Let us look at this issue of coffee and chocolate being cooling foods from two different perspectives, a physiological perspective followed by an energetic perspective. Before doing so, we must understand that the degree with which a cooling food cools the body is dependent on both the level of physical activity that body engages in and how much of two warming macronutrients (fat and protein) are consumed by that body.

Fat and protein are the most highly thermogenic foods we can eat. To put that simply, good quality fats and proteins increase metabolism and an important effect of increased metabolism is warmth on a muscle, tissue, organ, and cellular level. Therefore, healthy proportions of protein and fat in ones diet act as buffers to the cooling effects of low thermogenic foods, or less nutrient dense foods (many vegetables, fruits…) and play an important role in balancing any healthy diet. A balanced healthy diet is guaranteed to provide both sensory and nutritional satisfaction. Beyond those basics, there are many additional benefits you can expect from eating a balanced diet and you can learn more by attending classes, reading books, choosing and preparing healthy foods and sharing your knowledge with others.

Physiological Perspective (Cooling Natures of Coffee and Chocolate)

Coffee and chocolate both contain stimulants, coffee in the form of caffeine and strong alkaloids, and chocolate in the forms of theobromine, phenethylamine and other chemicals, more of which are being discovered on a regular basis. These chemicals have been shown to have the same effects and addictive qualities as amphetamines.

These naturally occurring chemicals stimulate the sympathetic branch of the autonomous nervous system. The sympathetic branch acts on blood distribution by increasing its flow from its regulated cycle of circulation in the body to the periphery of the body – hands, feet, and surface of the body in general. This process of moving blood to the periphery of the body also occurs when one is physically active, running, aerobic activity, or any kind of active movement. When active exercise triggers the sympathetic branch of the nervous system, there is an increase in respiration, heartbeat, body temperature, and perspiration… These reactions result in, among other things, dehydration, caloric output, and ultimately the need to replenish the body with food and water.

After exercising, the body begins to cool down and it is through the replenishing of food and water that the body regains its warmth and hydration. If the body is not recharged after physical exertion and refueled through food and water, it would eventually cool down to the point of depletion.

Exercise offers an obvious example of how the body regulates its functions from warm to cool and back again but the effect of coffee and chocolate are not as obvious. Both contain stimulants that trigger the sympathetic branch of the nervous system causing blood to flow outward from the center of the body. One then experiences an initial output of warmth as the result of a host of increased physiological functions through increased circulation.

Coffee and chocolate can stimulate heartbeat, increase respiratory function, and increase blood circulation along with other effects that also occur during exercise. However, these stimulants have other effects beyond those shared with exercise. It begins with the pituitary gland thinking there is an emergency causing it to release hormones that cause the adrenals to produce adrenalin. This leads to rapid heartbeat, elevated blood pressure, and a slowing of blood to the digestive system. The stimulation of adrenals, kidneys, and bladder functions increase urination. Unlike exercise where perspiration is increased through exertion, the chemicals in coffee and chocolate do not increase perspiration as much as they increase urination because they are diuretics. With the increase of urination from these diuretic stimulants, the body begins a process of dehydration and draining of moisture from tissue and cells.

Interestingly, the neurological messages of thirst and hunger are indistinguishable from each other by the human nervous system and often one has to make a conscious effort to understand which is calling. An interesting point when you think about it because for most people hunger is the prevailing message and the one acted on when a glass of pure water is often what is needed first.

Dehydration resulting from increased urination cools the body temperature and a lack of regulated blood flow to the intestines reduces the warmth (digestive fire) needed for proper digestion. If dehydration becomes chronic, a common occurrence among most people, physiological symptoms of dry skin, dark urine, cold hands and feet, decreased circulation in general, reduction in cellular function and cellular flexibility, and reduced function of kidneys and adrenals…all of which contribute to physical coldness.

After consuming coffee or chocolate, most people will recharge their cells and tissue with nutrition in some form. Yet for those who choose less thermogenic foods or diets low in fat and protein – they are going to have a more difficult time maintaining bodily warmth than those who consume moderate amounts of fats and proteins when consuming coffee and chocolate on a regular basis.

Additionally, the cooling effects of coffee and chocolate can be understood by the way they affect the liver. The stored glycogen (sugar) molecules in the liver are rapidly released when coffee and chocolate are consumed, again due to their stimulating natures. Glycogen molecules are initially stored in the liver to supply a steady source of fuel, energy and warmth to the body and when released in abundance as a reaction to stimulating chemicals, creates an initial feeling of warmth through sheer caloric out put but is short lived as the liver now must rebuild its storage base of glycogen. This too results in a cooling effect on the body and it can further result in strong cravings for sugar due to the now depleted reserves of glycogen in the liver.

Today many people consume their chocolate and coffee with sugar and milk unlike traditional peoples. While milk does buffer some of the cooling and drying effects of these foods and the sugar may help to restore glycogen to the liver – many researchers believe these combinations to be unhealthy for various reasons.

Physiologically speaking then, both coffee and chocolate through their chemical constituents tend to cool the body by over stimulating various physiological functions that result in an initial warmth with an after effect of cooling and decreased circulation due to loss of water, loss of caloric fuel (glycogen), and the diminishing effects they have on proteins and fats.

Energetic Perspective (Cooling Natures of Coffee and Chocolate)

Coffee and chocolate are the two foods most directly connected to sexual problems and low energy among those following natural food diets. For some people the consumption of these two foods often comprise equal quantity to, or more than, the healthy staple foods of grains, beans, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and naturally raised animal products. Let us keep in mind that this is but an observation and not a criticism or judgment against those who choose to consume these foods nor the foods themselves. Each of us is free to design our food choices to fit his/her needs but balancing excesses and extremes in our diets are essential for good health.

The regular and sometimes excessive consumption of coffee and chocolate among many proponents of natural and health food diets however, is telling in that they are also some of the most widely consumed foods among those consuming processed food diets, and for the same reasons. These include the drug inducing effects of physical and mental stimulation, increased energy, and altered mental states.

Because of their wide appeal and ability to influence so many diets, chocolate and coffee deserve to be understood in terms of their unique energetic properties. Much can be said as to their powerful influence on eating disorders, the emotions, and related issues but that is for another discussion.

These two foods/stimulants, while having some positive qualities also contain a host of chemicals with strong negative qualities that can have adverse effects on ones energy and more specifically, on ones sexual energy. The negative influences of these foods are especially noticeable among those whose diets are lacking in reasonable amounts of protein and fat with which to buffer the drying and cooling effects of these foods. While both coffee and chocolate are extremely cooling foods, fats and proteins are warming therefore the more there are of the latter in one’s diet the less cooling and depleting the effect will be on the individual who consumes coffee and chocolate. (Coffee and chocolate both contain fat and protein however, the existent amounts in each is in small quantities which is why coco butter from chocolate is so highly prized and priced)

Potential Effects On Sexual Energy

When consuming coffee and chocolate in disproportionate amounts in your daily diet, it is important to consider the proportion and quality of fats and proteins, you have in your diet. If you have been on a diet low in protein and fat (raw foods vegan diet, vegan diet, standard macrobiotic diet, low fat diets) for 6 months or longer then you likely have discharged much of the original excess of your past accumulations of poor quality fats and proteins. If at this time, you have not replenished your diet with reasonable amounts of quality proteins and fats you are likely to experience any number of the following symptoms.

a. A gradual diminishing of muscle tone and tissue flexibility.

b. Reduction of viscosity in semen with diminished quantity and lack of sexual endurance in men.

c. Decreased flow and production of vaginal fluids and an onset of an overall cold temperament in women.

d. Biological and psychological dependency on the natural chemicals (caffeine, anadamide…) inherent in coffee and chocolate.

e. Bone weakness, joint stiffness, and dehydration.

f. A deep seated craving for fats and proteins of which you will usually be compelled to compulsively satisfy those cravings with poor quality sources that are familiar from your past eating habits of processed foods rather than giving thought to better choices that could be obtained from traditional healthy foods.

Part of this reason for not choosing better quality sources to replace those fats and proteins when in the reaction mode of craving is often due to your individual beliefs about what foods are good and what foods are bad, in other words; a limited or biased understanding of healthy traditional foods. The simple fact is that coffee and chocolate have far more extreme effects on the body than some of the taboo foods discouraged among healthy diet proponents.

Consider the energetic properties of the coffee bean. A tropically grown shrub bearing a double seeded fruit corresponding with paired organs of the body i.e. Lungs, kidneys, ovaries, testicles… A drug/food with the stimulating power to release reserved and stored energy in an explosive manner while expanding the mind with a rush of ideas and thoughts, dehydrating body tissue and cells, and forcing the kidneys to work overtime all for that brief excursion into hyper time. All this followed by a crash of low energy and the need for more stimulation.

Then consider the fussy, temperamental, high maintenance and decadent nature of the cacao tree that has to have everything in its environment maintain a very specific order or it refuses to bear fruit. Like the cacao tree, its fruit, the prima donna of plant foods, convinces you that you need no one when you have it for your companion. Sensuous, satisfying, comforting…in the privacy of your space, only you with your compulsion and your chocolate. You feel protected and safe like it when nestled beneath the canopy of the rainforest shielded from the harsh rays of sunlight.

Both coffee and chocolate are derived from plants that are highly sensitive to cold temperatures. Both are small seeds with an intense bitter taste. Coffee beans (fruits, berries) are from a bush/small tree while cacao beans are the seeds of the cacao pod that grows on trees. Both are roasted before being consumed which increases their already bitter taste.

Coffee beans are roasted and dried. Cacao seeds are left to ferment for four or more days in the sun then sun dried and roasted at a low temperature. After roasting, both coffee and cacao seeds/beans are ground and consumed in several ways.

The bitter taste has the effect on the body of drying and purging and it resonates or enters the heart and small intestine. This includes all bitter foods and does not mean that the bitter taste is good for these organs. It simply means that bitter enters these organs. For example, dandelion and burdock roots have long been traditional remedies for numerous ills. Both have bitter tastes and therefore enter the heart and small intestine via the meridian channels of the human body. Coffee and chocolate too, have a bitter taste and will enter the same organs but will have a stimulating effect on those organs. The non-stimulating bitter taste of dandelion or burdock, neither of which are of tropical origin nor sensitive to cold temperatures, have a tonifying effect on the heart and small intestine.

Being energetically sensitive to cold temperatures (coffee and cacao cannot be grown where there is frost) coffee and chocolate impart in the consumer similar qualities and when consumed in excess demand a balance to their cooling effects in the form of warming nutrient dense foods. The bitter taste with its dehydrating and purging properties not only contributes to drying of body cells and tissue: the purging effect of these bitter stimulants can deplete the stored bodily warmth derived from warming fats and proteins and when depleted will compel strong cravings for both.

It is interesting to note that traditional cultures had a variety of bitter foods in their diets, unlike modern industrialized cultures. Various herbs for cooking, bitter tasting green vegetables, roasted foods, grilled foods, toasted foods (seeds, nuts, crackers, toast…) and smoked foods all contributed to the bitter taste in traditional diets.

Aside from the stimulating effects that make coffee and chocolate so widely popular perhaps the lack of a variety of traditionally consumed bitter tasting foods in our modern diets also plays an important role in the high consumption of these two most interesting foods.

The negative use of the word cause or causes when associated with a particular food is enough to invoke fear and concern in the bravest and most courageous of beings intent on nourishing themselves with a healthy diet based on traditional foods.

Upon hearing or reading that this food or that food “causes” disease or even “too much” of this or that food “causes” disease can easily set one up for a dietary experience based on fear of food that can have long lasting and damaging effects on ones health and more so, on ones happiness. The expression “too much” meat, cheese, fish, grain…“causes” cancer and or other diseases or even the same expression without the “too much” where a particular traditional food alone is presented as dangerous or even poisonous to health is a way of relating to food that is beyond strange when you think about it. Yet, at the same time, this mindset is not exclusive to any specific health food diet. In fact, it is common expression among diet proponents of natural food diets of all types, especially vegan, raw food and macrobiotic diets. It is an unhealthy mindset as it stifles creative thought and limits ones understanding of real food and its potential as our primary means of nourishment.

Even western nutritional science does not use this type of expression in their food/disease connections although theirs is not much of an improvement. When speaking in the negative about a particular food they use terms like such and such “has been linked to” or when speaking in the positive “may help to prevent” cancer or heart disease. Furthermore, when nutritional or medical science speaks to us about food they rarely speak of quality and mostly speak of isolated components. For example, with the exception of the rare scientific report researched by pro-organic organizations, you are not likely to hear from mainstream science how nutritionally superior organic broccoli is compared to commercial broccoli. It is simply, “broccoli may help to prevent cancer” or you will hear about the polyphenols or anthocyanins in blueberries as if these chemical components were more important than the blueberries as a whole giving one the impression that these chemicals are the sole reason you should eat blueberries.

When speaking in the negative, they tend to speak in generalities but their data and research are based mostly on processed or poor quality foods; “Saturated fats have been linked to high cholesterol and heart disease,” is one of many examples where all foods fitting that category of fats are inaccurately grouped together. It is no wonder all this terminology around food has contributed to such confusion among people trying to eat a healthy diet.

When nutritional science does use the word cause in connecting food and disease it is used to describe the effects of eating food in general. An example being, “Overeating disrupts entire networks of genes in the body, causing not only obesity, but diabetes and heart disease, in ways that may be possible to predict, researchers report.”

Alternately, when proponents of natural diets use the word ‘causes’ when connecting a food with a disease it is just as confusing. Unless this accursed food/cause connection can be clearly described as to how it does so, and so far, it cannot, then perhaps the word cause is best avoided when attempting to connect it with a traditional nourishing food.

Connecting a food as an influence on an organ as done in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic medicine or describing a food as having an energetic effect on an emotion is not the same as accusing a food of causing a disease. Many of these energetic food and mind/body connections are thousands of years old and recognized in every traditional culture in some form as traditional folk medicine, many of which are being validated through modern scientific research – but nowhere do we find a historical precedent for a traditional food as a cause of disease. Energetic correspondences between foods and human physical/emotional health are simply examples of a food’s potential to influence you based on a particular food’s unique characteristics and your relationship with it.

While it is obvious that poor quality processed foods are strong contributors to degenerative diseases and that this connection has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no causal connection what so ever that can be made to disease by any naturally grown traditional food of any kind through western science or energetic science. On the other hand, foods can contribute to biological and psychological symptoms like digestive distress or worry, food poisoning… but even these are bound to other factors that include combinations, eating late at night, eating to fast and not chewing, spoiled food…

The closest historical examples we have to natural traditional foods being causal factors to diseases are as follows. War, occupation of foreign lands and peoples, famine, drought and other environmental catastrophes all have an effect on a culture’s food and health but even with these problems one would be hard pressed to find a traditional natural food that caused any health problems during or in the aftermath of these events. The food related diseases associated with these events are primarily the result of deficiency and malnourishment due to loss of vital food crops and basic supplies for living.

Does naturally raised meat cause prostate cancer or liver cancer? Does raw un-pasteurized milk from grass fed cows cause breast cancer? No one really knows but historically; there has never been a reason to connect these or any other traditional foods as causal factors to any degenerative diseases especially when consumed proportionately with other traditional foods and certainly, no single traditional natural food in and of it self has caused a degenerative disease that anyone knows of.

Does hormone-injected, artificially raised cows or chickens cause cancer? Does pasteurized/homogenized milk and related processed products cause cancer? They certainly have been linked to diseases, for the most part, due to what has been done to these foods and their combinations with other processed foods but even these cannot be said to individually cause cancer or degenerative disease.

All diseases are the results of numerous influences in our lives so create the diet you need for your lifestyle with the highest quality foods you can get and rest assured none of those foods will cause the problems you fear.

Let us begin by making it clear that not all raw foods are cooling. As mentioned before, nutrient dense foods, those higher in fat and protein tend to be warming foods, as do some starchy foods. Raw food diets generally contain an ample amount of nuts and seeds in their preparations. Olive and coconut oils are also used on a regular basis. These foods can have thermogenic properties and thus are warming compared to fruits and leafy vegetables. It is also important to note that the addition of cooling foods in ones diet is just as important as warming foods. A balanced diet contains a wide variety of both cooling and warming foods all year round.

Food Temperaments

Each food has a temperament that it is grown or raised with. This temperament is a food’s identity, what it is, and has the potential to effect the human body with that identity. Food temperaments are comprised of four basic temperatures, hot, cold, cool, and warm. These four are then paired with one of two degrees of moisture, dry and moist (damp).

Generally, those foods that fall into the category of cold/cool are foods of plant origin that are high in water (juice), grown in water, high in vitamins and anti-oxidants, high in simple sugars, grow in tropical or semi-tropical climates, are fermented, and are lower in fat and protein.

Generally, those foods that fall into the category of hot/warm are foods of plant and animal origin that are lower in water content, grow in temperate climates, are high in fat and protein or high in starches like some root vegetables, beans and some grains.

I say “generally” because once you add that stamp of dry or moist to the warm or cool food it is more specifically defined in temperament.

Temperaments are easy to observe in people. A heavy set man, overweight by 70 or 100 lbs., perspiring profusely, with a red face and irritable and angry disposition is obviously carrying a general temperament of hot and moist. A skinny man with sunken cheekbones, dry hands and feet, pale complexion, poor posture…is obviously carrying a temperament of cold and dry. These temperaments are not unlike those of foods and like foods, they can be changed. Our temperaments change through our life choices and food temperaments can be changed through preparation methods (steaming, boiling, roasting, marinating…)

Using the two examples of men in the previous paragraph, let us now put them on one of two diets in order to determine the cooling or warming natures of foods on the human body. Diet 1. Fresh raw fruits, raw vegetables, raw nuts, and seeds. Diet 2. Cooked animal products, moderate amounts of fats and oils, some vegetables, and grains.

