Our relationship with food is filled with confusion and insecurity. Vegan or carnivore? Vegetarian or gluten-free? Keto or Mediterranean? Fasting or Paleo? Every day we hear about a new ingredient that is good or bad, a new diet that promises everything. But the secret to becoming healthier, losing weight, and living an energetic life has nothing to do with counting calories or feeling deprived--the key is relearning how to eat like a human...
What if I told you that you do not need to count calories, measure your portions, go hungry, or feel deprived? And, at the same time, that you can eat in such a way that you can become healthier, lose the extra pounds, live a more pain-free and energetic life, and contribute to the health of the planet?
How? By learning to eat like a human again. Simply put, this means finding food that is as nutrient dense as possible and preparing that food using methods that render it safe and make its nutrients available to our bodies. That’s it. Whatever diet you follow, whatever your food, whatever your food preferences, the goal is to find and prepare food so that it provides the most nutrients. Eating in this way will maximize your health and simultaneously simplify the process of knowing how, what, and when to eat.
Our ancestors knew how to do this. Tens of thousands of years ago, they figured out how to eat in highly nutritious ways that allowed them to thrive. Today, our modern food systems have evolved away from the instinctive approach to food, even though we continue to inhabit bodies with the same needs as our ancestors’ This has been much to our detriment as a species.
Today we can all be modern hunter-gatherers who use the same fundamental strategies our ancestors did to make their food safe, nutritious and bioavailable., rather than giving in to today’s socially and economically driven norms. Our parents and grandparents were familiar with some of these foods, such as liver or sauerkraut; but others challenge our modern beliefs about what is food.Â
In the coming weeks, we will take a deep dive into our physical and cultural evolution through time as it relates to food. We will discuss different food groups, like plants, animals, and dairy: explain preparation and cooking techniques associated with them; and provide concrete takeaways, recipes, and ideas on how to incorporate this information into modern life.
I realize that overhauling our diets and changing our relationship with food is not going to happen overnight, and some of us may never get over our aversion to certain unfamiliar foods or have the time to use all the methods I describe. What I do hope, however, is to offer you basic steps that incrementally build on one another to reconnect you with your food and increase the safety and nourishment of your diet. Whether this means inspiring you to start eating or cooking in new ways, or to simply start thinking about your food differently as you stroll the grocery store aisles, it is all transformative and ultimately empowering our common goal of seeking good health—and a healthy planet.
Figuring out how to eat is a challenge unique to humans. Think about it. No other animal asks this question. No other animal hires nutritionists or doctors to provide dietary advice. No other animal wastes its energy eating foods that provide zero nutritional or digestive value. And much of our ancestors’ efforts to figure out how to eat were efforts to overcome what were—and still are—fundamental biological and physical weaknesses that we as humans have always struggled to surmount. People don’t like to hear this, but when viewed through the prism of this most basic need—food—we humans are one of the weakest species on the planet, and this simple, uncomfortable fact has direct bearing on how we must feed ourselves differently than every other animal.
It’s important to shift your thinking a little, because to begin to understand how we as humans must learn to eat, you first have to understand that our physical weakness compared to other species means we are far less capable of obtaining food from our environment. For our ancestors, this was a matter of life and death. They couldn’t run as fast as other animals, they couldn’t fly, they couldn’t even dig into the ground as well as other species.
The second reality to understand is how biologically deficient we were, and are, as a species. Other animals are built to digest what they consume, and their diets match what they’re biologically equipped to handle. Herbivores like cows, for instance, are custom-built to process tough vegetable material like grass with their multi-chambered digestive systems. Ducks, geese and other grain-eating birds are perfectly designed to safely digest seeds, thanks to their crop (a specialized expansion of their esophagus), where grains are temporarily stored to slowly ferment and break down. From there the grains travel to the gizzard, where they’re ground between two muscular disks.
But what about us? The harsh reality is that biologically speaking, we have no business eating almost any food that we consume. In fact, other than when we were infants and well equipped to drink mother’s milk, the only foods our digestive tracts are biologically designed to consume are insects, limited amounts of wild fruits and vegetables. How we overcame these physical and biological deficiencies and learned how to eat is the story of how our ancestors became human both culturally and biologically. We developed technologies to do outside of our bodies what other animals do naturally inside theirs. Through imitation, innovation, or some combination of both, we created tools and behavior patterns that allowed us to access foods foods from our environment that otherwise would have been unavailable to us—whether physically or biologically—and we learned how to make them as safe, nutrient-dense, and bioavailable as possible before we ate them. This quest for safe, nourishing foods drove everything we did.
