What has happened to our food? This is a question that many in the modern era, specifically in the west, ask themselves. Why is it that conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity have seemingly increased out of control in the past century? Is it our sedentary lifestyles? portion sizes? Maybe it is a self-control and self-discipline issue, or perhaps, just maybe, it is something more sinister. What caused us to go from a society that was so robust, strong, muscular and lean into one in which now almost half of American adults are clinically obese. Where did it all go wrong?
While lifestyle decisions and self-discipline are a large factor in rising obesity rates, lack of proper nutrition and the foods we have accessible to us are just as responsible. For the majority of our prehistoric history, humans ate a “species-specific” diet, a diet our bodies evolved to consume over thousands of generations consisting of natural whole foods and wild game that was accessible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors depending on their geographical location.
Around 10,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors went through a major cultural shift and with it, came a new diet in the form of the agricultural revolution. When humans discovered agriculture, they genetically modified particular staple food crops based on their ability to reproduce and withstand environmental changes. In short, these early farmers found out how to take real whole foods and subsequentially them empty of nutrients in an effort to deliver higher yields. This shift had drastic impacts on humans around the globe. Early agriculturalists experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress. Standardized studies of whole skeletons has proven that regardless of geography, populations who turned to agriculture saw the average height and health of people decline.
While humans have made great leaps forward in terms of accessibility to a wider variety of nutrients, and the trend toward short stature has reversed – in part thanks to the industrialization of food systems – in many ways we are still worse off in terms of our diets. Today, around 60% of our calories still come from corn, rice and wheat.
Because of our western diet, we have become very unhealthy; diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and autoimmune diseases have reached epidemic level numbers. Diabetes, a disease that was almost nonexistent in the 19th century with rates of around 0.5% to 2% of residents in industrialized countries in the 1920s, has increased to a staggering 1 in 10 today. According to the American Centre of Disease Control, an estimated 37.3 million Americans suffer from diabetes making up around 11.3% of the population and America is not alone. Globally, the number of people with diabetes rose from 108 million in 1980 to 537 million people today and that number is predicted to rise to 783 million by 2045.
Diabetes causes a large range of medical problems such damage to the eyes, kidneys, heart, and to blood vessels in the brain, which can lead to strokes. It can also cause damage to the blood vessels in the hands and feet, and, depending on how long you have had the disease and how well you have managed it, it can take 10 to 15 years off your life. Diabetes also causes liver problems and has surpassed alcohol as the leading cause of liver transplants.
So how did this “epidemic” of disease, diabetes and obesity grow to the extremes we see today? Why in such a short time have so many people become obese and diabetic? Have we been eating the wrong foods the last 50 years? Or too much? Or both?
Lets turn to science for an answer. In 1994 we learned of a hormone called leptin, leptin is primarily made by our fat cells, it travels to our brain and signals to the brain that we have eaten enough. For 50,000 years or so, leptin worked very well as essentially a natural appetite suppressant, and then, about 40 years ago, it seemingly stopped working. The question was why? We knew that it was not because we were not producing enough leptin, in fact many people produce too much! The amount of leptin in a human body is directly proportional to the amount of body fat and so, as bodies get bigger, leptin is produced in higher levels and eventually leads to a condition known as leptin resistance.
The reason for leptin resistance is because of the hormone insulin. Insulin is a hormone created in your pancreas that controls the amount of glucose in your bloodstream. It also blocks the signal of Leptin getting to the brain to tell you to stop eating. So the question is, is insulin the bad guy? Not necessarily, your body needs both insulin and leptin to directly regulate each other, the problem arises if your body produces too much insulin, it in turn causes your body to increase leptin production. Similar to an alcoholic that drinks excessively and eventually increases their tolerance, the body becomes immune to the appetite suppressant effects of leptin . Unfortunately, today we, on average, produce more insulin now than ever before and therefore, more people suffer from leptin resistance.
The cause of this can be summed up in one word. Sugar. According to the American Heart Association, the average American is eating 22 teaspoons of added sugar per day. Now, you may be thinking, “this can’t apply to me, I don’t add sugar to my food”. Unfortunately, sugar enters our diets through regular food that you buy from the grocery store in various ways that you may not be aware of. If you go into a super market and pull most items from the middle shelves, over 74% of them will have some sort of added sugar and while nutrition labels are required to state how much sugar is in food, it is not required to separate the amount of naturally occurring sugar and added sugar. Due to this, we consume triple the sugar each day than our body can metabolize. This is where the true harm is being done. Our society is essentially over dosing on sugar.
Of the 600,000 products in any given supermarket, over 74% of them have been laced with unnecessary sugar by the food companies for their own benefit, not yours. The food industry knows that sugar is highly addictive and so, when they increase the sugar in common processed foods, you buy more. With the increasing levels of sugars in our food, our body is forced to work overtime, generating insulin to regulate the glucose in our blood.
Now, think back to our discussion on the paleolithic diet. While paleolithic humans would have had access to different types of foods according to their geographical location there was one commonality, sugar; specifically, the lack of sugar. Over a short period of time in the context of our evolution, humans have increased the amount of sugar we consume to levels that our bodies cannot keep up with. In short, we have evolved our diets faster than our bodies can evolve to keep up. This is the reason for an increase in diet related diseases like diabetes.
So maybe it’s time to reconsider our diets and how we eat as modern humans. Perhaps, in order to maintain a healthy body we need to take some lessons from our prehistoric ancestors and adapt our diets to better fit what humans evolved to eat over generations. We need to recognize that our diets today are not created to fit what our bodies truly need, but are created in a way that encourages us to consume more and generate higher profits for food companies. Perhaps it is time to go back to eating a human appropriate, human specific diet focused on nutrient dense whole foods.
Sources:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615094514.htm
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/diabetes-statistics