If all we wanted to do was cool down the heavy set man from the first example it would not take very long with Diet no. 1 but it might take some time with Diet 2. Likewise, in order to warm up the skinny cold man we would obviously suggest Diet 2. While these examples do not describe exactly how raw foods cool it does reveal that the principle foods of some raw food diets have the potential to break down excess, reduce fat, and thus cool the body.

All is relative of course but here is another simple example. Conventional ice cream and soy milk ice cream. I think we can all agree that these are cooling, cold foods. However, which one is more cooling with longer lasting effects? The soy based frozen dessert is more cooling because it does not contain the thermogenic qualities inherent in animal milk.

Getting to know the temperaments of foods is one way to begin understanding the warming and cooling properties of foods.

Building Up and Breaking down

Another way to understand the cooling or warming energetics of foods is through their effects in the human body. The human body builds mass from warming foods that tend to be protein and fat based and there is no doubt the Western world has consumed these in excess but a simple fact is that muscle, tissue, organs and cells are built by proteins and fats. High fiber raw fruits and green vegetables are lower in these two components yet high in vitamins, minerals, and other important nutrients. These cooling foods are break down foods in the sense that they have the ability to reduce excess fat and protein in the body through high enzyme activity, especially when eaten raw. When fat and protein reserves are diminished the body cools, blood pressure drops, and numerous other changes occur.

One could argue that fruits and vegetables are building foods for apes and monkeys but if you think about an ape and its eating patterns you will find that it eats massive quantities of plant foods at one sitting and a cow grazes all day long. Furthermore, we human omnivores are neither apes nor cows so the argument is not even worth debating. Further, most herbivores get their daily share of animal foods in the form of insects for grazing animals and insects and small rodents for monkeys and apes.

Enzymes and Fermentation

Witness the powerful effect of papaya on meat. A single slice of papaya placed on a piece of meat will immediately begin digesting, breaking down the meat. Fruits are high in enzymes and one of the primary roles of food enzymes is to break down concentrated nutrient dense foods in the human body. A diet high in breakdown foods (raw fruits, vegetables and seeds and nuts) can be beneficial for those wanting to cleanse the body of excess heat and lose weight. It may not be the best approach for everyone but it is an option that does get results. However, like a strict macrobiotic diet and vegan diets it too leads to the physiological reactions ranging from being hungry all the time to intense cravings for fats and proteins.

In summary then, cooling break down foods are mostly plant foods that contain high levels of enzymes, high fiber content, high simple sugar content, high chlorophyll content (green foods), and fermented foods.

Fermentation actually facilitates the break down of plant fibers and alters the cellular structure of plant cells. This form of decomposition also has a cooling effect on the body. Fermented foods are essential in any healthy diet because they assist in the break down and absorption of warming fats and proteins.

What about that tofu? Is it cooling? Hold it in your hand, feel it, squeeze it, bite it. The temperament of tofu is cold and moist. Okay, now slice the tofu and fry it. Add it to a hearty stew of root vegetables and fish, seasoned with miso. Now what is the temperament of that tofu?

How about that papaya? Temperament, cold and moist. Dry that papaya and its new temperament is cool and dry. A foods temperament can be altered by what is done to the food and by what other foods are combined with it. There is no one correct way to eat foods. By that, I mean 100% raw is not the way to go nor is 100% cooked the way to go. Both are essential for a healthy human diet. Should we eat a carrot raw simply because it has more enzymes that way and were it cooked those enzymes would be destroyed? Carrots are also high in carotenoids, beta-carotene, which is a fat-soluble vitamin. Sautéing carrots frees the carotenoids for absorption and offers another way of getting benefits from carrots you would not get if you ate them raw all the time. Both are great ways to eat carrots depending on what you are preparing and what kind of energetics you are looking for.

Digestion and absorption are part of an organized process that requires warmth. Your digestive fire is activated and sustained by fats and proteins and the regulation of your metabolic fire is dependent on these two macronutrients as well. They are the foods that keep the digestive fire burning. This does not mean one should eat excessive quantities of these foods but to maintain healthy digestive fire one should consume these warming and building foods in small quantities to offset the cooling break down effects of a high plant based diet.

Other ways you can learn to understand the warming and cooling natures of foods are to think about how a food grows and the environment where it is grown; near water or in water, on moist fertile land or dry land, in a forest, high or low sun exposure…? How was the food eaten by traditional people and why? These and other important qualities of food are all influences on the human body and mind. Some are subtle while others are obvious. Many of these unique qualities of foods, which were clearly understood by our ancestors through energetic science, are often taken for granted or given little thought by us. Meanwhile, more and more of these energetic qualities are being rediscovered and confirmed through modern science. One of the latest fields of food research has to do with plant communication.

Oh yes, food does communicate with us. Listen, observe, savor, and learn.

One of the most popular foods in the world, chocolate is also one of the most versatile. It can find its way into (and have its way with!) delicate cakes, creamy puddings, mousse, cookies, candies, beverages . . . when used for sauces or as a seasoning mixed with spices and herbs, it can even transform a savory meal into an exotic culinary experience.

Few foods on the planet have as much appeal as chocolate. It can dominate sweet desserts or entire meals while still maintaining its peculiar character and distinctly recognizable taste. Like fine wine, varieties of chocolate can be measured by flavor, taste and other more subtle qualities, all of which determine the distinctions between the chocolate used in those chocolate bars found in your local convenience store versus chocolates from fine chocolate makers, especially those who use ecologically grown, harvested and processed varieties.

Anatomy of a Pod

Theobroma Cacao is the name of the tree that produces the pod-like fruit from which cacao seeds are derived. The slender tree averages about 20 feet in height and thrives in humid, tropical forests beneath the shade and shelter of other taller trees that make up the forest canopy. Cacao trees take about seven years to mature and can live up to 50 years, bearing 50 to 60 football-sized pods per year. These pods, when mature, can become red, purple, yellow, orange or green.

Unlike most fruits that grow and ripen at the end of branches, cacao pods grow directly out of the main branches and from the trunk and bark of the tree. Each pod contains 20 to 40 almond-sized beans (seeds) embedded in a soft white pulp. The pulp has a sweet citrus flavor with a pear-like texture and has long been a traditional food for hunter-gatherers residing in the steamy forests of Mesoamerica. The creamy pulp is essential for the fermentation of cacao beans, an important stage of transformation on the way to actually becoming chocolate.

The Transformation

Cacao is the name given to the seeds before they are processed; once processed, they become chocolate. Here is a somewhat simplified version of the first stages of chocolate making:

First the ripened cacao pods are split open and the pulp and beans scooped out. The mixture is then spread on mats to ferment for four to six days in a shady area; the fermenting beans are turned occasionally by raking. The degree of fermentation is crucial to good chocolate and must be carefully observed and timed. The fermenting pulp eventually turns to liquid and drains away as the temperature rises, leaving the seeds with little residue of pulp.

During this time, the seeds begin to germinate, but high temperature and acidity levels prevent them from reaching full germination. The seeds are then sun dried for another five to seven days, then roasted for about 40 minutes at 100 to 200 degrees to enhance flavor. The paper-thin skin surrounding the beans is then removed, leaving what is called the “cocoa nib.” This is unprocessed, dark, unsweetened chocolate.

From here just about anything goes: milk, sugar, nuts, spices and numerous other ingredients can be added to make both familiar and not-so-familiar delicacies.

The origins of this unique and exacting processing method for chocolate are lost in time. Wherever it came from, we can be sure the people responsible for it knew a great deal about science and food processing.

A Little Chocolate Science

Chocolate contains over 400 known pharmacological chemicals. There is still much to learn about this food, but three important chemicals whose interesting effects we have studied are phenylethylamine, anadamide and theobromine.

Phenylethylamine is an amphetamine-like substance that selectively elevates those brain chemicals associated with pleasure. It is known to raise blood pressure and increase the activity of neurotransmitters.

Anadamide is a compound found naturally in the brain, seminal plasma and ovarian fluids. It is similar to THC in that it activates cannabinoid receptors (parts of a cellular system that regulate some reproductive fluids) and is responsible for creating enhanced feelings of well-being.

Theobromine is a mild stimulant with similar effects to caffeine but only about one-tenth its potency. Its diverse actions include: myocardial stimulant, diuretic, smooth muscle relaxant and dilator of coronary arteries. Cacao also contains a small amount of caffeine, along with strong alkaloids similar to those found in coffee and tea.

Cocoa butter, the fat contained in cacao, consists of approximately 35 percent oleic acid, 35 percent stearic acid, 25 percent palmitic acid and five percent other. It is the third-highest source of saturated fat, after coconut oil and palm oil. Overall, the cacao bean is about 30 percent fat, with an additional 14 percent carbohydrate and nine percent protein. Cocoa butter liquefies at just above body temperature; since it is mostly stearic and palmitic acid, it does not raise cholesterol. It is also a stable fat, meaning it doesn’t go rancid quickly. In fact, the fat content of cacao is one of its healthiest qualities. Cocoa butter is a valuable fat with multiple uses; the finest quality chocolate has high quantities of it in the finished product.

Ancient History

No one really knows how our fascination with cacao began, nor do we know the true origins of this remarkable food. However, some evidence does exist to reveal clues that could one day help to solve the mystery of the origin of chocolate.

Archeological evidence points to the Olmecs as the first people to use cacao. The word “cacao” itself was given to us by the Mayan peoples who once populated much of South and Central America. Historically, they are the people who came after the Olmecs in these regions. While Mesoamerican hunter-gatherer tribes may have harvested cacao pods to extract the creamy, custard-like flesh that surrounds the actual cacao seeds, the elaborate processing of cacao seeds began with the agrarian lifestyle of the Olmec civilization.

In many ways, the Olmecs are as much a mystery as is cacao. The word Olmec means “rubber people,” reflecting the fact that evidence for early Olmec civilization was found in areas where trees that produce the essence of rubber were found. These enigmatic people are known for their elaborate stonework, consisting of colossal multi-ton stone heads (some over six feet in height and almost as wide) carved from hard basalt that was somehow brought to the Yucatan and surrounding areas of Mesoamerica from great distances. Some of these heads have helmets and stern faces, resembling warriors of some lost civilization, while others have faces with serene expressions, as if in a state of meditation.

The Olmecs are also known for their building of megalithic temples, sophisticated irrigation and drainage technology, crystal lenses and much more. They are said to be the earliest civilization of the Americas. Their influence stretches throughout the Yucatan peninsula and into the remote jungles of Guatemala. Archeologists are continuously finding new Olmec sites and uncovering information that helps broaden our understanding of these intriguing people of the past who were responsible for introducing the world to chocolate.

A recent title of Proto-Mayans has been given to the Olmecs because it is believed that they preceded the Mayans and may have even intermixed with them to form future branches of the Mayan race. Conservative timelines for the Olmecs place them at around 1500 BC at the earliest; more realistic timelines place them in Mesoamerica by at least 3000 BC. Where they came from is anyone’s guess, but they appear to have arrived fully organized and structured with civilization and agriculture.

There is no indication of any evolutionary process, from primitive hunter-gatherer to technologically advanced civilization, among the Olmecs. In fact, much of the archeological evidence indicates a controversial mixture of racial types. Stone sculptures have been excavated that clearly reveal the various racial types of African, Mongoloid, Semitic and Caucasian peoples. This strange cultural mix strongly points to cross-cultural diffusion at some remote period in history, and to the likely possibility of early settlement in the Americas by several racial types having traveled together.

An argument against this point of view pertaining specifically to cacao has to do with the unique growing environment cacao needs to thrive. Since the plant needs the hot and humid conditions of a rainforest, the argument against the diffusionists’ point of view is that the product must be unique to the rainforest of the Americas. The fact that the plant is not found anywhere else is also cited. However, this argument does not take into consideration the possibility that similar environments may have existed in the distant past and long disappeared in a cataclysm, as indicated by numerous oral and written traditions—or that cacao could have been genetically designed by the Olmecs or some other advanced peoples. After all, it is a rather unique crop with strange attributes.

Sophisticated Food Science

Why this emphasis on the Olmecs? And what does it all have to do with chocolate? What is so interesting is the extraordinary and detailed processing of cacao seeds from the Theobroma cacao tree to the finished chocolate, beginning with the Olmecs who handed it down to the Mayans, Aztecs and everyone else who followed them. Such elaborate processing is not something one learns through trial and error. Transforming the bitter and essentially inedible seeds of the cacao pod into chocolate was a well thought-out process comprised of complex and detailed phases, and would have required a sophisticated understanding of each stage of the process. Furthermore, where would one get the idea to take such a bitter, inedible seed to make it into something edible, let alone something of such great importance? Some knowledge of biochemistry would have been necessary to undertake putting cacao seeds through such a process, and whoever first did so would have known beforehand what the outcome would be.

The chemical interactions that take place during the fermentation stage of cacao processing and the combination of shade and intense sunlight used to induce these and other chemical reactions reveals a comprehensive understanding of food science. It is a bit more complex than the hunter-gatherer, who observes an animal’s interaction with particular plants and from there begins to imitate that behavior. Nor does it sit comfortably with the idea that someone at sometime in the past witnessed a rotting cacao pod fermenting in the shade, by chance had a brainstorm, and spontaneously deduced the remaining details and steps needed to derive chocolate from the seeds.

For what purpose would one want to put so much energy into processing cacao seeds? It’s important to realize that to the Mayans and Aztecs, cacao seeds were worth more than gold. Moreover, they, like the Olmecs before them, knew all too well the physical and psychological effects of chocolate. Chocolate was also fermented to make alcoholic beverages and they most certainly combined it with various mind-altering plants and fungi.

Like other advanced civilizations of antiquity, the Olmecs had a sophisticated understanding of food science, including breeding, cultivation and processing. The sophisticated food science involved in turning cacao seeds into chocolate was something the Olmecs knew about when they arrived in the Americas. For that matter, they may have even brought the cacao plant with them from their original homeland—now lost to the sea from one of the cataclysmic events that took place sometime within the last 11,500 years.

Cacao is one of many food plants of the world with unknown origins. What appear to be wild cacao trees can be found throughout the jungles of Mesoamerica—yet whether these are wild or simply cultivated plants that have run wild is anyone’s guess.

Ritualistic Uses of Chocolate

Historically, cacao was handed down from the Olmecs to the Maya and from the Maya to the Aztecs. At some point in this lineage, the Olmecs seem either to have disappeared or to have been integrated into or evolved into the early Mayan cultures. Artifacts from some early Mayan archeological sites closely resemble Olmec art. It is from these early Mayan periods, as well as later ones, that traces of cacao have been found in excavated pottery, sometimes in tombs or areas where evidence suggests the practice of ritual human sacrifice. There is ample evidence to show that cacao was used as part of some of these rituals, especially those where enemy captives were sacrificed to appease the Gods.

How cacao was used in ritual sacrifice is more clearly ascertained through evidence left by the later Aztecs of Mexico. It is important to understand the context in which this occurred. In The True History of Chocolate, Sophie and Michael Coe explain that the Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice for reasons of blood lust, cruelty or an obsession with death. Rather, it was practiced because of an overshadowing fear that the world as they knew it might end, with everything in it perishing. This fear had its roots in myths and legends left by their ancestors.

In fact, this fear of a worldwide catastrophe where few humans survive to repopulate the earth appears in legends among hundreds of traditional cultures around the world; it appears to be based on actual experience passed on in the form of oral and written traditions by survivors among previous generations.

Though there is clearly a historical basis for the idea that human sacrifice was practiced by these cultures, much of the information we have pertaining to human sacrifice among the Aztecs is now recognized as embellished fact, in many instances highly exaggerated examples originally concocted by apologists who lived during the Spanish conquest.

The killing of most of Mexico’s indigenous peoples in 1521 by the Spanish conquistadors and their religious zealots, along with the beating into submission of those few who remained, is a sad story indeed. It is because of these barbarous acts that the conquerors were compelled to alter historical facts by destroying all but a few written records and proclaiming the Maya and Aztecs to be primitive, inhumane people—when in fact, both were highly civilized peoples with extremely organized, productive and thriving civilizations. In many ways, their polytheistic cultures were actually far more advanced than that of their conquerors, especially in their understanding and implementation of architecture, agriculture and medicine.

Sacrifice was but one context of the many for the ritualistic use of chocolate among traditional Mayan and Aztec peoples. It also played an important role in weddings, royal feasts and other special days throughout the year. Moreover, when it was served during these occasions, it was not consumed indulgently, without meaning or purpose.

Cacao seeds were also a source of monetary exchange for both the Maya and the Aztecs; it was their currency for purchase and trade among themselves and with other peoples. That it was a food specifically and exclusively for the ruling elite, including lords, long-distant merchants and warriors, is supported by numerous sources, but according to some researchers, this idea is still inconclusive. Some believe there is also evidence to support a long history of public consumption as well.

Cacao was available to commoners if they were assigned status as soldiers in the Aztec army. This may have been for practical purposes, as chocolate can act as an appetite suppressant and with large armies to feed, cacao would certainly help supply energy to the soldiers while also helping to curb their appetites.

Food of the Gods—and Goddesses

Cacao is mentioned several times in the Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel), a sacred book of the Quiche Maya of the Guatemalan highlands. One particularly interesting mention has to do with the Gods having created humans in their final form after several previous attempts that ended in failure. In order to do this, the Gods had to find the right foods with which to form human bodies. The foods were found in what was called the Mountain of Sustenance, and although several foods are mentioned in the legend, two very important ones were maize and cacao.

The Aztecs have a similar story that includes a mountain and the god Quetzalcoatl, who instructed ants to bring seeds to the surface that were hidden in a mountain. To both the Mayan and Aztec peoples, cacao was known as a “Food of the Gods” and was consumed primarily as a beverage, of which there were many variations.

Numerous ingredients were added to chocolate beverages, which were for the most part served unheated, although there is evidence that the Mayans consumed both heated and unheated versions. Some of the added ingredients included chili powder, vanilla, maize, honey and flowers. Each addition had a specific purpose and effect, but the ultimate and most widely cherished part of these beverages was the foam that would appear floating on the top of the drinking vessel. This bubbling foam was created by pouring from one vessel, in a standing position, into a receiving vessel at ground level.

