Humans spent many millions of years evolving into the incredible specimen you look at when you look in the mirror every morning. Most scientists say that for at least the last two million years modern humans and their ancestors have been human. For the past 2 million years humans have had pretty much the same diet, so you might say that the "normal" diet, the one he evolved eating, and the one that sustained him for his entire existence, was a constant. All of that began to change about 4000 years ago and about 50 years ago, and that change rapidly increased in rate. So you could say that for 99.5% of Human's existence Human ate the same diet, and only for 0.025% of Human's existence has he eaten the modern Western human's combination of foods so many of us today consume.
If you were to travel the world looking for groups of people who were in great condition, in great health, and were strong and fast, you'd find that the majority of those groups are the remaining hunter/gatherer tribal groups scattered around the globe. Scientists now acknowledge 84 separate tribes still living this lifestyle. These people are stronger, faster, and more resistant to disease and physical damage than you and I. Even though these people live in different parts of the world, they share a common trait, their diet.
The ancient hunter gatherer diet has been come to be known as the Paleolithic (literally meaning "the old age of stone") diet, or sometimes the stone age diet or even the cave man diet. This diet is decidedly simple. It consists of meats, fish, eggs, fruits, green vegetables and root vegetables. Many of these foods were eaten raw, or if cooked, only cooked enough to kill the surface bacteria and render them safe to eat if they were a bit older or on the verge of going bad.
About 4,000 years ago, agriculture swept the world. Interestingly, it sprang up all over the world at just about the same time. The primary products of agriculture at that time were grains. Wheat, rice, millet, corn, barley, oats, and beans were the ideal crops for that time. They allowed people to weather long droughts since dried rain seeds could be stored for a long time with little care. Humans could now travel carrying their food and start new colonies since the seeds are readily planted when he arrived at his destination. Grains also have a high caloric value for their size.
The main thing that brought about the revolution in grains was the invention of cooking. In their raw forms grains are toxic. They will make you sick if eaten in large quantities. In small quantities, they are designed to pass through the system of animals to be deposited elsewhere in a pile of dung. Consider a fruit, such as an apple. If a horse eats the apple, it eats it whole. The flesh of the fruit is digested, but the seeds, being toxic cannot be digested and some time later, those seeds get expelled from the horse's body and end up in a pile of horse manure - the perfect fertilizer for sprouting apple seeds and adding nutrients to the soil needed by a young apple tree seedling. The apple has increased its chances of procreating by evolving toxic seeds.
Cooking kills some of the toxins in grains and breaks down their fibrous shells so that they can be digested. While they can be digested doesn't mean that they're a natural food that a human has adapted to consume. In fact the opposite is true - we have not adapted to consume grains.
Birds and other creatures adapted to eating seeds, have special enzymes in their digestive tracts that break down these chemicals, Humans do not. While cooking can reduce these chemicals, it cannot eliminate them.
Another downside of consuming calories by eating grains, is that grains contain very little value in terms of macro-nutrients, that is vitamins and minerals so essential to Human's health. As compared to the rich source of vitamins in green, leafy vegetables and fruits, grains are nearly devoid of vitamins. They're empty calories.
Another event that occurred about 50 years ago, was the rush for milled grains - WHITE bread, WHITE rice, peeled, fluffy WHITE mashed potatoes - suddenly grains had to be white. What the milling process does is remove the tough cover of the grain to allow it to be cooked faster and have a softer, prettier result. The husk of the grain and the peel of the potatoes contain dietary fiber, which has an extremely essential role in regulating the body's use of the food you eat.
The main food value of grains is their content of carbohydrate. The word carbohydrate in Greek is the word for sugar. Carbohydrates are just that: sugar. When you eat a carbohydrate the body immediately converts that molecule into sugar that is easily absorbed into the system. When your body takes in sugar, it is transported into the blood stream and its presence stimulates the release of hormones that decide what to do with the nutrients. The main hormone determining the use of the energy is insulin. If your body gets what the body perceives is an excess of sugar in the system, the liver generates lots of insulin that chemically direct the body to store the energy away as fat for later use.
Storing away excess energy windfalls is a millions of years old survival mechanism. Think about it, you're a cave man in the ice age. In the autumn, with a quickly approaching bitter winter, you come across a huge surplus of calories in the form of sugar, fruits that ripen and become sweet in the fall. You gorge yourself on whatever you can collect. Your body, sensing that this is a time of plenty, rushes to stash away this energy for the upcoming hard times of winter ahead.
Now milled grains have the exact same effect. They act as pure sugar and your body rushes to store away the excess energy. This is one of the main causes of obesity in the modern world: not fats, but an excess of processed carbohydrates. It's not the burger or the lettuce and onion in a Big Mac that makes you fat, it's the bun and ketchup (nearly half sugar) that do it.
The presence of fiber with grains, regulates their conversion into sugars once in the system. If you eat grains with high fiber content (whole grains) they are dissolved much more slowly than if you eat processed grains. The liver doesn't detect a huge surge of excess sugar in the blood stream, so doesn't pump as much insulin into the system telling it to store away the nutrients as fat. It allows you to use the nutrients immediately. Have you ever experienced a mid-morning or mid-afternoon slump when you feel like taking a nap? Well, I bet you had a high carbohydrate breakfast or lunch a couple hours before. Your body has stored away all of that energy you ate as fat and now you're low on energy for your body to use. If you had eaten a low carbohydrate meal, or a meal with moderate carbohydrates and lots of fiber, that slump would not have occurred. You would have ample energy in your system to keep on going, and going.
Shocking the system with huge amounts of carbohydrates, especially refined carbs, causes all sorts of health hazards, but the two biggest are obesity and diabetes. It is well documented that type 2, adult onset diabetes is a result of a poor diet, one high in sugars and refined carbohydrates. Many other diseases are related to poor nutrition and obesity, especially the two biggest killers of all, cancer and heart disease.
The modern human's diet of sugars and refined carbohydrates is killing us. Of that, there is no doubt. If you want to be slimmer, stronger, faster and have more energy, and be more resistant to disease, a return to the natural diet your body was evolved to consume will go a long ways to bringing you there. Bringing out your inner cave man is not a complex task that forces you to shop in specialty stores and eat strange foods. In fact it's pretty simple. You can walk into most any every restaurant and order a cave man diet meal right off the menu (with a little tweaking.) Even many fast food restaurants can accommodate you.
So if you want to be healthier, slimmer, and have more energy, stop eating white grains. This means wheat bread, pasta, cereal, rice, potatoes, and so on. Switch to vegetables. A big pile of steaming broccoli, spinach, cabbage, or squash will give you more nutrition with less calories. They're a lot better tasting too. If you must eat grains, eat only whole grains. A brown rice pilaf, European pumpernickel bread or cooked azuki (Japanese red beans) is far, far better for you than that bagel, doughnut, or pizza slice.
Your bathroom scale will thank you, as will your waistline, blood pressure, heart, liver and endocrine system.
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