied tremendously in their repertoire of foods, and biodiversity of plant and animal life and their seasonal availability meant that people in different locales at different times were eating very differently. But among all that diversity, there are important connecting threads that I think are often being missed.