Women served cacao to men of high rank or royal status. Whether or not it was forbidden to elite women of a thousand or more years ago is hard to say. If it was—women of that time doubtless being as resourceful as they have always been—one would suspect that traditional Mayan and Aztec women somehow managed to get their share of chocolate too.

There are three recognized varieties of cacao used to make chocolate today, although each of these varieties have adapted to various environments since first discovered, causing them to take on unique characteristics of the environment in which they are grown.

Criollo “native” cacao is considered the finest available and was the variety introduced to the Spanish when they first set foot in Mesoamerica. While it is the finest, it is also the most difficult to cultivate. Forestero is of lower quality but is hardier and more prolific than criollo. The third variety of cacao, trinitario, is a cross between the first two types.

Although Cortez brought cacao seeds to the Emperor of Spain in 1502, it wasn’t until 1585 that chocolate officially arrived from the “New World” (Vera Cruz) on the shores of Seville, Spain, where it continued in its status as a food for the elite upper classes. However, it wasn’t long before it became available to the public as well. Once available to the masses, this unique food quickly spread its influence throughout the world. No longer limited to the humid forests of Mesoamerica, and although stripped of its original spiritual and ritual history, chocolate has now become the focus of new exotic and erotic rituals in a unique position as a global food phenomena. Moreover, while still a Food of the Gods, with its overwhelming appeal to women, it could easily and deservedly be called Food of the Goddesses.

Chocolate and Sex

Is chocolate a healthy food—or is it perhaps one of those very special foods where it really doesn’t matter whether it’s healthy or not?

It certainly has some healthy ingredients, particularly cocoa butter. It contains stimulants and it contains sedatives. Much like coffee, it begins with a bitter flavor but can be altered to suit one’s taste. According to traditional Chinese medicine, its bitter nature makes it resonate in the heart and small intestine. It has a dry and cold effect on the body when consumed as dark chocolate, and a damp and cool effect when consumed as milk chocolate.

It has long been recognized as a substitute for sex—yet for the true chocolate lover, sex may serve as a substitute for chocolate! Given our brief discussion of some of chocolate’s ingredients, it is easy to see how it could influence sex on a biochemical level.

With specific components that can induce feelings of well-being while at the same time cooling the fire of sexual passion, it can induce a mental state of sexual delirium. Chocolate has less of an influence on the physical aspects of sex, as far as stimulating sexual fire goes, but it does have a strong influence on the more mental or psychological aspects of sex in the form of sexual fantasies, especially those where aggressive physical stimulation is used for sexual enhancement. While physical stimulation may be reduced under the influence of chocolate, chocolate may serve to enhance more subtle psychological aspects of sex having to do with emotional sensitivity.

Two Sides to Chocolate

The great and powerful Aztec ruler Montezuma believed it to be an aphrodisiac; an old Aztec legend speaks of it in a less positive light.

The legend speaks of Motecuhzoma, an earlier great Aztec emperor who, curious about the legends and origins of his people, decided to dispatch a group of sorcerers to seek out the legendary Aztec homeland called Aztlan. After a long journey, the party eventually arrived at Aztlan, which was situated on an island in the middle of a lake. Upon meeting the islanders, the sorcerers told them they had gifts for the goddess Coatlicue (Serpent Skirt). The goddess lived on top of a hill; the sorcerers were instructed to follow a guide up the hill to meet the goddess.

The old guide climbed the hill with ease but the sorcerers found they could barely walk up the steep incline. The spry old man asked the group of Aztecs what they ate in their land that would make them so heavy and fatigued. They told the elder guide they ate foods that grew there and that they drink chocolate. The elder then told them that this would make it difficult for them to reach the place of their ancestors.

When they finally reached the goddess, they presented her with their gifts. When she asked what chocolate was, they told her it was drunk and sometimes eaten. She told them that this was why they could not climb the hill: they had become old and weak, burdened by the chocolate. There are many more details to the story, but this will suffice for getting the point across!

Thus the ancient stories present two sides to this mysterious food. One side portrays chocolate as an important and essential gift of the gods; the other, as expressed by the goddess Coatlicue, portrays it as a weakening and debilitating food. Perhaps chocolate carries the potential for both extremes and, like other specialized foods, deserves to be understood for all that it truly is.

A Demanding and Sensitive Food

The cacao tree is subject to a multitude of diseases. Those known to attack it include fungus, pod rot and extraneous growths. It is extremely sensitive to exposure and low temperatures kill the seeds. Cacao is difficult to grow and requires both year-round moisture and regular irrigation to thrive. Overall, cacao is a very needy and demanding plant, and if it doesn’t get these needs fulfilled it will die. These properties are all entrained in the final product.

The sensual allure of chocolate is something few people can resist. It’s as if this mysterious food has the ability to influence the senses in ways that no other food can. It can create deep feelings of satisfaction that can lead to expressions of self-importance and confidence. It can impart feelings of relaxation, euphoria and sexual playfulness. It can even be a substitute for sex by sedating one’s inner fire and replacing it with a sultry yet superficial demeanor.

Chocolate can stimulate and energize the body and mind. It can influence our thoughts by leading us down well-trodden paths of psychological awareness, while at the same time challenging us to open doors of perception we never knew existed, sometimes revealing thoughts and expressions of blatant truths and confusing deceptions that somehow meld into each other with convincing acumen.

Chocolate seems to have it all when it comes to being a favorite treat. It is the food of choice many people lean on in times of stress. When life doesn’t seem to be going right, when anxiety has peaked, when the passion is gone, when there is no one who will listen, understand or believe, there is always chocolate to comfort us and ease the pain. While there are endless reasons—or excuses—for indulging in chocolate, for many the simple fact that it exists is reason enough.

Sources:

America’s First Cuisines, Sophie D. Coe.
The True History of Chocolate, Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe.
The Olmec, Mother Culture of Mesoamerica, Roman Pina Chan.
The Cambridge World History of Food, Kiple and Ornelas.

Answer: Like soy, flax is gaining ground as the next “great thing” you can do for your health. And again like soy, much of the scientific research on flax and flax oil comes from similar sources, “agenda driven” science funded by special interest groups intent on saturating the market place with products that are easily mass produced and marketed with inflated prices. Much of the research on flax oil, (the oil extracted from flax seed or linseed), is focused on the high amounts it contains of what are called omega-3 fatty acids.

Omega-3 fatty acids (alpha linolenic acid) are essential fatty acids that cannot be made by the body and therefore must be provided by diet. These essential fatty acid precursors are converted in the body to EPA and DHA, both of which are supportive of hormone-like substances known as prostaglandins, which are vital to the regulation of metabolism and other regulatory functions. Refining and hydrogenation destroy the vital omega-3 oils leaving modern day consumers with high omega-6 fatty acids and little of the omega 3s so important to biological functions.

Some experienced health practitioners believe flax and flax oil to be the ultimate panaceas for many problems. Others feel the tiny seed is simply another “band aid” approach to health and that it would be wise to seek more reliable sources of omega-3 fats available in fish liver oils that, unlike flax oil, is readily converted to a usable form by the human body. Fish along with wild and naturally raised animal meats and eggs were traditional sources of Omega-3 for thousands of years.
Speaking of thousands of years lets go back a bit and consider some history on flax. There are several commonly expressed opinions and statements from both researchers and lay people pertaining to the historical relevance of flax. These same statements are used to support the idea that consuming flax is beneficial to health. Let’s take a look at some of these statements.

“Flax has been used for five thousand years in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and numerous other places throughout the world.”

“Flax oil was used in ancient Egypt since the time of the Pharaohs.”

“Flax was once a staple food of the Roman Empire.”

These and many other statements along with the latest scientific research is enough to convince even the most skeptical of us that we are indeed missing out on something if we are not consuming flax in some form or another.

While it is true that flax has been in use by ancient cultures for thousands of years and was used extensively throughout the world in textile manufacturing, as a base for paint and for preserving wood; it was not a principle food of any culture. Evidence does exist, however, to show it has been used as a supplemental food when traditional foods were scarce due to adverse climactic conditions and other destabilizing influences on some cultures. As a food, flax may have been used as a last resort in times of famine, as is the case in Ethiopia and a few other places of the world during drought when grain crops were compromised. More recently, in the last few hundred years or so, ground flax, boiled in water, was used as both an internal remedy for colds, coughs and urinary irritation, as well as a medicinal poultice applied externally for boils and abscesses. Therefore, while flax seed does have some limited use as a food in recent history, flax oil, on the other hand has no historical use as a food.

In Food in Antiquity, a survey of the diet of early peoples by Brothwell and Brothwell we read:
“…in Mesopotamia and Egypt, though it may have been more valued as a textile material than for its oil potential. In Europe, however, the picture is different. Flax was grown in Neolithic Spain, Holland and England, and the Swiss prehistoric lake dwellings have yielded seeds from the beginning of the third millennium BC. A sort of linseed cake was found at Robenhousen…” This “sort of linseed cake” is certainly not a cake made from linseeds and does not mean it was used as a Food. Pressing seeds onto balls is a common traditional method of oil extraction. The compressing of seeds into a rounded shape was a way of preparing seeds for grinding by hand with a rock to extract the oil which could then be used to cure wood, leather or rope and for mixing to form a highly absorbent and drying paint. Eating whole flax seed pressed into a patty of some sort would cause serious digestive distress and is not something any intelligent prehistoric human being would do more than once, if that, so these “cakes” certainly were not food. Neither was the oil used for human consumption because it is highly unstable and traditional peoples did not have refrigerators, a technology needed to prevent the fast rate of rancidity flax oil goes through when exposed to oxygen.

Carbonized flax together with cameline seed have been found at a Roman Iron Age site in Denmark. Both of these seeds yield high oil content and it seems as if they were grown together for this purpose. At the same site in Denmark was found what resembled a “cake” of poppy seeds, also suspected to be another source of oil. The same source (Food In Antiquity) also states:
“None of these oil/producing plants can be said to have had any great significance as food but in the case of the olive…”

While these seeds (flax and poppy) were grown for their oil, it is highly unlikely the oil was consumed as a food as both oils are of a highly unstable nature and not suitable for human consumption by crude methods of extraction. Many scientific studies on omega 3 fatty acids are used by proponents of flax oil to encourage the belief that flax oil, because of its extensive use in paint and other industrial uses for thousands of years, somehow means it was also consumed as a food for thousands of years, the same goes for the seeds. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

All right, let’s indulge ourselves for a moment and say yes, it is true: flax formed an integral part of some ancient peoples diets. Was this a good thing? If current science is correct when it stresses the importance of eating raw unheated flax oil because it cannot withstand the high temperatures of cooking, or that flax oil should be refrigerated to prevent rapid deterioration, or that a certain toxic chemical in flax seed can only be neutralized through cooking or processing of some sort… One would be hard pressed to believe that the ancient Chinese, Indians and Egyptians with thousands of years of wise traditions in food and medicine unwittingly created health hazards for themselves by cooking their food with flax oil or eating raw flax seeds. Additionally, there is no reason to believe they would consider consuming raw such foul tasting oil when other healthy and tasty fats and oils were prevalent and essential worldwide staple foods. Storing and preserving flax oil for human consumption was not an option for traditional peoples. There is no evidence for cooking with flax oil either. The only evidence for the use of flax oil in a traditional setting is for purposes other than human consumption.

Historical evidence is always subject to interpretation and when modern scientific methods are applied to the evidence, we find, in the case of flax oil, little reason to consume it among traditional peoples due to its harmful qualities when not properly handled with modern technologies.

A quick read on the can of linseed oil found in your local hardware store describes the way linseed oil (flax) heats as it dries and how it deeply penetrates wood. This is in reference to applying the oil to wood in order to preserve it. The can also says it contains 100% linseed oil and “Danger, harmful if swallowed!” Solvent extraction for commercial linseed oil removes much of the antioxidants that encourage rancidity thus helping to stabilize the polyunsaturated fatty acids. However, when these fatty acids are not protected they produce gummy plastic-like residues called polymers, toxic substances unfit for human consumption and have destabilizing effects on cell walls as they cause blood cells to clump together. Modern “food grade” flax oil is now said to be “cold pressed,” a term that, according to most experts, simply does not exist since some heat is generated through the grinding of seeds, especially hard seeds the likes of flax. Any heating or exposure to air of this highly unstable plant oil causes oxidation, which leads to high free radical production when it is consumed.

While the majority of research on flax oil appears to be positive in nature, it is important to read between the lines of these studies. Some other studies do not support the trend that ‘flax oil is good for human consumption.’ Through his research at the University of Virginia Medical School in Charlottesville, Dr. Charles Myers found that flax seed oil increased the growth of prostate cancer cells by 300% leading Dr. Myers and associates to proclaim flax oil to be the most powerful stimulant they know for prostate cancer cells.

This of course is in direct contrast to studies that have shown flax oil to be a strong immune “stimulant” and thus helpful for cancer. Because a substance stimulates the immune system does not mean it is good for it. A healthy substance is more likely to enhance immunity or support immunity, not stimulate it. Viruses and other interfering organisms tend to stimulate immune response. Therefore, the language used in scientific studies is not always what it means or for that matter, what it seems. Another example of this shows up in studies where flax oil proved to be effective in lowering total body cholesterol. Well, there are two types of cholesterol, a good one and a bad one. Flax oil was shown to have lowered both. This not a good thing but it looks like it is the way it has been presented.

Another study from Denmark at the Clinical Chemistry Department of Aalborg Hospital compared the effects of cod liver oil and flax seed oil on the EPA content of blood fats. After one week, the cod liver oil showed a tenfold increase in the EPA content and the flax oil showed only insignificant increases.

The lignans found in flax oil should be another concern for many people; these steroid like compounds may not be as healthy as we have been led to believe, especially at the levels found in both flax and soy. Sesamin, (a lignan with strong antioxidant properties found in sesame seeds) or the lignans found in vegetables, nuts, and grains are different from the toxic lignans found in flax. A little research into plant lignans can reveal some interesting yet disturbing information. Apparently, there are about 450 types of known lignans. Just what are these lignans? Lignans are often described as “potent naturally occurring substances with many toxic side effects.” One could argue that many plants we consume may have varying degrees of toxic side effects due to lignans. True, but flax is recognized as being the highest source of plant lignans, up to one hundred times more than other sources. This is something the scientific literature promotes as a good thing. When these lignans are converted in the body to mammalian lignans they have estrogen like and anti-estrogen effects. In turn, these compounds, touted and praised by the latest scientific literature, are similar to those found in soy. These estrogenic compounds, contrary to what is being promoted, are not beneficial to health.

Then there are the anti nutrients linatine and cyanogenic glycosides found in flax. Linatine is a vitamin B 6 antagonist. Flax also contains a cyanide containing glucoside called linamarin. This substance releases hydrogen cyanide under moist and acidic conditions (inside your body). Normally, when processed with chemical solvents and high temperatures the enzyme linase is destroyed so it is not a problem, but this is not the case with the cold/expeller pressed flax oil or raw flax seeds preferred by consumers. This same toxic substance can be found in lima beans and the cassava plant, both used as foods among indigenous peoples for thousands of years. However, both of these foods are processed by soaking and cooking before being consumed, not the case with flax seeds or flax oil.

It is currently suggested by nutritional experts that 1 to 2 tablespoons of flax oil be used daily if used at all. Why the limitations? These suggestions do not apply to olive oil, coconut oil, or animal fats all of which have been used abundantly throughout the ancient world and up to the present. Being in the field of Natural Health, I counsel people from all lifestyles. I have found that people attempting to follow natural diets, especially Vegans and Vegetarians, generally do not consume flax oil or flax seeds in small amounts as suggested, rather, like their often excessive consumption of soy products, canola oil and soy oil—there is a tendency toward more is better. Could this become a problem of toxicity for many people or can we rationalize it as acceptable because flax oil contains omega 3s, lignans and other isolated components that supposedly have remarkable health benefits?

Moreover, in spite of great effort by some courageous people to bring to public awareness the detrimental effects of trans fats, many people who consume flax oil are still unaware of this problem. Trans fats interfere with the conversion of EFAs in the body. So, are the many people who consume large amounts of trans fats wasting their time taking flax oil for the omega 3 fatty acids? If saturated fats including animal fats, are important to the conversion process of the EFAs found in flax oil: are the people who avoid these fats or those who are on low fat diets wasting money and time on flax oil? Many vegans, raw fooders and vegetarians rely on flax oil as their primary source of omega 3s. These same people tend to avoid saturated fats (important factors in assisting in the conversion process of EFAs) while at the same time many of these people consume trans fats (known to inhibit the conversion process of EFAs) in the form of hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils in margarine and other foods. Does this defeat the purpose of consuming flax oil all together if either one of these factors are part of ones chosen lifestyle? The science would seem to indicate this is so.

Teas and medicines are one thing but using flax seed and flax oil as a regular staple food does raise many questions. Perhaps what is needed is a manual listing all the dos and don’ts required to insure the absorption and assimilation of flax and flax oil in order to reap the supposed benefits.

Apparently at one point the FDA had initial concerns about the hydrogen cyanide found in flax seeds but later the agency stated there was no concern. Now that is reassuring, an FDA sanction. Most health conscious people are aware of the lack of consistency with this agency and how the influence of corporations and private interest groups can be, and has been, used to sway their decisions about food and ingredients.

I am not a scientist but I am an observant witness and am fully aware of how science from one source can be used to refute science from another source, especially in the field of nutrition. A case in point is the ongoing soy debate. Both sides use scientific studies to back their causes and for the person with little experience in how scientific studies can be bought by large corporations, it can be very confusing. For me, with 25 years of counseling and teaching experience in the field of natural health, I have found that regular use of non-traditional soy products and flax has done more harm than good for people seeking to improve their health. Unfortunately, with these examples anyway, the time-tested experiences of consumers far outweigh the scientific theories.

