It's Not Like the Good Old Days
No really, and unfortunately there is plenty
of evidence to back up this up.
There have been copious studies on the actual nutrient content
of our food, carried out periodically since the 1940s, in an attempt to
link our changing dietary habits with the consistent rise in the degenerative
diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and osteoporosis and
also the trend for obesity.
Much research is also done on populations who still live as close to ways
of our ancestors as possible. These epidemiological studies show us how
our intake of key nutrients has changed through our history, as a direct
result of the introduction of farming, processing and preserving techniques.
Firstly, it has been estimated that our average ancestor in the Stone Age
could have eaten around 4,500 calories of nutrient dense food, which means
that he/she burnt these off with continual physical exertion, hardship and
the threat of danger. Also the food they ate provided the full complement
of vitamins and minerals needed to deal with this way of life and keep the
human body running on optimum. There was no refined food with its “empty
calories” – high calorific intake with a relatively low amounts
of the nutrients we need to function daily, let alone repair ourselves and
prevent disease. So even though modern man only lives on approximately 2,100
calories a day on average, for many in the West, much of this is food with
very little nutritional value. Although we have much more sedentary lives,
our nutrient requirements have not decreased markedly and many of us simply
do not achieve the levels we need. Even though we burn less fuel than our
ancestors, substances such as vitamins and minerals are deemed “essential”;
in nutritional terms this means that we must ingest them daily as our bodies
cannot make them. These are vital to all our body functions and our health.
So from our hunter-gatherer diet of grubs and roots, we have “evolved”
to be farmers and then learnt to process our food, eventually arriving at
the fast food culture we see today. The advents of isolating sugar from
fruit and learning to refine flour to its white form have led us to the
attitudes to food we have in the West today. White sugar and flour were
once reserved for the rich and ironically they are now a large component
of foods we deem as “junk”.
But it is not just our actual attitudes to food and our moving away from
the preparation of our meals from fresh, unrefined ingredients that is the
problem. There have been many studies to show that our diets have reduced
in nutrient quantity, the FSA (Food Standards Agency) published its new
National Diet and Nutrition Survey and showed that a further
decrease in many of our nutrient levels has occurred since the last survey
10 years ago. It highlighted that around one quarter of men and one third of
women are iron deficient and there are also widescale deficiencies in nutrients
such as selenium, magnesium, calcium and vitamins C, A and the B complex
vitamins. (We shall report these findings in full in the near future). It
has been estimated that our ingestion of vitamin C may have decreased by
half since the Stone Age, going some way to explain the increased incidence
of heart disease and degenerative conditions.
These trends can partly be explained by our changing diets, refining and
processing, but there is also something else at play. The drop in our nutrient
status has been shown in several studies to be matched by a decline in the
vitamin and mineral levels in our food itself. David Thomas, a minerologist
and fellow of the Geological Society, in one such study, looked at the mineral
levels in 64 different fruit and vegetables. He then compared these with
data from the 1940s and saw that the levels of almost all essential minerals
had decreased. Of great concern were the findings that vegetables had lost
around half of their calcium and potassium, a quarter of their iron and
three-quarters of their iron. Fruits also had considerable drops, with iron,
copper and zinc reported up to 27% less.
Jonathan Leake, the Environment Editor of The Times reported these results
in February of this year and cited several other studies. He also spoke
to Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition at King’s College London, who
highlighted the change that consumer taste has made to farming techniques;
in response to the research by the American Government that “apples
can comprise up to 15% sugar compared with 8-10% three decades ago”2.
Sanders said “for example, in apples this is partly due to new varieties
and partly to how they are picked and stored – so that they retain
more sugar. As a rule, most fruit juice provides about 10 grams of sugar
per 100 grams – about the same as Coca-Cola”.
The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), is an organisation which aims to
support the consumer in the face of the EU Directive to be enforced next
year (which will make many trusted and effective supplements unavailable
to us and will be fully discussed in later articles). An ANH spokesman stated
that “the shift to intensive cultivation, the use of narrow spectrum
fertilisers (rich primarily in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, but devoid
of many of the trace elements) undoubtedly has contributed to the serious
depletion that is evident”. Simply put, this means that plants can
only derive their minerals from the soil and if that soil is lacking the
essential minerals we need, we cannot receive them from those plant sources
that we eat.
So, we need to look at our eating habits and realise that we may not derive
all the nutrients we need or even expect from our food. We have come a long
way from the social and eating habits of our ancestors and this includes
the way we view and obtain our food. There are great changes to be made,
but some recognition of these facts by governing bodies is always the first
step. The UK Food Standards Agency is still reticent to acknowledge the
importance of supplementation despite these findings, stating poor methods
in the 1940s for measuring mineral levels as a factor, but this is disputed
and in fact we have since discovered that more trace minerals are essential
to our health!
Total Being Opinion:
Looking at the results of these findings can really help us to understand
why many people find difficulty coping with the stressors of modern life.
We are bombarded with pollution and electromagnetic radiation from mobile
phones, TVs and VDUs and eat additives and pesticides that raise our need
for nutrients. If the nutrient content of our foods is decreasing, then
we need to compensate accordingly with awareness.
The nation’s obsession with “empty calories” has now moved
into healthier foods like fruit and vegetables where the lower mineral status
and sweeter varieties are a result of our tastes and more intensive farming
techniques. This highlights the individual need for as much variety as possible
in the diet, opting for organic foods grown in more mineral rich soil, choosing
more traditional varieties of fruit such as berries and local older varieties
of English apples. This also supports the need for individualised supplementation
and the importance of the work by the ANH to support our right to buy vitamins
and minerals as we choose (see www.alliance-natural-health.org). (We will
look at how this consumer choice is to be denied us in subsequent articles).
Understanding these changing is crucial to the decisions we make regarding
our health and can show us how to have a preventative approach to illness
that is seen around us and in our families.
References
1. Clayton, P. Health Defence, Accelerated Learning Systems, 2001.
2. Leake, J. The Times
|
After the first six weeks I went down one dress size from a 12 to a 10. It's so easy to follow. 