Our ancestors became experts at developing ways to transform foods that had been biologically or physically unavailable to us. In addition to becoming hunters and gatherers we learned how to process the most nutrient-dense parts of the animal and we learned how to detoxify and process plants outside of our bodies. We developed advanced forms of cooking, fermentation, and curing. We invented strategies to pre-digest almost every food in the world, such as intentional fermentation of vegetables (sauerkraut), dairy (cheese, yogurt, and butter), and grains (sourdough bread and beer). We learned how to create storage vessels and technologies, including curing meats, that allowed us to capitalize on a surplus from a successful hunt or harvest. These technological advances supported everything we attempted to do. Populations grew as we expanded around the world.
The sad truth is, that when we began to stray away from this, we began to slowly grow increasingly distanced from our food. This shift began as we became food producers, and it accelerated when we became food consumers—that is, when our emphasis shifted from growing and processing our own food to purchasing it beginning with the industrial revolution in the 1700’s. With this growing distance, we began to lose our hard-earned food knowledge and, I would argue, we put ourselves on the opposite trajectory from our ancestors. Today, rather than growing in health and well-being, we are struggling with a multitude of illnesses and diseases directly related to poor diets, malnutrition, and misinformation. Few of us have any direct connection to producing our own food, or even with those who produce our food. Our culture and economies have shifted so dramatically over time that it is all too common for us to work all day to make money to go to a store to buy food grown, processed, and delivered by companies and people we don’t know. We haven’t seen the farm, walked the crops, touched the animals, met the farmer, the butcher, or truck driver. More importantly, they haven’t met us. They bare little or no responsibility to us or to our health and welfare. And in our detachment from our food sources, we willingly hand over our own power and ability to more safely and sustainability control every aspect of the food we eat and ultimately our health and well-being.
When we make our dietary decisions using a more holistic point of view, we bring to the table more nutritious foods. We eat foods that safely and sustainably nourish our bodies. When we eat them, we rise from the table feeling comforted, satiated, and fulfilled. This is how our ancestors ate, and this is what we should be striving for in our own diets. Our ability to incorporate ancestral and traditional food technologies into our busy, modern lives requires planning and time. Some of us have a lot more of it than others. Nor would I expect you, for instance, to trash everything in your pantry and upend your life to make a radical change (in fact, I recommend against it). But if you’re here reading this, I suspect that food and your relationship to it is a subject that you’ve already put a lot of time and thought into. And it’s likely you have genuine concerns for how our diets impact our communities, perhaps even goals for sustainability, and economics in the way that we feed ourselves and our families. For all of those reasons I applaud you for showing up, As a nutritionist and health coach I believe the diet of our future should absorb the lessons of our past and blend them with modern culinary practices and food preparation to create a food system and philosophy while recreating foods that are deeply nourishing, sustainable and ultimately create better health.
I’m excited that you are here. I wanted to give you a couple of things you can begin using in your day-to-day life to get started on your health journey. I know this can seem overwhelming, but you can begin taking small steps by going to the farmer’s markets in your community, sourcing local meat and dairy from local farmers. Take the time to get out and meet them, make it a family event and take your kids so they can see the chickens running around. This is a great place to start re-connecting to your food—remove as many links in the food chain as you can—and that alone will solve many problems.
The second thing I would recommend is to learn about the food you eat everyday—and learn to make your food from scratch. Roll up your sleeves and jump in, take the food that your family eats and not only learn how to make it from scratch but put your spin on it and make it as nourishing as possible and continue to do that. That will ultimately make a huge impact on your families health. Just the act of getting into the kitchen and using your own hands to make your own food and sourcing your food locally is a great way to start and will make a huge difference. When you walk into a grocery store, you will begin seeing your food differently as you begin reconnecting with your food. I know it sounds crazy for me to ask you to get into the kitchen at that level, but I promise you, that is where incredible change will happen.
In the coming weeks, we will take a deep dive into our physical and cultural evolution through time as it relates to food. We will discuss different food groups, like plants, animals, and dairy:Â explain preparation and cooking techniques associated with them; and provide concrete takeaways, recipes, and ideas on how to incorporate this information into your life. I would encourage you to join our community where we can lock arms and learn from each other.