Traditional foods containing omega 3 fatty acids include many dark leafy greens, wild freshwater micro algae, sardines, anchovies, walnuts, wild salmon, free-range eggs, pasture-raised beef and numerous other natural, unprocessed foods. Flax oil contains approximately 60% omega 3 fatty acids. Sardine oil and anchovy oil contain about half as much, but traditional peoples ate the whole fish, not just the oil. All of the other foods mentioned have low percentages of omega 3s and it is the combination of omega 3s with the other ingredients in these nutrient-dense foods that once supplied us with balanced nutrition. That no natural food source contains the levels of omega 3s found in flax oil is good reason to question the validity of it. While omega 3 fatty acids are essential they are also highly perishable and unstable, especially flax oil. Western nutrition’s fostering of the “more is better” theory has done little to improve the overall health of people and flax oil is another example of taking an isolated ingredient, promoting the quantity of it and making it look like more than it truly is.

Who eats flax seeds and flax oil? While the food industry is poised to position flax where soy now rules as king, “naturalists” represent the majority of people who are consuming both flax seeds and flax oil. Among natural food consumers, flax oil is the new kid on the block, but flax seed has been around for at least forty years, albeit in small alternative lifestyle groups. In America, flax seed was, and still is, primarily used as a laxative by those suffering with chronic constipation. Most of the people who use flax grind the seeds and mix it with water or their favorite beverage for the sole purpose of relieving constipation, and for the most part, it works. However, in my experience with clients using flax seeds for this problem, I have found that 10 and even 20 years later this “laxative” has done little more than temporarily relieve the symptoms of constipation while increasing digestive distress and creating a dependency on flax seeds.

Having had the opportunity to observe the effects of flax oil on clients for some years now I have found a few tell tale signs that reveal the adverse effects of this product on human health. If you experience these symptoms or have any of these signs, you might want to consider an alternative to flax oil. Alternatives are fish oil, krill oil and of course, a healthy balanced diet with traditional foods that contain ample amounts of omega-3 fats.

Symptoms that often manifest after consuming flax oil for a week or longer:

a. The appearance of bruises. These may appear anywhere on the body especially the arms and legs with no history of impact to the area. They just appear.

b. Sudden appearance of brown spots on the face and hands that do not go away. These are often called liver spots. It has been suggested that this is a sign of free radical damage from highly perishable polyunsaturated flax oil.

c. Intermittent periods of nausea.

d. Loss of mobility and spastic movements.

e. Muscle cramping, especially the calves of the legs.

f. Increased signs of aging including wrinkles and flaccid muscle tone.

Of all the great civilizations of antiquity that reaped the many benefits of the flax plant—a plant of such importance that it helped to define cultures the world over with style through clothing and art (paint and ink)—why did they not also consider it a daily food if it was so “good” for them?

Answer: Calcium, like Vitamin C, B6 and other isolated nutrients becomes an issue of nutritional concern when denatured foods are consumed in quantities that exceed wholesome natural foods and when there is an extreme imbalance among the basic macronutrients of carbohydrates, fats and proteins in one’s diet. When we consume large quantities of denatured foods (foods that are highly refined, processed and laden with preservatives) we will inevitably develop nutritional deficiencies. Nutritionally empty foods adversely affect metabolism, deplete enzyme and mineral reserves and contribute to numerous more specific deficiencies—nutritional voids that must be filled in order to regain nutritional balance.

The popular response to filling these nutritional voids is to saturate them with vitamin and mineral supplements. Many of the supplements available however are poor quality sources of synthetic nutrients that are marketed in the form of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, anti-oxidants etc…sometimes, real foods with added vitamins are suggested also by nutritionists.

Taking calcium supplements without addressing the fundamental cause of the problem cannot solve the problem without creating more problems. The reason for this is that the more calcium supplements one takes the more magnesium is needed to balance the calcium. And it doesn’t stop there. Additional nutritional factors are needed to balance the combination of calcium and magnesium. Fats play a major role in the absorption of calcium too, so a healthy source of fats needs to be considered, and fats are dependent on protein, carbohydrate and other nutrients to be adequately absorbed and assimilated. So begins a vicious cycle of left brained linear thinking that ultimately leads to confusion and ultimately, an unresolved problem. Unfortunately, there isn’t a specific pill we can take to solve our nutritional problems. However, there are numerous pills we can take to help us forget, ignore and avoid dealing with these problems. These are being promoted twenty four seven on TV, in magazines and just about everywhere we look. Even with their often-lengthy lists of side effects and contraindications, there is no mention as to how the massive industry of pharmaceuticals is contributing to the depletion of our nutritional reserves.

Responding to the “calcium need” from the Energetics perspective we begin with the first governing law of Food Energetics, Quality and Quantity. Before attempting to fill the calcium deficiency void we first need to look at what is causing the void. Having established that denatured foods are devoid of vital minerals, including those foods containing synthetic vitamins added to enhance the products—and that these foods also have been shown to deplete minerals and other nutrients from the body—we then suggest better quality foods over all. From here, we then establish a sound dietary base, free from extreme points of view and grounded in common sense, history and tradition.

The next thing to consider is the quality of the varied sources of calcium available to us. Milk is the food commonly recognized and accepted as a source of calcium by most people as well as the food choice most often recommended by nutritionists for combating the calcium deficiency problem. Even though the food most often suggested by the “experts” as a source of calcium is milk, in its modern pasteurized, homogenized and anti-biotic saturated form; milk is devoid of enzymes and other vital substances that support the bioavailability of the nutrition it has to offer. Few people have access to raw milk and even if they did many are lactose intolerant. Another consideration with milk is the fact that cows milk contains approximately 82% casein and 18% whey whereas human breast milk contains approximately 40% casein and 60% whey. Casein proteins coagulate to form solid clumps while whey proteins tend to remain suspended in liquid. Casein is a bonding agent often used to make glue and other adhesives. With these unbalanced levels of whey and casein between human and cows milk it should be cause for wonder how bonded we might want to be to the source of the milk we choose to drink.

Cows milk is also very acidic with an average PH of 6.5. There are many other issues concerning milk to consider but the most important is that historically cows milk was rarely used as a beverage and when it was it was consumed raw. For the most part, among agricultural peoples milk was naturally processed and cultured to make suitable foods for human consumption. These include butter, cheese, yogurt, buttermilk etc. Even these foods are foods that should be consumed with appropriate accompaniments to insure proper digestion and assimilation. For example, wine, bread, apples, pears, olives, capers and a variety of fermented vegetables traditionally accompanied cheese…and you know about bread and butter. Other animal milks too have been sources of calcium. These include sheep and goat milks and products made from them, all of which have different effects from cow milk and its products. When I say different, I am not implying better. Rather, each milk-producing animal has its own unique qualities. Meeting our nutritional needs is a complementary process, a process that was worked out thousands of years ago through ancient wisdom and common sense.

While raw, naturally processed dairy products from grazing livestock have numerous redeeming qualities for many people, for many others, on a qualitative scale and due to traditions where it wasn’t a primary food, milk ranks low as a source of daily calcium. Other quality sources of calcium are nuts, seeds, dark leafy green vegetables, and some varieties of marine algae (seaweed). The difference between these and other whole foods and a calcium supplement is the synergy of all the other healthy ingredients involved in the whole foods when they are properly prepared and consumed.

For those unable to consume milk, due to lactose intolerance or allergies, the combination of healthy fats, proteins and carbohydrates found in seeds and nuts make them high quality traditional food choices for fulfilling calcium needs. Kale, collard greens, mustard greens, dandelion greens and other dark green vegetables also are great sources of calcium and they contain other vital, supportive and complementary nutrients as well. The bioavailability of the calcium in these green plants is enhanced when they are braised, sautéed, or stir fried with coconut, palm, olive oil or butter. These sources nutrition, with or without dairy products, when consumed on a regular basis can assist in solving the calcium issue along with several other nutritional deficiencies for many people. For many traditional peoples these foods are their primary sources of calcium and they have thrived on them for many generations. For others, raw, naturally processed dairy products from cows, goats, sheep and other animals have been primary sources of calcium for many generations. It is certainly ideal if we can consume a combination of these traditional foods without adverse reactions however, if not, we must choose a variety of the foods we are comfortable with before considering supplements.

In summary then, we can say, first find the reason for the calcium deficiency. Being a mineral, Calcium can be easily depleted from our bodies through the excess consumption of pharmaceuticals, sugar, coffee, tea, and denatured foods in general. Next, include more high quality food sources that contain natural calcium. This will be beneficial in several ways because these foods have additional nutrients that complement the absorption and assimilation of calcium and they are excellent and essential sources of nutrition to a healthy diet anyway. It is often said that calcium and magnesium work together in our cells. They are dependent on each other.

This is true and it is also true that both of these substances are dependent on fats, proteins, carbohydrates and other nutrition sources that synergistically work together to support a healthy human organism.

Your body is in a continuous process of change and adjustment and as a result needs to be nourished accordingly. This can be done most effectively through an open-minded inquiry into what you eat, digest, absorb, and assimilate.

A teenager has different dietary needs than a 3 year old or even a 50 year old. A construction worker and an office worker have different dietary needs too. However, there are some basic needs we all have in common. One of the most important is good nutrition through healthy foods. Not everyone wants to eat healthy nutritious foods but that does not mean they do not need them.
Granted, one’s individual nourishment needs extend beyond mere physical edibles, however when your physical foods are truly nourishing to your body you will have a solid foundation in health from which to choose how you are nourished in your other relations. Understanding food energetics will give you the opportunity to make sound and practical choices that can change the way you think about food in ways that will help answer many of your diet related questions and open doors to new and interesting discoveries. Now let’s take a look in that kitchen by using a few guiding principles of food energetics.

Three Essential Principles

Any good theory comes with a set of principles that act as guides in order to assist you in your exploration and understanding of the theory. Here are three basic principles essential for understanding food energetics.

Food Quality

Health articles permeate magazines and TV with headlines like “A low fat diet may prevent cancer and heart disease.” What articles like these rarely if ever tell you is how important quality is. In this titled article for example, natural traditional fats and oils have never been implicated in heart disease and cancer to begin but that will not even be mentioned in the lengthy article. By not mentioning this important qualitative detail, the reader can easily be lead to believe that all fats are created equal and therefore problematic. Considering the majority of studies on the detrimental effects of fats are based on research conducted on hydrogenated animal fats and vegetable oils and not on the effects of traditional non-hydrogenated fats it is no wonder people get confused. In fact current research on traditionally used and naturally processed fats show just the opposite. So, is it true that a low fat diet can prevent cancer and heart disease? Perhaps it is more like, “A diet with little to no trans-fats and processed polyunsaturated oils can prevent cancer and heart disease.” Better yet, “A healthy varied diet with moderate amounts of good quality fats and oils may help to prevent cancer and heart disease.”

An interesting example of misunderstood quality in fats can be found in the flax oil phenomena. There have been numerous scientific studies touting flax oil as a panacea for a number of ills. These studies tout the extremely high levels of omega-3 fatty acids in flax oil and simply because they are scientific studies they are generally accepted by most people as truth without stopping to question how those scientific conclusions were reached. Much can be garnered by how scientific studies are worded and by who funds them. For example, scientific reports state that flax oil “lowers total body cholesterol.” Does one really want to lower total body cholesterol, both the good and bad cholesterol? This is generally not a good idea. Other claims for flax oil include that it “has been shown to destroy cancer cells and that it stimulates the immune system.” How does it Does it destroys cancer cells? Does it do it in a similar way that chemotherapy kills cancer cells? Is also stimulates the immune system. Is this a good thing? Viruses and many toxins have been shown to stimulate the immune system too. This is very different from a substance that supports the immune system. Many healthy foods and herbs have been shown to support immunity without stimulating it.

More can be said about this oil but I will not get into it here due to time and space. Here are a few health assessment questions you could ask anyone who consumes flax oil on a regular basis. Do you or have you:

1. experience intermittent bouts of nausea throughout the day?
2. experience cramping in the leg muscles, especially the calves and feet, during sleep?
3. have an increase of dark spots (often called liver spots) appearing on your face, hands, arms or back?
4. experience dizzy spells and lack of mental clarity with the slightest physical exertion?
5. experienced a loss of muscle tone (flaccid muscles) and an inability to build and tone muscle through regular workouts?
6. noticed an increase in the number of wrinkles on your face and other parts of your body that indicate rapid aging beyond your years?
7. experienced an increase in spastic movements and lack of coordination and mobility?

Granted, many of these symptoms can be attributed to other problems but the consistency of occurrence with 5 to 7 of these symptoms is not uncommon among those who consume flax oil. Now, apply the same questions to those who consume fish oils also rich in omega-3s, omega-3s easily converted by the body into usable nutrition. You will not get the same response. Why? It is a quality issue. Although people have not eaten capsules of fish oil for thousands of years, they have consumed fish high in omega-3 fatty acids along with numerous other natural sources of omega-3s as well. The same cannot be said of flax oil. I use the above example to demonstrate how easily it is to loose sight of quality when other prevailing nutritional factors are evident. Quality should always come first with our food and a cash cow with science to back it up for the natural food industry does not mean it is there to support your health. Another example is the fledgling soy industry. Traditionally made miso, natto, tempeh, and shoyu are qualitatively very different from the soy junk foods flooding the natural marketplace.

The quality of our food is determined by weighing the difference between the naturalness of it and the artificial. By studying naturally grown and naturally raised foods, we become aware of the true nature of the food in question. Foods grown with chemicals and preservatives or those with added hormones or genetically altered represent the lowest quality foods available for human consumption.

Anyone with a desire to understand the nature of food first needs to make quality the first rule of thumb. Unfortunately, this is not often the case with conventional nutritional studies where the measuring of nutrients often takes precedence over quality. This form of food analysis, while useful, often leads to categorizing foods in groups that can lead to confusion. A nutritional analysis of a commercial breakfast cereal with added synthetic vitamins may look the same or even better than the nutritional profile of an organic version of the actual whole grain that forms the basis of that breakfast cereal. Both are carbohydrates yet are qualitatively very different from each other.

The same is true for naturally raised grass fed livestock and factory-farmed livestock. The former is raised in a natural environment eating their natural grass diet while the latter is raised in confinement, often consuming foods unnatural to the species and further enhanced with hormones and chemicals. While both animals may look alike, when examined under a microscope for nutritional data they reveal differences in fat levels and other nutrient levels making them qualitatively very different.

The dietary choices we make based on nutritional analysis will be greatly enhanced through personal health benefits when quality is considered first. While a cursory examination between superior quality, naturally grown foods compared to their inferior counterparts may show in some cases some comparative nutritional profiles, it has been proven through scientific studies that quality foods have higher ratios of nutrients in general in addition to little or no harmful chemicals and preservatives. Understanding the effects on our health of inferior foods laced with toxic chemicals and artificial ingredients is obvious and it is this obviousness of quality that often leads well intentioned proponents of natural foods to inaccurately demonize particular foods yet understanding the same foods grown naturally reveals a greater comprehension of what these foods are as sources of nourishment.

The study of food quality leads us to the basic fundamental truth that the foundation of any truly healthy diet must be comprised of naturally grown and naturally raised foods.

History and Origin.

The history and origin of a particular food is another essential principle in the quest for understanding food energetics. How long has the food been consumed by humans? Where did the food in question originate and how?

Sweet potatoes have been grown and consumed by Asian and South American peoples for thousands of years in spite of the fact that these different cultures they are thousands of miles from each other. The same is true for peanuts. Chickens have provided nourishment for Asians and Middle Eastern peoples for 7 to 10 thousand years. Whole grains have been essential foods for 20 thousand years or more. In fact the very same unprocessed foods we consume today have been the mainstay of the human diet for at least 10 thousand years with the primary changes being in quality over those many decades. In fact, most of these food changes have occurred in only last two hundred years. Aside from offshoots through grafting and crossing of plant species to produce new vegetables, there have been few additions to human foods in over 10 thousand years.

Why is that? Could it be because there has been no need to alter these highly nourishing ancestral foods? In the coming years we will likely see more foods introduced as a result of genetic manipulation but for the most part we are still dependent on our ancestral foods as nourishment for the masses.

Now, one could argue that just because a food has been consumed for thousands of years does not mean it is good for you. This statement has little relevance when considering that diets are by design, all of them, modern and ancestral diets. The foods in any diet are designed for a particular agenda whether they are for health, spirituality, emotional stability, strength…with some being multifaceted. Ancestral foods have a long track record of nourishing the human species and all ancestral foods without exception can be proven to be nourishing through nutritional analysis as well.

It really has nothing to do with good or bad for us until we bring our personal designer diet into the picture. It is then that we began to define a food as good or bad and began to remove it from or add it to our approved foods list. It is one thing to say you do not want to eat a chicken because you do not believe in eating animals but attempting to rationalize not eating a chicken because it is a bad or unhealthy food to eat is not only inaccurate, it is absurd. Alternatively, you might try to rationalize not eating chicken because you think you can get the same protein from other sources. This too is inaccurate. Sure, you can get protein from different sources but the chicken has its own unique profile of proteins and other nutrients that makes it a chicken and nothing else. No other food has the same profile of nutrition that a chicken has. The same goes for a cow or any source of plant protein. This in no way means one is better than the other as a food, just different. Comparative nutrition profiling is not only inaccurate; it can be misleading when trying to understand food energetics. The very purpose of studying food energetics is to get to know the uniqueness of each food not to debase that uniqueness by comparing some of its isolated nutrients to something else equally unique in its own way simply because it has some of the same nutrients.

Then there is the question of location, where a food originated and how that fits into your diet. Historically, foods grown in one part of the world have traveled to the other side of the world through trade and commerce. This has been going on longer than most historians would like to believe and there is plenty of evidence to support it. Does eating from your environment mean not eating spices from Thailand if you live in North America? How about someone living in the mountains thousands of miles from the sea, should they not eat fish or sea vegetables since those foods are not part of their environment? Only you can put limitations on the size of your food environment. You can choose to limit your diet to foods grown from as far away as 1000 miles in any direction or you could choose to include foods from many thousands of miles in any direction. Which choice do you think offers the best options for a healthy balanced diet? A good axiom to uphold when choosing foods for a balanced whole foods diet is: Support locally, eat globally.

