Surviving Modern Diets
How to navigate the perils of our quickly evolving food environment
In this edition of Momentum you’ll learn how to build a health promoting diet despite our unhealthy modern food environment.
My wife and I have been watching a new nature documentary on Netflix, Our Planet Part II.
Watching this show we realized that every single wild animal on this planet spends most of it’s waking day searching for food.
Walking, stalking, hunting, swimming, and digging.
The entire documentary is animals looking for food.
And then occasionally some animal murder. Which is just a different animal looking for food.
During the small breaks that they aren’t looking for food they’re looking for some sweet animal lovin’ with a worthy mate.
For most of human history we behaved the same way.
Until relatively recently.
We too used to spend the majority of our days walking, hunting, and foraging for food.
When we eventually found food it wasn’t an all you can eat buffet.
It was a blueberry bush.
Nowadays food is everywhere.
Delicious, hyper-palatable, calorie dense, nutrient devoid, delicious, crunchy, sweet, and salty food.
The problem lies in that our genetics haven’t changed but our environment has trained tremendously.
We fixed the food scarcity issue in developed countries with advancements in food technology we created a myriad of health problems associated with this new food abundance.
Our new food environment includes foods that are increasingly readily available, are engineered to last longer, taste way better, have more calories, and fewer nutrients.
Without turning this into a public health lecture that I am not qualified to give I can acknowledge that yes improvements in all of these things have improved food insecurity and safety and there are lots of good that has come from it.
But think about this.
We have created an entire industry to deal with the problems with our new food environment… that we also created.
The Global Weight Loss and Weight Management market is valued at 190.5 billion dollars.
This number is growing with our waistlines.
This new food environment is a big problem.
What do we do?
I find value here in looking to our ancestors for answers.
A Hunter-Gatherer Diet
The diet of our ancestors varied greatly based on what was available. What grew naturally, what could be farmed locally, what animals were available and nearby to hunt.
So, the actual components of the diet of primal humans was very different based on geography. They all shared things in common, however.
They ate single ingredient, whole foods that were not in abundance.
The modern hunter gatherer tribes we study have different diets but they basically follow that same guideline.
The Hadza are hunter-gatherers living in Tanzania. They have 5 categories of food; tubers, berries, meat, baobab, and honey. That’s basically it. This diet is super high carb, moderate in protein, and very low in fat.
The Tsimane are hunter-gatherers living in the Bolivian Amazon. They became well known after the Tsimane heart study came out.
This study concluded the Tsimane have the healthiest hearts and coronary artery system ever studied. It led many to study their diet and see how it can save the rest of us from cardiovascular disease which, statistically, is the most likely thing to kill us.
After studying the tribe the following patterns emerged: about 66% of their calories come from plantains and rice, 16% comes from over 40 different species of fish, 6% from wild game, and 8% from local markets. Their diets, like the Hadza, are high in carbs, moderate in protein, and low in fat.
Unfortunately, their dietary intake of added sugars and fats is increasing over time as more modern foods become more available. Read more here.
Getting More Tribal With Your Diet
I know what you’re thinking.
“This all sounds great, but we don’t live in the Bolivian Amazon in a small tribe.”
That’s correct, however, we should try to make our food environment more like theirs.
Here are three things to focus on to do so.
Focus on Single Ingredient Foods
As much as you can eat just single ingredient, whole foods.
Eat a chicken breast instead of a premade chicken burger.
Eat spinach instead of premade creamed spinach.
Reduce Your Intake of Ultra-Processed Foods
By eating single ingredient foods you are reducing the added sugar and fat that most processed foods contain greatly reducing your caloric intake.
Enrich the Taste of Your Food with Simple Ingredients
Most of the time to make things taste good we add sugar, salt, and fat.
Make the Word “Diet” A Noun
Humans are the only animal on the planet that the word “diet” becomes a verb for.
That is, unless we over-feed our domesticated pets who then need to diet, verb.
For every other animal, their diet is just what they eat.
Not an action word that means we’re trying to lose weight.
I do think, and this holds true for many people I work with, that when you focus on these basic principles you can switch back to the noun form of diet.
You just eat mostly single ingredient foods that are prepared at home and occasionally enjoy tastier treats in moderation.