About Naturalist Nutrition
Instead of referring to guidelines based on non-science and listening to associations and alphabet soup government agencies about what humans should eat and how we should live to be optimally healthy, I use nature as the guide.
“90% of our problems would be solved if we went back to the conditions under which we evolved.”
It even rhymes.
Argue the semantics of “actually, it would be more like 78.3%” all you want; most of the chronic diseases which we suffer from in the industrialized world are due to the food we eat and the lifestyle we choose. Certainly, the changes that have happened since 1870 or so have had dramatic consequences, and I’ll talk about that a lot in my blog. 150 years is the blink of an eye in terms of human history, and we’ve managed to mess up an awful lot of stuff in that amount of time.
Extending back further, though, gives us more perspective. The agrarian revolution which happened 8,000 to 15,000 years ago saw the cultivation of grains, which are the seeds of grasses. Anthropologists have discovered that the human brain has been shrinking ever since. Although our health has dropped precipitously in the last 100-150 years, it has been on the decline ever since we departed from a proper human diet.
There’s no shortage of people who put forward their own idea of the optimal diet for humans. Anthropological evidence and nitrogen isotope testing of skeletal remains of pre-agrarian humans reveal that nearly all that humans ate for the vast majority of our evolution was the meat and fat of animals. Whatever berries and roots we could find seasonally might serve as fallback foods if we couldn’t make a kill.
The majority of the plants humans now eat are our own inventions and didn’t exist even 500 years ago. Modern fruits, vegetables, and grains are quite dissimilar from their ancestral counterparts.
The processing our food has undergone since the industrial revolution is a major departure from nature which has destroyed our health. Carbohydrates, refined and otherwise, sugar, and worst of all, seed oils, now fill the American diet and all of the countries which have adopted our horrific way of eating.
Though “modern science” and health agencies have led us away from this conclusion, a proper human diet is almost entirely carnivorous. This is what our ancestors ate. This is what our physiology is designed for. This is what leads to the greatest health. Mankind evolved as scavenger-hunter-gatherers, subsisting mostly and often entirely on the flesh and fat of animals, including megafauna, ruminants, and sea creatures.
Our “modern understanding of nutrition” has led us away from an ancestrally appropriate diet, and we now view red meat and saturated fat as causes of chronic disease, things that should be minimized. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What is Naturalist Nutrition about? Returning to nature, to the greatest extent we can in the modern world.
You don’t have to live in a cave and sleep on the dirt with a rock for a pillow, you don’t have to hunt wild game and go back to hunter-gatherer ways. You can if you want to, but that’s not viable for the vast majority of us.
I believe there’s value in trying to replicate the way things were. I think that should be a template for our lives.
And I want to help you with that.