As humans, we have the capacity to eat anything as evidenced by the tremendous quantities of junk foods consumed by humans. Is it reasonable to assume that someone living in a non-tropical environment consuming coconut oil from the tropics is going to become mentally unbalanced or develop health problems from eating a food that does not come from his environment? Could one actually become dislocated in time and space due to this food relationship? And, if so would that be so bad? Coconut oil has a four year shelf life at room temperature, is one of the few heat stable plant oils for cooking and like the coconut from which it is derived it is loaded with all kinds of health supporting nutrition. Based on nutritional propaganda pertaining to saturated fats one would think that coconut oil, with up to 87% saturated fat, would be detrimental to health. Yet, just the opposite is true. Due to it’s high content of lauric acid, a substance that is similar to the nourishing components in mothers milk, the short and medium chain fatty acids in coconut oil are easily assimilated by the body with no indication of raising cholesterol or contributing to weight gain. It is also very helpful in regulating metabolism, an especially helpful food indeed for those suffering from binge eating and other eating disorders. The other products derived from coconut also contribute to good health.

Rich, creamy and metabolically satisfying coconut milk and coconut cream are great foods for those who have trouble consuming dairy products due to lactose intolerance. Essentially, then, coconuts and the products derived from them are healthy foods that just about anyone anywhere can benefit from. The old saying “The world is your oyster” can be taken literally when it comes to food. The choices are limitless but understanding both the varieties of foods you choose to consume, why you choose them and your individual limitations are essential.

How about spices? Tropically grown cayenne peppers, chili type peppers and peppercorns have played important roles in traditional diets for millennia having served indigenous peoples in numerous ways. Not only did they add wonderful and exotic flavors to their daily cuisine, they have medicinal qualities as well that have been acknowledged through modern science. These food seasonings have anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-parasitic qualities. Additionally, they increase blood circulation and can help regulate cholesterol levels. There is no reason whatsoever that these foods should not be part of a healthy diet in Northern Scandinavia and other northern countries since people there, like everyone else in the world, are not exempt from the problems these foods can help to resolve. One way of comprehending the importance of a foods role in history is to eat it. It is when you do this that the historical position of that food in a traditional diet is fully realized because it will become you.

There are many fears surrounding foods today but most of these food fears can easily be reduced by first eliminating non food foods from ones diet and replacing them with real traditional foods. Once this is accomplished that once deep-seated fear of food transforms into a sense of respect for all that came before us. This is not to say you should eat all traditional foods from every part of the world, but to know these foods as the original sources of nourishment can open doors for making important choices in your diet that could literally change your life for the better while adding additional sources of nutrition.

Food Character Observations

When you observe other people, you become aware of numerous characteristics that attract your attention. Dark hair, light hair, lean body, over weight, muscular body, big smile, sadness, well dressed conservative, casual elegance, unkempt, charismatic, fatigued, high energy…these and many other characteristics flash through your minds during your daily encounters with others. Some of these are given extra thought and contemplation while others are simply noticed.

We humans have so many physical and emotional characteristics it sometimes makes it difficult to figure each other out but we are all aware that some basic traits are shared by us all and these are what make us human. Whether it is a long-term relationship, new friends, allies in the workplace, any acquaintance really, we are constantly discovering new characteristics of those around us.

The foods you eat also have their unique characteristics and observing their unique characteristics can give you insight into how a particular food can nourish you through its correlations to your body and mind. By observing how a plant grows and develops, you learn about its needs, what it requires to become a food that you will consume. With animals, you can observe their growth and development too but you can also observe their behavior and in the case of factory farmed animals the behavior modifications due to the disruption of their natural lifestyles.

The obsessive-compulsive behavior, often accompanied by osteoporosis, of caged hens is not a characteristic of free-range chickens. The grass fed cow maintains a healthy weight and disposition while the cow raised in confinement contains more fat and tends to suffer from depression and other health problems. It is not far fetched to surmise a psychological connection between factory farmed chicken and the increase of OCD among humans consuming excessive quantities of these animals, just as it is not far fetched to suspect a link to osteoporosis in humans and the same animal. Food psychology is not a new phenomenon. Ancient peoples understood it and it became the foundation of traditional healing modalities throughout the world. Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic healing are just two examples that incorporate this natural science.

When observing a leafy green vegetable you can see how it grows upward and thrives on sunshine. Exposed to the elements it withstands torrential rains and continues to grow and expand upward and outward as it inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. This correspondence is reversed in your respiratory system where your lungs inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Green plants then are the respiratory system of the earth and have a direct correlation to your corresponding bodily function.

Root vegetables (carrots, burdock, parsnip etc.) are foods that prefer the dark recesses of the earth, a private food hidden away from the bright sunshine. These foods are highly efficient at absorbing and assimilating water and nutrients from the earth while they anchor and stabilized the whole plant.
These simple observations speak volumes about the energetic properties of these foods.

The firm fleshed winter squash is planted in summer and harvested in fall. As it develops, a long tubular stem nourishes the squash by supplying it with water, inorganic materials and other nutrients the squash needs to develop into a dry, warming sweet-fleshed nourishing food. The process of growth and development is slow and consistent.

Planted in the summer and harvested in the summer, the juicy, sweet watermelon too is nourished by a long tubular stem that pumps copious amounts of water and nourishment to the melon. This causes the development process and growing season to be of less duration than the squash and results in a delicious, moist, cooling flesh. Both the squash and the melon are heavy, sweet and firm on the exterior but their water content and the speed in which they develop differ greatly. The way the squash and melon handle water from their environment has a direct correlation to our kidneys and bladder, two organs responsible for water balance in the human body. The obvious effect of the melon is an increase in urination while the dry flesh of the squash has the opposite effect but that is not all. Each food can have several energetic effects on the body.

Modern nutritional science has recently discovered that some food components, phyto-nutrients and anti-oxidants, choose specific pathways from a complex network existing in the human body in which to travel. The ability of foods to traverse the physiological network of the human body has long been part of the study of food energetics. Just as modern research has demonstrated nutritional pathways, ancient food energetics too goes way beyond the simple ingestion of food into the digestive tract and the excretion of waste from the large intestine.

Thousands of years ago, Traditional Chinese medicine, demonstrated how the flavors of foods choose specific pathways to organs and systems of the human body. For example, the sweet flavor traverses the spleen and pancreas meridian pathways. These pathways (commonly known as meridians) play important roles in the natural healing modalities of acupuncture, herbalism and massage therapy. Of the five flavors, each follows its own specific pathways to a pair of organs in the body.

Using our example of the squash and melon, you can learn about another energetic property through flavor pathways. Both are sweet tasting foods so they will naturally travel the pathways to the spleen and stomach carrying with them their unique energetics or characteristics. The resulting effect on these organs will tend to be as follows. The juicy, sweet, soft and watery melon will tend to have a relaxing, cooling and dampening effect on the spleen and stomach whereas the winter squash will tend to have a tonifying, warming and drying effect on the spleen and stomach. One is not better than the other they are simply different just as every other food is as well. Each has its own unique energetic characteristics.

Other methods of character observations include what happens to a food when combined with other foods through various methods of preparation. Adding fire to foods through cooking contributes to thermogenic (warming) properties depending on the foods density factor and how it is cooked. Pickling foods resulting in fermentation and enhancement of enzymes can change the energetics of foods by opening pathways that would not be traversed were they prepared through steaming, boiling or sautéing. Foods textures, hard, crunchy, soft, chewy…influence the energetics of foods in their own ways as well.

First ask yourself and then ask your friends what their favorite green vegetable is, their favorite root vegetable, favorite grain, animal product (dairy products, meats etc.), favorite fruit… Then apply our third principle of Character Observations and learn about those foods. Discover why you like them so much, why they have become such an intimate part of your life. Learn how they have nourished you in helping you to heal or even how they could be preventing you from healing and being nutritionally satisfied. In the process of discovery you will learn through those foods many things about yourself simply because the foods you eat will become you and in subtle ways you will become them.

This fascinating geometric model has been called by many other names in different parts of the world and different historical epochs. The spiral has often been termed the “universal master form,” and has long been revered as a sacred symbol of life, death, and transformation. Found abundantly throughout nature in both the plant and animal realms, manifestations of the spiral with its logarithmic progressions have been represented in the arts and sciences of every culture, from the most primitive to the most advanced. It is in the logarithmic spiral that we find a consistent thread of knowledge linking the beliefs and lifestyles of the great ancient civilizations through art, architecture, astronomy, engineering—and even agriculture, pastoralism, and food production.

Whether in India, China, the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, North or South America, the study of traditional foods reveals a dietary pattern based on a remarkably consistent wisdom of sensibility, practicality, and proportion. On the surface, these traditions are characterized by obvious cultural diversity: thus, one part of the world may include cereals of a particular species, while elsewhere another species takes precedence. The same holds true for vegetables, animal products, beans, seeds and nuts, dairy products, etc. Yet there is an underlying consistency—one is tempted to say uniformity—in the basic proportions of foods and food groups each culture has used to feed its people.

There are, of course, broad differences based on climate and terrain. Coastal peoples naturally consumed more fish and seafood than inland peoples, who consumed more fowl and mammal products. Yet as fundamentally agricultural peoples, both groups consumed animal products overall in a roughly equivalent proportion to all other foods. While ruling classes often exercised the exclusive rights of the wealthy to adjust these proportions for their personal use, the general proportions were maintained among traditional peoples just as they are today. Some non-agricultural peoples represent exceptions to these principles due to environmental factors or simply because of the fact that they do not practice agriculture. However, even among many hunter-gatherers these proportions of higher quantities of plant foods with smaller portions of animal products are the norm.

Golden Ratio, Golden Age

It is my experience that a diet of traditionally grown foods, eaten in accordance with the principles of the golden spiral, holds the keys to health where so many other approaches fail. The culture bearers of antiquity were able to create a golden age, a state that is possible only when all aspects of life are in harmony. I believe we can achieve optimal health, a clean environment, and new levels of cultural expression by consciously implementing these principles once again.

Careful investigation of the spirallic nature of the traditional dietary pattern leads to a startlingly profound truth at its center: Light is the source of inspiration. This is simply a poetic way of stating that the source of all is the powerful force of creation itself—what some refer to as “God” or by many other names.

This omnipresent, omniscient force charges and generates the process and flow of energy through each stage of this spiral, supplying the raw materials for human sustenance and nourishment. These materials are comprised of macronutrients, vitamins, phytonutrients, carotenoids, and all other known and unknown ingredients inherent in our daily foods.

More than these ingredients, every food also carries specific energetic properties exclusive to its makeup and origin. These “energetics” have the ability to alter our health in profound ways.

THE SPIRAL OF NOURISHMENT

Section 1: Air

When we are born, the first breath, a simple inhalation of air, is the beginning of an incredible journey in self-discovery that is individually unique.

Throughout our lives, air will serve as our most abundant resource for nourishment. Oxygen from the air will spark the fires of metabolism, helping to regulate all micro- and macro-cellular functions in the physical body. Although we experience variations in our respiratory quotients, the air we breathe will supply the greatest proportion of nourishment as energy to support life.

The constant exchange of oxygen with carbon dioxide through the respiratory system plays an integral role in the body’s ability to process all other forms of nutrients. Air is the one form of nourishment that is consumed while you are both asleep and awake. Other forms of nutrition listed in the chart have a proportionally equal influence on oxygen’s effectiveness—right down to the cellular level.

Section 2: Water

Water comprises more of our daily diet than we realize. Fruits and vegetables are mostly water. Grains, beans, soups, and boiled or steamed foods are prepared with water. About 75 percent of the human body is water. If we were to weigh all that we consume at the end of a day, water would weigh in as the second largest quantity, after air.

We require large amounts water daily for cooling the body and cleansing the blood, cells, and organs of toxins and wastes. Water is also essential in maintaining and regulating healthy bowel function and peristalsis.

While pure water is the ideal beverage and the one that hydrates our body cells most efficiently, our ancestors also consumed other liquids, including herbal teas, wine, beer, and water-based herbal remedies.

Section 3: Carbohydrates

The ideal carbohydrates are those consumed by traditional peoples: whole grains, whole grain products (breads, pastas, etc.), pseudo-cereals (quinoa, amaranth, teff), and starchy vegetables (roots and tubers: sweet potato, potato, yam, yucca, squashes, and others). These foods, partly because of their versatility, should make up the largest portion of the diet.

This section also includes supplementary carbohydrates (all fruits and sweeteners). Some typical sweeteners are grain malts, honey, maple syrup, sugar cane, etc. Supplementary carbohydrates were consumed in smaller quantities in traditional diets.

Among the carbohydrates, revered above all other foods, appear the “sacred gifts of the gods”: the grains and pseudo-cereals. Ancient peoples believed these staples held the genetic memory of human origin and the spiritual essence of man and woman.

Section 4: Vegetables

Vegetables include all edible land and water plants. Roots, seeds, leaves, stalks, buds, and marine- and fresh-water algae are but some of the plant forms consumed around the world. Although many vegetables can be considered additional sources of carbohydrates, I have placed them in a separate section because of their dietary importance in the lives of our ancestors.

Vegetables contain a wide spectrum of nutrients and act as neutralizing agents when eaten in proper combination with other foods. For most people, vegetables are sorely lacking, exceptions being those instances where people practice certain ethnic traditions or dietary programs specifically based on ample quantities of a variety of fresh vegetables.

Section 5: Protein

Progressing from greatest quantity to smallest, protein sources follow wild and domesticated plants as the next category in the spiral. This includes a broad range of traditional foods: eggs, wild game, fowl, waterfowl, cattle, lamb, goat, pig, organ meats, dairy products, shellfish, fish, beans, seeds and nuts are some of the many types of protein consumed historically throughout the world.

Section 6: Fats and Oils

Fats and oils have a long history in dietary traditions, consumed either as a part of other foods or as a base used to prepare particular foods. Olives, avocadoes, and nuts are whole-plant sources of fat; salmon, eggs, and beef are examples of animal sources. Some traditional, standalone fats include animal-derived butter, ghee, and lard; and the plant oils from olives, sesame seeds, hazelnuts, palm kernels and coconuts.

Section 7: Essential and Supportive Supplements

This section of the dietary spiral includes herbs, spices, salt, minerals, and natural medicinal foods such as bee pollen, specialized fungi and micro algae. It can also include high quality sources of non-synthetic whole food supplements.

Supplements have several functions. They can enhance digestion, aid assimilation, improve flavor, raise or lower blood pressure, increase kidney or liver efficiency, and strengthen the immune system. Peppercorns and certain other spices possess anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal properties.

Additional Considerations

The area of each section represents roughly the proportion that type of food amounted to in our agricultural ancestors’ daily diets. These proportions hold true for many generations back into perpetuity.

Each section of the chart is proportionally dependent on every other section for proper metabolic balance and health maintenance.

While the chart divides different foods into sections or categories, bear in mind that in the context of nature and tradition, this represents a single continuum: you will find most foods and food groups overlapping with the preceding and/or following categories. For example, “beans and nuts” embraces nutritional combinations of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in varying amounts.

The sections are also designed for easy recognition of the food sources most commonly accepted as fitting in that section. For example, beans (legumes) are only about 25 percent protein, yet they are most commonly thought of as a protein source and have therefore been placed in the protein category. As another example, many cheeses are high in both protein and fat and could logically be ascribed to either category. Yet, like beans, cheese is more commonly thought of as a protein food, so it is grouped in that section. Leafy green plants, which also provide some protein, are grouped in their own section, as explained above.
Plant protein has an incomplete amino acid profile, while animal proteins contain all essential amino acids necessary for the body’s growth and cell repair.

Plant oils have a different effect in the body than animal fats, and each type of oil or fat has its own unique effect as well. In fact, the body responds uniquely and distinctly to each different food.

What worsens these concerns is the inordinate difficulty of sorting through all the “newest information” to make any reasonable sense out of an increasingly bewildering picture. Multinational corporations and private interest groups “buy” food science to promote their special agendas, each tailored to support profits in the marketplace. As a result, we are routinely bombarded with an at times bizarre assortment of food theories and fad diets, each solemnly pronounced to be beneficial to our health, a “breakthrough” that will increase our chances at longevity and lean fat free bodies.

Indeed, many of us experience such an information overload that we are no longer able to ask the right questions and think for ourselves. To help remedy this situation, I offer food energetics as a simple way to understand and choose food.

QUALITY IS HEALTH

At first hearing, the term “food energetics” may sound like yet another diet theory; quite the opposite is true. Food energetics is an effort to distance us from fad and theory, to start thinking for ourselves and simplify our daily eating habits in a way that can be exceptionally rewarding.

What do you think of when you talk about health and hear the word “energy?” Perhaps words like vitality, stamina, endurance,and mental stability come to mind, as well as other terms that all have to do with feeling good. Thinking of food as being “energetic” suggests the idea of vibrant, healthy, enduring foods, foods that are themselves well nourished.

Grade-school science classes taught us that plants need sunlight, air, water, and soil to grow. True enough, but equally important is the question of quality. Superior plants make superior food; the importance of quality cannot be overemphasized. For example, the healthiest soil contains a balance of many minerals and microorganisms. The highest quality (most energetic) food sources are those grown via the most natural methods. “Wild” or “wild-crafted,” “biodynamic,” and “organic” are terms associated with foods grown with natural methods. “Commercial,” “hydroponic,” and “genetically engineered” are descriptions of those methods that are both more artificial and by far the predominate ones on the market today. Unfortunately, such artificial methods cause their produce (whether plant or animal) to progressively lose its integrity (identity), energy (energetic health), and nutritional value.

Quality nourishment is the first principle of food energetics.

