De-Evolution

We've all heard of evolution; from life in the ocean to life on land; from life on four legs to life on two; it's a subject whose origin and validity has been observed researched and debated to death.  Taking a simplistic view however, we usually relate the "evolutionary process" to one in which an organism or animal changes over many generations in such a way that this change leads to improvement in one way or another.  Darwin stated that through natural selection life on earth has evolved in such a way that only the most dominant or strongest or beneficial traits needed for survival would be passed on to the next generation, slowly but surely paving the way to modern day animals and fish and humans.

Is this the case however when it comes to the evolution of the human diet?

Sure you can say that the human diet has evolved.  Evolved from one driven by a pure basic natural need for nourishment to an industrialized factory driven diet of overly processed foods replacing the basic dietary needs of the body with chemicals and toxins.  And with this dramatic change in our diets over such a short period of time, evolutionarily speaking, we have also seen the evolution of disease and the toll it has taken on this modern industrialized nutrient starved human race, rendering our society one plagued by obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, and chronic inflammatory diseases of every kind.

This however seems to contradict ours simplistic view of evolution.  If humans are the most evolved species on the planet than why have we let our diets take such an unnatural and blatantly detrimental path.  Unless of course this is nature's way of weeding out a specie that has proven to be toxic to both nature and themselves alike.

If this is the case then I say its time for the "De-Evolution" of the human diet!

It is time to replace those chemicals (fillers, preservative, GMO's) with pure natural organic nutrient rich un-fooled-around-with ingredients.  It's time to step off this indiscriminately destructive fast moving industrialized food train that our "highly advanced" society is riding full-steam-ahead and get back on track with the basics of our dietary needs.  It's time to stop exploiting this chauvinistic view that the human race sits alone above all other species as are given right to do as we please in the name of food, regardless of the destruction in our wake, and wise up to the fact that when it comes to our health (life) we are not independent but rather dependent.  The truth is there is something like 10 trillion bacteria making up the human body, which is 10 times the number of individual cells that actually make up the human body.  So biologically speaking, at the cellular level, we are not even the dominant organism when it comes to ourselves!  Maybe if we step back and look at our dietary "evolutionary advancement", we will see that from a health perspective we haven't advanced at all. 

I don't mean we must a revert back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors eating nothing but raw meat from fresh kills, but we can take away something very important from our distant past, and that is our basic primal need for animal protein, animal fat, and fat soluble vitamins.  As a hunter gatherer you ate to survive which meant giving your body what it wants and needs!  Once we lay this crucial dietary foundation consisting of healthy pastured meats in place we can move up the timeline to the advent of agriculture.  Agriculture has been around for approximately 10-12k years, and although a mere blip on our evolutionary timeline, when compared to factory farming and industrialized "pharming" which have only been driving our food industry at this pace since around the time of WWII (barely an evolutionary blink of the eye) we can safely say that there is a place in our diets for organic sustainable farming.  But even here we have to travel back in time to the agricultural beginning when we had only one way to preserve our food, lacto fermentation.  It was this basic natural process, not chemical preservatives or genetically modified organisms or even refrigeration for that matter, that not only kept our food from spoiling but fed our bodies with the healthy bacteria that we need to survive.

Lacto fermented foods have been shown to be far more abundant in strands of  healthy bacteria in a single serving than most over the counter pharmaceutical grade probiotics contain per container.  Add this to the enhanced nutrient content and absence of  most toxins and anti-nutrients compared to non-fermented foods, and you can quickly see why fermented foods are so important to the human diet.  Our gut is our immune system, and when we have an unbalanced unhealthy gut we are easy prey for bad bacteria taking over our bodies.  Without the correct healthy ratio of beneficial bacteria to unhealthy bacteria within our bodies, we begin to suffer from the many chronic diseases and disorders that the modern human diet promotes.

So do your body, and the trillions of bacteria living within that make life possible a favor and help De-Evolve when it comes to your diet.