ESSENTIAL CHARACTER

The second principle is “essential character.”
Each food has qualities that make it what it is. For example, a cow is a cow—by its character, it is not a goat or sheep, and certainly not a chicken. The essential character of a food is what gives it the identity we recognize as an orange, duck, fish, or cow. There are four basic patterns that make up this principle; each food has a predominance of one of these patterns. These four patterns are:

These four patterns help to better understand the nature of a particular food. A carrot, for example, grows underground, and not in a rounded path (like a turnip) but fairly straight down, to a tip. Considering the four patterns, we see that “down and in” best reflects the growth pattern of the carrot.

Being a root vegetable, the carrot absorbs and assimilates vital elements from the soil for the ultimate benefit of the entire plant. This is also true for other root vegetables: they are the portions of the plant that absorbs and assimilates elements from the soil and firmly anchors the entire plant into that soil. Yet the turnip, though it is also a root vegetable, doesn’t exhibit the same characteristic pattern as does the carrot. Its growth rather follows the pattern, “down and out,” revealed in the outward, bulging direction that gives it its round shape.

What about leafy green plants, such as collard greens, kale, and lettuce? Which of the four patterns apply to them? Leafy greens grow upward with leaves that spread outward: we would say they are “up and out.” During photosynthesis, green leaves take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Green plants are also high in chlorophyll which helps supply our blood with oxygen.

Let’s take the principle of essential character a step further and see if it can be applied to the systems of the human body.

Do you recall the description above of roots as absorbing and assimilating nutrients for the entire plant? Is there an organ or organ system in the human body that performs the same function? Indeed there is: the gastrointestinal tract,especially the small intestine,where most of our food’s nutrients are absorbed into the bloodstream. Therefore, it would be a reasonable step of energetic logic to propose that root vegetables and the GI tract share a similar or related essential character.

Let’s apply the same transposing logic to the essential character of leafy greens. Their function is the exchange of gasses: taking in carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen. Our body functions in a similar but opposite way, taking in oxygen from the environment and giving off carbon dioxide—a process associated with the respiratory system. Again, we have a function in the plant world that is mirrored and paralleled in a function of the human body. Here again, the metaphoric logic of food energetics suggests that it is precisely that food with a particular function that best nourishes and supports the corresponding human organs’ echoed role in the human body. This correspondence has historically been known as the “Doctrine of Signatures” by traditional peoples throughout the world.

TEMPERAMENT

A third crucial principle of food energetics is “temperament.”
The temperament of a food can be compared to the various psychophysical states within people. We describe certain individuals as being “hot-blooded,” others as “cool” or even “cold-blooded.” We instinctively refer to others as having warm personalities but, perhaps, a dry sense of humor. As in the discussion of essential character, these are more than merely fanciful observations: there is something intrinsic to these different people that is quite real and goes to the core of their nature.

Precisely the same is true of foods.
The four temperaments of food are hot, warm, cold, and cool. Each temperament also occurs always in one of two variations, either dry or damp. These permutations produce eight possible temperaments:

• hot and dry;
• hot and damp;
• warm and dry;
• warm and damp;
• cool and dry;
• cool and damp;
• cold and dry;
• cold and damp.

Let’s look at how these temperaments associate with a human personality.
If a person is angry to the point of physical aggression, we can easily surmise that his temperament is hot. If that same person perspires profusely, we can describe his temperament as hot and damp.

Of course, we all have the capacity to control our extreme temperaments, and rarely does anyone exhibit the same temperament all the time. For that matter, there is not a food in nature that exhibits only one, solitary, unchanging temperament. Temperament, whether of a person or a food, can be thought of as a tendency, and one that is subject to change.

The temperament also reveals the potential effects a particular food might have on the body and mind of the person consuming it. For example, fats and proteins help generate warmth to our bodies through a process called thermogenesis. Vitamins, enzymes, minerals, carbohydrates, tend to have cooling effects on the body.

When classifying foods according to temperament you will discover several variables. For example, consider the difference in temperaments between a cow (beef, red meat) and a chicken. The large, mammalian cow is high in protein comprised of long twitch fibers, rich red blood (hemoglobin), and saturated fat, giving this food a hot and damp temperament. Chicken breast meat, by contrast, is white with short twitch fibers, is less fatty, and contains less hemoglobin than red meat. Chicken tends toward a warm and dry temperament. Each will affect the body differently because of these different temperaments.

Every food has its own unique temperament.

PREPARATION

It is also important to realize that any temperament can be altered, sometimes significantly, through food preparation methods, i.e. cooking, fermentation, drying, etc. In the study of food energetics, method of preparation is the third and final consideration (after essential character and temperament) in determining how a food will nourish us.

As a simple example, consider a raw carrot, with its character pattern of down and in and a temperament of cool and dry. When sautéed with oil and seasoned with salt, it maintains its essential carrot character of down and in, but its temperament transforms from cool and dryto warm and damp because of the added oil, salt, and heat.

Cooked foods are generally associated with warm temperaments, while raw foods tend to have cool temperaments. A raw green salad, low in fat and protein but high in water, vitamins, and enzymes, will tend to have a cool and damp temperament that will impart a cooling effect on the body.

To consider an example of how this understanding might be applied to health: Imagine a thin, frail person, living in a northern climate and suffering from a chronic condition of cold hands and feet. It doesn’t take a great deal of common sense to realize that he needs to increase warm foods, perhaps those richer in protein and fat. He would be wise to reduce cool foods, such as raw vegetables, fruits, and juices in order to correct his condition through diet.

Now, this is not a black and white process, nor does it serve well as a prescriptive straightjacket. The understanding and application of food energetics has to do with personal choice — with the individual condition and a commonsense approach to applying these principles in real-life situations. As we learn more about food, we learn more about ourselves, our own preferences and natures and tolerance levels. Dietary extremes tend only to lead inevitably to extremes of equivalent force, only in the opposite direction!

THE SCIENCE OF NATURE

Another way of describing the principles of food energetics is to say that this is one approach to studying nature’s science.

Traditional peoples throughout the world were and many still are intimately connected to nature, and it is through this relationship that they learned over time to apply this “science of nature” to all aspects of their lives. As their knowledge increased, their application of natural laws became the traditional wisdom from which today’s natural healing arts draw their scientific and philosophical foundations. Two of the most widely known of these healing arts are traditional Chinese medicine and the Ayurvedic medicine of India; however, there are many others, equally valid and powerful, that are still practiced today by traditional peoples around the world.

By combining ancient wisdom with modern nutritional research and our own creative understanding, we can arrive at a genuine science of nature that will allow each of us to grasp the true meaning of the French gastronome Brillat-Savarin’s famous phrase, “You are what you eat.”1

Energetic principles are easy and fun to apply. I strongly encourage you to consciously choose a wide variety of foods to experiment with, because food variety contributes to vibrant health and an open mind. Explore and enjoy the foods you eat—because ultimately they will become you!

1.Widely described as “history’s greatest gastronome,” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin spent time in the United States following the French revolution, supporting himself giving language lessons and playing violin in a New York theater orchestra as he introduced new and exotic dishes to his American friends. His most admired work is La Physiologie du Gout (Physiology of Taste) (1825). His actual expression was, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

When considering traditional ancestral diets as a model from which we can draw to improve our own food choices for better health, we must understand that these diets vary considerably according to a host of factors, including soil conditions, cultural habits, changing weather, availability of resources, and more. Despite these smaller variations, we can place traditional diets broadly into one of two categories depending on whether the people who practiced them were hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists.

Conventional historians assert that the earliest traditional human diets were those of the hunter-gatherers; however, this established theory is now being questioned by a host of alternative historians. Explorers, anthropologists, and other scientists have offered compelling evidence of long-lost agriculturalist civilizations that had reached levels of development equal to or more advanced than our own.

The theory for advanced agricultural civilizations in prehistory parallels challenges to the mainstream theory of cultural evolution, which proclaims a slow evolutionary process from primates to primitive humans who used stone tools and fire, culminating in the first civilizations between 5,500 BC and 3,500 BC. While this “cultural evolution” orthodoxy has its supporting evidence, its theory is limited by the hypothesis that civilization began about this time and that all prehistoric humans lived as hunter-gathers until about 10,000 years ago, when they began to discover agriculture. The alternative point of view suggests that both agricultural and non-agricultural peoples may have coexisted for thousands or even tens of thousands of years—long before the accepted (and more conservative) estimated timeline for the advent of agriculture.

As one explores publications with conventional and alternative perspectives on ancient history, a profound realization begins to emerge: We modern humans have been around for a long time and have experienced numerous cycles of catastrophic destruction. Through sheer tenacity and the will to survive, we have repeatedly emerged from the ashes of destruction to rebuild civilization.

Today, many historians blame our agricultural ancestors for the downfall of several civilizations, when the true causes were more likely drought, floods, fire, or any other number of natural phenomena. Civilized Homo sapiens have lived through ice age conditions and numerous other periods of setbacks, surviving it all along with primitive humans and a variety of other primates.

Many of the primitive humans of Paleolithic times did not participate in cultural advancement beyond their basic living needs and have survived outside the boundaries of civilization for countless generations. Estranged from urban living, some of these groups of prehistoric hunter-gatherers learned to make and use stone tools and have continued to do so for hundreds of thousands of years. Sometimes their slow-paced development came to an abrupt halt when they were conquered by other hunter-gatherers or by agricultural peoples.

Today, in some parts of the world, indigenous tribes of hunter-gatherers continue to exist in much the same way as those of antiquity; at the same time, colonizers from powerful nations continue to seek new lands and peoples to conquer. Things haven’t changed that much for the hunter-gatherers, and the “stone age” of the past, in some ways, is alive and well today.

Apart from our two categories of traditional peoples, past and present, we can define a third category of humans: one that is growing at a phenomenal pace and may be destined to replace the other two traditional groups altogether. This third category represents an extreme departure from our two natural ancestral dietary traditions, moving to one based on artificial foods. The people in this group use an “imitation diet,” which we shall touch upon near the end of our discussion. For now, let’s get back to our two ancestral groups and their diets.

Clues from the Past

It is important to keep in mind that anthropological and archeological conclusions are very often based on hypotheses and conjectures derived only from evidence that conforms to, or is made to conform to, preexisting paradigms. It is through this exclusive evidence that history is then reconstructed and often presented to the public as though it were fact. By re-examining this evidence and combining it with other reliable sources, we are able to create alternate theories and arrive at different conclusions from those we have been given. Let’s consider the primary means of obtaining supportive evidence, see how it is used to formulate commonly accepted beliefs about Paleolithic dietary history, and realize how these conclusions are not the only interpretations possible.

There are four basic means of obtaining evidence when trying to understand our ancestors’ traditional diets; other methods are usually extensions or variations of these four.

A. The analyses of stone tools, animal bones, and charred seeds found in prehistoric sites, mostly in or around lake settlements, hearths, fire pits, and caves.
B. Examinations of a few prehistoric human and other primate specimens, mostly incomplete fragments of skulls and skeletons.

C. Examinations of the world’s prehistoric cave and rock art, depicting hunting scenes. This method also includes other art forms, such as pottery and textiles.

D. Cultural comparisons between ancient hunter-gatherers and modern hunter-gatherers. These also include comparative analyses of bones, teeth, and genetics of pre-agricultural and agricultural peoples to speculate and generalize about their health characteristics as compared to one another.

Each of these examples of evidence, regardless of the context in which they are found, is conveniently placed in the context of a single established theory: the cultural evolution theory. However, all four data collection methods have resulted in additional, anomalous evidence that does not fit the accepted paradigms; such anomalous evidence is often simply discarded.

For example, anthropologists have found human bones and stone tools in North America dating thousands of years before what they considered the earliest human occupation of this region. Also, many examples of very ancient stone tools have been found throughout the world that show craftsmanship superior to more recent examples. This suggests that stone tool making did not always evolve gradually or consistently, as is usually suggested. Agricultural tools, too, have been found in early strata, dating well before the accepted timeline for agricultural origins.

Historical dating is based on the assumption of uniformity, a gradual and consistent depositing of strata over millions of years. This idea of uniformitarianism does not fully consider the evidence for the many global catastrophes that have occurred throughout history, sometimes with effects so devastating that virtually all remnants of civilizations were obliterated. Human relics, dinosaur fossils, and any number of other remains have been found mixed in strata dating back millions of years, when each theoretically should have been found in its own particular stratum, far removed from all others. This sort of evidence appears all over the world and clearly proves that nature does not always behave in a consistent, regulated manner.

Nevertheless, for convenience and consistency’s sake, I will use the standard dating sequences of human remains and other historical artifacts for purposes of discussion throughout this article.

Lack of plant evidence in strata at some Paleolithic sites seems to indicate that hunter-gathers consumed mostly meat, with few fruits or vegetables, because animal bones were often found in abundance around prehistoric hearths, while plant remains rarely show up in very early strata. However, plants have a much higher decomposition rate than bones or stone tools, and this is the reason we find little evidence for plant consumption in ancient strata. Pollen samples are often used to obtain scientific data on prehistoric plant matter, but results can vary considerably.

While animal bones and carbonized wild grass seeds found in prehistoric lake settlements seem to indicate that meat and wild seeds were part of the hunter-gatherers’ diet, we should not assume that no or few plant foods were consumed just because few flora samples show up in prehistoric strata. Some obvious exceptions to diets including plant consumption would be ice age sites, where people similar to modern-day Inuit lived and whose environment lacked a climate suitable for plant growth. But while evidence from ice age settlements is plentiful, these sites do not represent the only lifestyle of early humans, who had to endure changing global conditions over hundreds of thousands of years. Even the regular inclusion of wild and domestic cereal grains by prehistoric hunter-gatherers, is now suggested by some historians.

For example, we find evidence today of early agricultural tools in several areas of the Near East where groups of robust peoples we call the Natufians once lived.

Of particular interest is the presence of sickle blades, sickle handles and even some intact sickles. The blades often have a sheen or gloss, which is taken to indicate that they had been used to harvest cereals, either wild or tame. Grinding and pounding equipment, both stationary and moveable, was also abundant. All the equipment for cultivating cereal grains is present in the Natufians’ industries, but there is no indication that either plants or animals were domesticated. The Natufian people lived in an area in which wild wheat and barley are abundant today and presumably were abundant at that time.2
The Natufians are a good example of grain consumers whose skeletal remains reveal robust health. In fact, there are many indigenous hunter-gatherers living today who include a large quantity of plants in their diets. The assumption that agriculture and the domestication of cereal grains began for the first time in the Neolithic period is tenuous.
While we can no longer deny the regular use of wild grasses by some early hunter-gatherers, we must also understand these early peoples may have had uses for wild grasses other than as food. Examples of charred wild grasses have been found in Paleolithic sites and are often interpreted (in attempts to support the evolution of cultivated plants theory) as primitive examples of pre-agricultural food sources from which later evolved cultivated cereals. While in some cases this is possible, as a few Paleo feces have revealed the remains of grass seeds, it is more likely that this evidence represents the early use of grasses for fuel, baskets, bedding, or any of a range of other purposes commonly found today among the world’s non-agricultural indigenous peoples.
Ancient Structures and Primitive Art

The first evidences of civilization around the world are megalithic stone forms so old that archeologists have trouble assigning dates because of the difficulty in dating stone with radiocarbon dating technology. Even if it could be dated, the dated age of such an artifact would not necessarily tell us when the megalith was cut and placed. Therefore, most of the dates assigned to these structures are based on pottery, bones, and other artifacts found near or on the sites. This, too, can be misleading: many of these artifacts are often remnants of cultures that followed the megaliths by thousands of years. In other words, many of these structures could be thousands of years older than suspected; some even show signs of vitrification.

These ancient stone structures obviously were not the work of early hunter-gatherers, who would have had neither any reason to build such edifices nor the technology to do so. The world’s many examples of monumental architecture were obviously constructed by technologically advanced agricultural peoples living in prehistoric times. And while we often think of the builders as primitives using the crudest of stone and metal tools, some of these megaliths could be produced today only with the most advanced equipment available—and some could not be reproduced at all, even with modern technology.

We refer to these nameless ancient experts of masonry simply as the “megalith builders.” The enigmatic walled fortress of Sacsayuaman sitting high on the hilltop above the charming city of Cuzco, Peru, is one example of their work. Technologically perfect, these stones easily pre-date the Western timeline of the earliest Incas; the techniques used for cutting and finishing these gigantic stones are no longer practiced. Indeed, later Incan and modern Peruvian stone works pale in comparison. The Incas themselves never took credit for these megalithic structures, attributing them instead to ancient giant culture-bearers. Throughout Peru one can find numerous examples of ancient Peruvian stone works piled in rubble upon gigantic blocks of precision-cut, magnificently crafted stone, built perhaps by some long-forgotten ancestors of the Incas. Though expert stone masons in their own right, modern-day Incas cannot reproduce these works. Who these builders were remains a mystery as we regrettably concede that these great methods in engineering and technology have been lost.

On the other side of the world at Ba’albek lies the undated and massive Trilithon, a gigantic stone platform consisting of three massive stones that were expanded upon with later Greek and Roman architecture. No one from known Western civilization could have originally built the Trilithon, though, because no one during that time period had the technology necessary to move three gigantic, 870-ton stone blocks over rough, uneven terrain, then raise them ten meters onto a platform and set them so precisely. It is highly questionable whether we could accomplish this feat even today. There has yet to be an orthodox explanation for these Herculean feats from our prehistoric past that can be demonstrated and proven.

Many ancient megalithic structures also remain as underground tunnel works that extend for hundreds of miles into the subterranean world. Someone was using a very sophisticated technology many thousands of years ago to design these megalithic structures, few of which have ever been equaled by anyone later in history. If we are to believe the current paradigm that proposes that these and numerous other superhuman feats were accomplished by humans, we have little choice but to accept the existence of advanced civilizations in prehistory.

Ancient Cave Art

Prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France date between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. These and other cave paintings throughout the world reveal an extraordinary sophistication, not only in the artwork itself but also in the subtle messages portrayed. The Lascaux art, for example, uses the natural contours of the rocks to give three-dimensional appearances to many of its figures, which almost seem to come alive when viewed at different angles.

Many of the world’s cave paintings are so unusual and modern in scope that few could possibly believe primitive cave men could have made them. Still others are so completely mind-boggling and difficult to interpret according to accepted theory that they are intentionally left out of history books. An historian might suggest that the cave paintings portraying hunting scenes of mammoths and other animals are the only examples depicting actual daily life during prehistoric times. However, within this context we are left with little choice but to write other paintings off as representing the influence of mere superstition, or perhaps drug-induced hallucinations—yet these explanations do not account for the amazing skill level and exceptional attention to detail these works display.

Although there are many available caves throughout the world, cave dwellers today are few and far between, which suggests that people choosing to live in caves during prehistoric times probably would have done so only for extreme reasons. Cave dwellers may have resorted to this lifestyle to protect themselves from an inhospitable climate, for example. Exposure to predators was another concern for these early humans; the saber-toothed tiger and giant bear were two likely man-eaters that early cave dwellers would have needed to avoid. Troglodytic existence is quite rare among indigenous peoples today.

So, who were these ancient cave artists? A few experts suggest that Cro-Magnon men were the artists responsible for some of these paintings. Perhaps, but basing this on the assumption that primitive Cro-Magnon or other hunter-gatherers were the only available artists at the time doesn’t make this conclusion true. What about other cave paintings with high levels of sophistication that we find around the world? Hunter-gatherers today don’t even paint in caves. There are cave paintings dating back 11,000 years in Australia, and modern native aborigines assure us that the paintings were made long before their arrival.

What are we to make of a scene that details ten stars of the night sky, the seven stars of the Pleiades and three other constellations—four of which we need telescopes to see? Astronomers say these four stars were not visible in prehistoric times. Could a human with exceptional eyesight have seen them and later documented them in a painting? Could the artist have experienced astronomical awareness while astral traveling under the influence of a psychotropic drug? While either of these two unlikely explanations is possible, explanations that are more plausible might be: 1) that the artist learned astronomy from someone with that knowledge, or 2) that the artist was himself an astronomer who had survived a cataclysmic event. Such an event might have forced him or her to revert to a primitive lifestyle staying in the cave, either temporarily or long-term. Perhaps the cave art was a message intended to assure future generations that survivors from a sophisticated civilization had been there.

There are many examples of extremely ancient art that appear more advanced in technique than more recent ones. Cave art can be likened to modern graffiti in that the artists create it as a message on a wall. Sometimes the message is misunderstood or misinterpreted by people analyzing the work, while in other cases the message is perfectly clear. Just as there are variances in the sophistication of modern graffiti, ancient cave art also has its levels of expression, ranging from crude to artistically intelligent and precise. We have examples of “mixed messages,” with a scene in simple stick figures hunting game, other depictions of similar scenes in exacting detail, and still others depicting entire complex panoramic scenes. What is remarkable is that traces of vibrant colors in some of these more sophisticated cave paintings are evident even after many thousands of years. Color retention in paint is a demanding craft that has evolved in modern times only gradually and which paint makers still strive for in the art industry today.

In response to the question of how exquisite ancient artworks were created in the dark recesses of caves, we are told that these prehistoric artists used torches or, in some later examples, oil lamps in order to see what they were painting. This answer seems reasonable until we consider some contraindicating details some alternative historians have revealed. For example, some of these sites lacked the ventilation necessary to support the prolonged burning of fuel. For whatever duration the torch or lamp could burn, the artist would probably have had to endure breathing the heavy, toxic smoke resulting from an inefficient fuel source. The lack of ceiling soot in some of the caves also suggests that no fire whatsoever was used.

This is also the case with some of the Egyptian subterranean artworks. Some Egyptologists answer this apparent mystery by explaining that the early Egyptians used mirrors of highly polished silver or copper. However, we have to question the practicality of this explanation: many of the long, narrow underground passageways leading to this artwork have sharp turns that would have made mirror placement extremely difficult if not impossible. Prehistoric cave art has also been found in high, dark, and almost inaccessible parts of caves where the artist would first have to have built some form of scaffolding (unless they were extremely tall) to access the rock “canvas.”

The question of what could possibly have been the light source for some of this art is still a mystery. Perhaps some of these examples were created with salvaged technological remnants of a collapsed civilization.

Wall paintings have not been the only kind of prehistoric art found in caves. Recently, figures carved from mammoth tusks dating from 30,000 years ago were found in a cave in southwestern Germany. The figures are realistic depictions of a water bird, an anthropomorphic lion-man, and a horse’s head. They are said to rival the quality of work from the high civilizations of 3,000 to 4,000 BC. These figures call into question the theory that human’s artistic skills have evolved gradually in a single continuum. Several sources document news of the discovery.

The researchers said they believed the figurines were created by early anatomically modern humans… Radio carbon dating used to date the carvings is inexact, but the objects were almost certainly made between 28,000 and 35,000 years ago….3

Another article focuses on the primitive shaman theory, since the bird is a common shaman motif. Many tribal groups today practice some form of shamanism; however, this is only one explanation for the carvings’ subject matter because the quality of these carvings are of very high quality. Yet another source challenges the theory that there was a gradual evolution of artistic skills by stating:

The carvings…are considered to be the same vintage as 20 similar ivory artifacts, including ornaments and musical instruments, found in nearby Swabian digs. They join a clutch of other archeological surprises, including the intricate French cave drawings in the Grotte Chauvet and the discovery of a sophisticated use of textiles and clay in what is now the Czech Republic. They all debunk the notion that art developed over eons at about the pace that Homo sapiens moved out of the cave. I guess the bottom line is we’re dealing with people who are at a cultural level very similar to ourselves.4

Also relevant is this article’s mention of the discovery of cooking pottery found in a cave in China:

The cave yielded the country’s most primitive potsherds, estimated to be 12,000 years old. Like any technological innovation, the creation of pottery is believed to have been embedded in some cultural context.5

The Tassili frescos of the Sahara Desert are another example of highly sophisticated art. This inaccessible area is rarely frequented by anyone other than the indigenous Tuaregs. Like many other indigenous peoples throughout the world, they have no idea who the artists were who created the ancient art in their environs. Along with scenes of hunting are scenes of otherworldly, round-headed humanoids, bird headed people, and both dark- and light-skinned women, dressed as though they just stepped out of the latest fashion magazine. The paintings and carvings are prolific and could date from between 2,000-10,000 BC.6 Were the artist-hunter-gatherers exercising their creative skills under some potent herbal drug that gave them visions of the future? Or were they survivors from a lost civilization leaving records for future generations to interpret?

First Farmers, Later Hunter-Gatherers

In the dense Brazilian rainforest archeologists are shocked to find a 1000-year-old, 15-square-mile network of towns and villages that were connected by a system of broad, parallel highways. The reason researchers were shocked is because it has long been thought that the pre-Columbian rain forest had always been a wild ecosystem unaltered by humans and occupied by various hunter-gatherer tribes. The indigenous Xinguano and Kuikuro tribes now living there were unaware of the accomplishments of their ancestors until this discovery. Following are some highlights from news articles:

Ancestors of the Kuikuro people in the Amazon basin had a “complex and sophisticated” civilization with a population of many thousands during the period before 1492. These people were not the small mobile bands or simple dispersed populations that some earlier studies had suggested…the people demonstrated sophisticated levels of engineering, planning…in carving out of the tropical rainforest a system of interconnected towns making up a widespread culture based on farming…. The people also altered the natural forest, planting and maintaining orchards and agricultural fields…7

In reference to the ancient settlement that included raised causeways, canals, and other structures, the article states, “They are organized in ways that suggests a sophisticated knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and other sciences….”8

While 1000 years may not seem such a long time, it certainly was long enough for the people living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to develop amnesia and forget completely where they came from. Current aerial photographs indicate that the entire Amazon forest may have been engineered with settlement mounds, irrigation canals, agriculture and roads at some time in the distant past. These new findings are literally shattering the “pristine myth” that the Americas, before being discovered by Columbus, were an untouched Eden occupied by primitive hunter-gatherers.

It is not known when this massive engineering project took place, but it could have occurred numerous times over thousands of years, each time ending with the lush forest completely engulfing the long-abandoned areas of development. Excavations at many neighboring South and Central American pyramids reveal a repeating history of building and rebuilding by subsequent settlers.

These discoveries also question the origins of what appear to be wild food plants in the Amazon forest. Perhaps many medicinal herbs and food plants gathered by resident tribes today are but free-running examples of what were once cultivated crops of ancient agriculturists. Dates for other recently discovered agricultural sites in Peru and Bolivia are being pushed back nearly 5,000 years as long-standing theories are being challenged.

In the desert of the Supe Valley, near the coast of Peru, lie the remains of Caral, a city that flourished nearly 5,000 years ago. Findings reveal a peaceful city of pyramids and homes founded on farming and trade. Spanning 35 square miles, Caral all but destroys the popular theory that civilization was the result of warfare. While discussing ancient agriculture in South America in his book The Living Fields, Jack R. Harlan refers to other researchers: “Levi-Strauss (1950) and Lathrap (1968), among others, have suggested that most, if not all, hunter-gatherers in South America are ‘drop-outs’ from farming.”9

In Graham Hancock’s seminal work Fingerprints of the Gods we find another example of “lost agriculture” in Egypt. On pages 412–413, he refers to Hoffman’s Egypt Before the Pharaohs and Wendorff’s and Schild’s Prehistory of the Nile when discussing mysteries of “Paleolithic agricultural revolution.” Grinding stones and sickle blades used in the preparation of plant foods were found in the Nile valley and dated to around 13,000 BC. While this may not be so unusual, what makes it interesting is that fishing declined in the area at this time and barley suddenly appeared—just before the first settlements were established. Moreover, hunter-gatherers replaced grinding stones and sickles with stone tools about 2,500 years later. Based on the evidence, Hancock suggests that agricultural practices were established around 13,000 BC in Egypt, but the great Nile floods of 11,000 BC led to the abandonment of agriculture and caused a prolonged relapse to a more primitive lifestyle.10

How many other ancient civilizations lost their agrarian-based cultures to an adaptive hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Such may have been the case with the ancient pre-civilizations of Egypt, China, Mexico, Indus Valley, Sumeria and others that later re-emerged as what now appear to be our “earliest examples” of civilizations.

Sites of large urban developments from antiquity have been found in various areas of inland and coastal regions. Ancient urban peoples clearly used their resources and knowledge of agriculture in harmony with nature to effectively support their growing populations. Some of these cities were comparable with modern cities in size and population, complete with sophisticated waste management systems, drainage, running water, and irrigation canals. The Giza plateau in Egypt contains an elaborate maze of underground tunnels carved out of solid limestone bedrock with precise right-angle turns that stretch for miles. Modern research in this area suggests that these tunnels represent an elaborate irrigation system used to transport water from local rivers to what were once neighboring cities and their agricultural centers. Other records available from these civilizations reveal lifestyles embedded in the advanced sciences of agriculture, astronomy, architecture, and engineering.

These qualities do not appear to have been an evolutionary process; in most cases throughout the world, they rather appear to have been a legacy left by previous civilizations. These and other findings help to prove the capabilities of ancient humans, dispel the “all pre-agricultural peoples were primitives” theory, and strongly support the notion of culturally advanced people with sophisticated abilities living in prehistory.

Time and again, when discoveries do not support an orthodox theory because that theory would crumble if the controversial evidence were made known, those discoveries have been kept from public awareness. The fact of such a state of “withheld evidence” is undisputable.

Why has so much evidence not supporting accepted theories of human history been dismissed? Raising this question would of course be unnecessary if all the puzzle pieces of history already fit nicely into place, but they don’t. Ideally, the world’s recognized anthropologists, archeologists, and historians would assemble, discuss all the evidence available, decide how the information pertains to all possible theories, and present their findings to the public. Until that day, dissatisfied newcomers will need to investigate sites, dredge through archives, run tests, publish their own findings, and speak out to gain credibility for an alternative theory.

When we start to include all the rejected pieces of this extraordinary puzzle, it becomes crystal clear that there is a great deal more to human history than conventional theory would have us believe. These rejected pieces are the very information that could help solve one of life’s greatest mysteries. Until all the cards relative to the traditional lifestyles of ancient peoples are placed on the table, we are left with no choice but to seriously entertain the idea of planet-wide coexistence between hunter-gatherers and agricultural peoples in prehistoric times.

Stature and Health Among Traditional Peoples

Some anthropologists claim our hunter-gatherer ancestors were taller than the agricultural types—and therefore healthier. The idea of greater height as a barometer of better health is typical of the Eurocentric point of view stemming from early anthropological research; just as typically, when examined in a global context, both presently and in the fossil record, it is both misleading and incorrect. I have personally witnessed robust health between both types of traditional peoples from different parts of the world of varying heights and builds.

Oxygen, carbon dioxide, and radiation levels, among other environmental conditions, vary immensely throughout our past, all likely affecting the conditions of flora and fauna, including hominids. Fossil evidence from Paleolithic times generally shows most flora and fauna to be quite large. Using the “man is an evolved animal” theory, is it so unusual to find larger hominid fossils during Paleolithic times as well? Paleolithic flora specimens appear gigantic as compared to their counterparts, even in the Neolithic period. Fauna specimens of the Pleistocene period, including those of the wooly mammoth, giant sloth, saber-toothed tiger, and giant bear, are much larger than the mammals that followed.

Today, many free-ranging, domesticated ruminants are smaller than their wild counterparts, yet they are not less healthy simply because they are smaller and domesticated. Can we unequivocally say that prehistoric mega-fauna and -flora of a particular era were healthier simply because they were larger than the specimens of a later age? Not really. What we can surmise is that many plants, animals, hominids, and humans from a particular time in pre-history differed from many of those that followed, and that each adapted as much as possible and were suitable to the environment of their day.

Just because the cranial capacities of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal were larger than that of today’s human being doesn’t mean they were smarter than we are. To assume this would be the equivalent of saying, “All generally tall Germanic peoples are smarter than generally shorter Japanese people.” Many tall traditional peoples have robust health, but so do many short traditional peoples, some averaging less than five feet in height. The agricultural highland Peruvians, for example, are short in stature and healthy, according to the studies and research of Weston A. Price.11, Early western explorers of South America and Mexico were often carried over treacherous mountain terrain for miles on the backs of sub-five-foot-tall Peruvians and Mexicans. These same tiny agricultural people of the Peruvian highlands could run for 30 miles or more, starting at 9,000 feet above sea level, where the air is extremely thin, to coastal regions, and then return the same day with fish they had caught or traded for their ruler’s dinner—hardly examples of weak, unhealthy people.

To accurately study the history of stature and health in our ancestors, we would have to include the giant skeletons from the many fossils found throughout the world. In the mid-1800s and up through the early 1900s, many human skeletons ranging in height from seven to 18 feet were found in North America and around the world. These fossils were excavated from mounds, caves, and many different levels of strata. Some dated back to the Jurassic period, over 185 million years ago. Newspaper reports, along with many reputable witnesses, attest to the truth of the discoveries, yet none of these numerous unusual fossils have ever been entered into the fossil record. Some of these skeletons were found with axes and stone tools. Some specimens had even gone through the process of mummification. Were these giants healthier Homo sapiens than average-sized Homo sapiens, or were they a different species altogether!

Generalizations on health and stature between ancient agricultural peoples and hunter-gatherers based on fossil evidence can be misleading, as it is not clear how many ancient agriculturists had reverted to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in prehistoric times, nor do we know how many cycles of agriculture and civilization there may have been in our complex history as Homo sapiens. The possibility of such a reversion process, demonstrated by the modern examples of the Amazonian tribes mentioned earlier—whom scientists once thought had a long history as hunter-gatherers, only to find that their ancestors were agriculturists who developed sophisticated city states—could very well be one of many examples. The Amazon discoveries may be the first examples of what could be a worldwide phenomenon. These findings, in addition to the myths and legends told by many ancient hunter-gatherers and agriculturists, could help to explain the sudden emergence of agriculture in some parts of the world. They would also help to explain the discoveries of domesticated cereals and other crops found in archeological sites with no wild progenitors and no signs of previous agricultural experimentation.

Does diet play a role in physical stature? Certainly. People who consume dairy products, for example, tend to be taller than nondairy eaters. However, this does not mean that dairy consumers are healthier than those who consume little to no dairy products. Today, people in Western countries are becoming taller but generally eat inferior foods, compared to those of traditional people. Increased stature today is often caused by foods laden with growth hormones and other hormonal stimulants, the result actually being a decline in health correlating with increased height! While diet may affect stature, peoples’ heights and hat sizes have little to do with robust health, high intelligence, and longevity.

Defining Traditional Diets

If the theories of human and cultural evolution are reasonably valid, we can accept the idea that our diet should consist of foods our ancestors gathered, hunted, and fished. But what do we really know about these ancestral diets, and how do we know what we know?

With little evidence from our prehistoric ancestors, except for some telltale signs from bones and stone tools, much of the information about traditional diets has been gleaned from studies of various present-day indigenous peoples, who continue to live primarily as their ancestors lived. However, some of today’s indigenous peoples, through the influence of other cultures over time, have added new food sources to their diets, creating a modified version of what their ancestors ate. The introduction of new culinary tastes and experiences by outside cultural influences has been a common practice throughout history and likely prehistory as well. Sometimes new foods have improved the health of the people. At other times, the change has contributed to their demise. Traditional peoples who have incorporated large quantities of modern refined flour, sugar, and processed foods into their diets have experienced a sharp decline in health during the last two centuries.

There are many different opinions on what constituted a pre-agricultural diet; most of them can easily find scientific evidence to back their theories. It has been said that our Paleolithic ancestors did not consume dairy products. According to evolutionary theory, it is assumed that dairy products are not incorporated until the onset of agriculture and animal husbandry during the Neolithic period. However, we are not certain that this is the case. A UPI Science News report challenges one such widely accepted notion about the onset of dairy consumption:
…traces of milk some 6,000 years old in Britain, the earliest direct evidence known of human dairy activities… “first direct evidence milk was consumed by humans in the early Neolithic, or Stone Age.”13

Although still fitting the accepted timeline for animal domestication, this report places the use of milk at a far earlier date than previously thought for Britain. People began herding animals earlier than 6,000 years ago in the Near East, but the idea of primitive herders being the only humans who had connections with animals—other than hunted prey and the domesticated dog—is an assumption based on a lack of evidence from anything earlier than about 12,000 years ago. Perhaps the use of animal’s milk, like grain domestication, extends much further back into prehistory than the incomplete facts and assumed theory suggest.

With more evidence supporting the existence of Paleolithic agriculture, it is reasonable to assume that animal domestication occurred at an earlier time as well. Could the extensive harvesting of wild grasses by some Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, as noted by researchers and scientists, have been feeding their domesticated livestock? This is highly plausible in that our fossil record for early animal domestication in the Near East includes bones from both wild and domestic sheep and goats. The morphological similarity of modern and ancient sheep and goat bones is so close that even under close examination they are often indistinguishable from each other. Like the hypothetical “Agricultural Revolution,” and the origin of grain domestication, perhaps it is also unwise and far too early in the game to confine animal domestication to an imaginary time period.

Ancestral Nutritional Problems

Due to at least 100,000 years of extreme climatic fluctuation from the late Pleistocene up through the Holocene, about 12,000 years ago, it is difficult to accurately compare the health of hunter-gatherers and agriculturists in antiquity. Both groups throughout history have experienced periods of abundance, scarcity, and famine, depending on the prevailing climate, geography, and resources. For example, the early Egyptians, like other past civilizations, faced times of war, famine, drought and other environmental problems throughout many generations since prehistory. For thousands of years, these people enjoyed a wholesome, varied diet abundant in both plant and animal products. Because of these facts, we cannot simply state, as some have done, that some human fossils revealing signs of ill health resulted from a diet high in grain and low in protein and fat. The analyses of a few, or even 100, mummies or other fossils of ancient peoples from around the world at various times of history is hardly enough to conclude—again, as some have claimed—that all ancient Egyptians or other agriculturists suffered from ill health for the last 10,000 years or more, as compared to Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

Some historians suggest that because hunter-gatherers were mobile and thought to consist of groups smaller than 100, they were less susceptible to the diseases and health problems faced by agricultural civilizations. Small, moving groups tend not to pollute their water supply or attract rodents and insects, all strong contributors of disease in civilization. While this may be true to some degree, it is also known that hunter-gatherers at times endure famine and an insufficient supply of animal protein. When this “meat hunger” occurs, what little amount of meat is available typically becomes rationed. The males who hunt down the food are given priority, while women and children have to subside on whatever amount remains uneaten, if any remains at all. This lack of protein has been known to last anywhere from several days to weeks for those less fortunate tribe members. Some hunter-gatherers today show signs of malnutrition from protein deficiency.

The notion that “small and mobile is better” is placed into a more realistic perspective when we consider the knowledge of early agriculturalists. Like those of hunter-gatherers, sophisticated civilizations of early agriculturists also had natural medicines to help combat disease. Both groups had a working knowledge of the medicinal qualities of the plants and animals in their environment, knowledge that was passed down from generation to generation. Herbology, traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines, and numerous other highly effective healing systems are contemporary examples of such wisdom that have been passed down through many generations.

Archeological records also suggest use of the natural antiviral, antibacterial qualities of herbs and spices by early agriculturists. The domestication of cats in 9,500 BP may have been an effort to control rodents in settled communities. Evidence is presently accumulating that pertains to severe health problems among some groups of ancient hunter-gatherers during various periods throughout history, not to mention the taboo subject of cannibalism. These new discoveries are challenging previously held beliefs, making it unreasonable to assume that hunter-gatherers possessed superior health over agricultural peoples.

In the present day, the health of some modern agriculturists practicing traditional farming methods far exceeds that of some modern hunter-gatherers; in other cases, the opposite is true. There is no reason the same would not hold true with our ancestors as well. Other studies show that some ancient agricultural peoples had remarkable bone densities and extraordinary life spans. In other words, civilization is not necessarily a disease-infested way of living. Our ancient agricultural ancestors developed ways of handling the many negatives of a largely populated, lesser-mobile lifestyle, just as nomadic hunter-gatherers have found ways to cope with their cyclical changes.

It is quite easy to gather scientific evidence for either the hunter-gatherers or agriculturalists in order to fit a particular dietary agenda, such as a low-carbohydrate or low-fat perspective. If we wanted to downplay the diets of the hunter-gatherers, we could emphasize the long history of cannibalism practiced routinely among some groups until only recently, as documented by anthropologist Marvin Harris14 and others.

Many hunter-gatherers have suffered (and still do today) from long-standing parasitic infections. Hunter-gatherers often feed in an area until it is depleted. Their lives can be marked by internal strife, short life expectancy, population control by infanticide, incest, rape, and violence from tribe to tribe. On the other hand, the lifestyle of some agricultural peoples has had its shortcomings as well, with dental caries, arthritis, the practice of genocide, epidemics, and numerous other problems. In fact, the two groups share so many characteristics that if we were to swap problems between the two groups, we would probably find that eventually they would both end up with the same problems they had before, albeit with slight variations.

Based on the evidence, what we can safely conclude is that physical and mental health problems occur in both groups of people when nutritional balance is adversely affected by external influences. Comparing the modern diets of both groups is impractical and misleading, because many hunter-gatherers today still maintain a natural diet largely similar to their ancestors’ diets, whereas most modern agricultural people maintain a diet based on artificial foods. And while it is helpful to understand the functions and behaviors of isolated nutrients in foods, the approach of modern nutritional science is severely lacking in the nutritional commonsense and wisdom of our ancestors—both of them.

In essence, researchers have not found a specific meat- or plant-based Paleolithic diet that represents an overall example that we could reasonably call “our ancestral diet.” Food choices vary considerably within both groups. Staples of insects and monkey brains, for examples, are daily fare for the hunting and gathering Mentawai tribe of Sumatra, while the agricultural Incan descendants living in the highlands of Peru find their sources of nutrition in cuy (a domesticated guinea pig) and cultivated quinoa.

Dr. Weston A. Price has a very balanced perspective on traditional peoples and their diets, pointing out the numerous health benefits of living a natural lifestyle through his studies of traditional peoples throughout the world. Although the diets of the groups of people he studied vary considerably due to climate, environment, and geographic location, Dr. Price is able to show how natural, unrefined foods contribute to robust health. He concludes that it is not a matter of whether or not a people practice agriculture; rather, it is what essential foods constitute a healthy diet. Among people with ample amounts of nutrient-dense foods, he finds better overall health, as contrasted with those lacking in sufficient amounts of these foods.15

In the past, as today, people throughout the world lived in widely varying conditions and circumstances. Today some people live in poverty and suffer from numerous nutritional deficiencies while others live affluent lives and still suffer from nutritional deficiencies. The most important difference between agricultural people of the past and people of the present is that the overwhelming majority of people of the present suffer from “environmental amnesia” and have lost their intimate connection with their natural surroundings, while many people of the past, whether rich or poor, maintained harmony with nature through their food and agricultural practices.

Diet Evolution

From the evolutionary perspective, man’s earliest primate ancestors ate a diet of fruits, nuts, leaves, roots and a small percentage of meat, not unlike modern-day chimpanzees and apes. These primate “ancestors” were said to have evolved to the point of being able to use stone tools about 2.5 million years ago. Stone tool usage represented the beginning of technology and led to an increase of meat and fat consumption in the form of small, easy-to-pursue animals.

This period of increased meat consumption coincided with an increase in brain size and is considered an important side effect of consuming nutrient-dense food in the form of animal fat and protein. However, the increase in brain size could also have been caused by the need to utilize the brain more in order to hunt prey. Increased brain size gave hominids a new branch among the primates on the ancestral tree 1.8 million to 500,000 years ago. Then, the hominid Homo erectus appeared with a fully functional brain that gave him the capacity to hunt big game. Large quantities of animal bones found at some archeological sites along with stone tools from this period confirmed regular consumption of prehistoric game animals.

While other hominid species appeared throughout these long periods, it was not until about 200,000 years ago that modern humans made their appearance. This period also coincided with the first evidence of cooking. By cooking their food, modern humans increased the available energy content of plant foods, especially complex carbohydrates (wild grasses, tubers, and roots), which, in combination with big game animals, supposedly contributed to another leap in the evolution of brain function.

After about 190,000 years of continuous hunting, fishing, gathering, scavenging, and cooking, modern humans began to farm. Hunter-gatherers presumably had hunted the mega fauna to extinction in some parts of the world. Lack of available prey then led to the need to farm the land.

Many hominid species in the evolutionary tree are not mentioned, and some of the dates vary among historians; what we have then is a basic outline of a widely accepted—though unproven—theory of diet evolution.

The Neanderthals

Although evolutionists do not believe humans evolved from chimpanzees or apes, they do believe that humans and chimps have a common ancestry. Characteristics associated with being human include loss of thick body hair, bipedal movement, tool- and weapon-making, use of fire, creation of clothing, and language development. Each is thought to have evolved along with our ancestors. Evolution, rather than representing a ladder leading upward in a straight line, is better understood as a tree with many hominid branches that include Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. All hominids, relatively, are “cousins” that somehow eventually culminated into modern humans through millions of years of mutations.

However, DNA analysis of Russian Neanderthal remains dating back 29,000 years reveals “that modern humans are not related to Neanderthals,”16 disproving conventional scientific opinion. Instead, Neanderthals represent a completely different species of hominid. Additional tests on Neanderthal remains found in a cave in Germany show the same results. Both studies imply that Neanderthals “…don’t have the diversity to encompass a modern human gene pool.”17

Another theory suggests that Neanderthals didn’t have the technological means to survive the increasingly harsh winters of the ice age. One has to wonder about this theory, when evidence for Neanderthal intelligence has been well documented. They buried their dead in specific astronomical directions, showed signs of artistic creativity, knew how to make fires, lived in caves and ate a diet consisting exclusively of meat. The same theory suggests that modern hairless Homo sapiens had what it took to survive because they could make throwing spears, fishing nets and fur clothing. It is difficult to believe that Neanderthals, with their developed brains, could not have figured out these basic survival skills as well. Still, however, the experts continue to debate the role of Neanderthals in their social and genetic relations to modern humans.

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?

What really caused the demise of the Neanderthals, wiping them from the fossil record around 30,000 years ago? Human bones found at some Neanderthal sites strongly indicate the regular practice of cannibalism. This should not surprise us, since our human history, right up into recent times includes numerous examples of cannibalism. Anthropologist Marvin Harris writes about the history of cannibalism. In Good To Eat Harris states: “When first contacted by Europeans, the peoples of New Guinea, northern Australia, and most of the islands of Melanesia such as the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia practiced some degree of warfare cannibalism.”18 Later on, while discussing other issues related to diet and lifestyle; Harris makes a point to say that not all Polynesian islanders practiced cannibalism. “All three of the Polynesian groups that practiced warfare cannibalism also lacked the highly productive agriculture and fisheries which characterized the politically centralized Polynesian Islands.” A few agricultural peoples also practiced cannibalism, but cannibalism tended to predominate among peoples lacking centralized governments and the accompanying agricultural systems.

It is interesting to note that in the tribal lore of modern tribes who practiced cannibalism, there is a common belief that consuming another person, be it conquered warrior, relative, or other, endows the consumer with the powers or energies of the person consumed. The consumption of a powerful opponent, then, means more power and energy for the consumer. While this may sound barbaric or disgusting to our sensibilities, many primitive and civilized peoples perceived nature and food of any kind as energy.

There are a few recorded examples of cannibalism among agricultural peoples as well. One of these describes the Aztecs, who first sacrificed their victims to the gods before consuming them, with only the upper classes and priests allowed to partake of the ghastly feast.

While the reasons for consuming human flesh may differ between meat-hungry tribes and civilized cannibals, the basic shared belief of obtaining the strength and power of a competing rival may very well be the reason for the demise of the Neanderthals and other “robust and powerful” hominids in the past. With the onset of the ice age and competition for food between “modern humans” (hunter-gatherers) and Neanderthals, including the history of cannibalism among both, perhaps desperate times led to desperate acts. Perhaps humans outnumbered Neanderthals, or maybe early hunter-gatherers considered a powerful Neanderthal a prize meal, when they could capture one.

In light of new discoveries in anthropology and archeology, it is increasingly difficult to define the character of early human and other hominid species. Some evidence confirms the barbaric and primitive qualities that previously defined prehistoric cave men. Other evidence reveals a fully conscious and intelligent species, not unlike modern humans at their best.

A basic problem with the orthodox view of ancestral Paleolithic diets is that it is based on a series of assumed progressions from nonhuman primates that eventually culminate with modern humans, yet an actual link between these primates and humans cannot be shown to exist. This is also the case with Homo erectus and Neanderthal: there is no actual genetic link that proves modern humans actually evolved from any hominid species. Without such a link, diets of other species need not be a basis for human dietary practices, modern or ancient.

Even though some of these hominids used fire, stone tools, and competed with modern humans in hunting, the simple truth is that ancient humans (hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists) are the only true ancestral examples we have with which to accurately assess human dietary history. It is difficult to say if diet had any influence in making us human; however, it definitely played a major role in the establishment of civilization and human development. And diet may very well be the most distinguishing factor between our hunter-gatherer and agricultural ancestors.

The Hunter-Gatherers

Some historians think that prehistoric humans were parasites of the land because they would diminish both plant and animal resources before moving on to their next habitat. However, new discoveries are being made almost daily that shed further light on the lives of prehistoric peoples, including Neanderthals, revealing extraordinary abilities as exhibited in their astronomy, art, pottery, and textiles. Evidence of mummification indicates knowledge of preservation and elaborate burial rituals. Up until recently, we have associated all these activities with civilization, not with primitive hunter-gatherers. Is it possible to have all these earmarks of civilization and no agriculture? Why did these prehistoric hunter-gatherers take so long to cultivate plants and domesticate animals? Some experts of cultural evolution now say that hunter-gatherers have, to some extent, been using agricultural techniques all along.

If what these new findings suggest is true, then we have numerous examples of prehistoric hunter-gatherers that were advanced in some areas that most modern hunter-gatherers have yet to reach. For modern hunter-gatherers, little has changed and their lifestyle appears much the same as that of their ancient ancestors. It seems as though evolution has ceased for them, and that their culture remains confined to the simple tools and materials necessary to survive the elements.

The fact that examples still exist in parts of the world is remarkable, considering the extremely long time spans attributed to the evolutionary process and the intrusions into their territories by civilizations throughout history. How much longer hunter-gatherers will be able to continue living as they do remains to be seen. Will they disappear, like Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon? Both of these prehistoric peoples were supposedly more robust than agricultural peoples and they both had hunter-gatherer lifestyles and diets. How did the comparatively frail human with little body hair, survivors of an ice age and the crowning achievement of hominid evolution, come to outlive the other Homo specimens? The answer we have been taught to accept is based on the limited view that human culture developed in a mechanical way through the use of stone tools and other material basics. Moreover, adherents of the cultural evolution theory inaccurately assume that current hunter-gatherers represent the only living examples of what humans were like before 10,000 years ago!

The hunter-gatherers have never lost their original primal instincts for survival. Today there are people from this group who know of agriculture but prefer to maintain their nomadic lifestyles. Tens of thousands of years of hunting would naturally hone one’s skills, especially when confronted with predators competing for food. Without the speed or agility of the lion, for example, but knowing what, when, and where a lion hunts is something these ancestors would learn at an early age. Having a close tie to the environment also allows the hunter-gatherer to observe animals’ relationships to plants and develop various uses for those plants through continuous sampling. This, in turn, leads to the development of natural medicines. Knowledge of plants and animals is a commonly recognized skill of hunter-gatherers and it is this close relationship with nature that modern-day hunter-gatherers share with their ancient ancestors. Nature has been and remains their teacher.

The Paleolithic Diet Riddle

The following statements are some of the most commonly expressed opinions on traditional pre-agricultural diets by experts in the fields of paleontology and anthropology:

A. Early Paleolithic man had a diet much like other forest dwelling primates. This would be similar to what chimpanzees eat today and includes mostly fruits, some other plants, and small amounts of insects and rodents.

B. The diet of the early hunter-gatherers consisted of about 80 percent gathered foods, including shellfish, eggs, plants, and about 20 percent meat.

C. Man was a gatherer-scavenger; his diet consisted of mostly wild roots and other plants, occasionally supplemented by small amounts of scavenged animal flesh left by predatory animals or taken from them when possible.

D. Early man’s original diet was based on fish, seafood, and other marine life until he was forced inland from coastal regions by rising sea levels, where he learned how to hunt game.

E. The diet of early man was mostly meat, up to 80 percent or more, derived from hunting game.

If we were to create a multiple-choice question asking which of the above was the diet of our Paleolithic ancestors, the answer would have to be “all of the above.” The reason for such diversity in opinions on early ancestral diets is because evidence has been found to support them all. Naturally, as more evidence is accumulated, the theories get revised and updated, but current evidence shows there are a variety of regional diets for the early and modern hunter-gatherers. Based on this evidence, some of these early diets were healthy and supplied more than adequate nutrition for people, while other diets did not. Obviously, lush, tropical, coastal environs could provide a healthy diet of abundant plant foods with moderate amounts of animal products, whereas arctic dwellers would derive most of their nutrition from mammals and seafood and with less plant foods.

Those who toe the party line of cultural evolution persist in the belief that hunter-gatherers and agricultural civilizations did not exist side by side in prehistory. They also often glamorize hunter-gatherers as being taller and with superior health as a result of their nomadic diet, as compared to the much “later” agricultural peoples.

Aside from the fact that some of the evidence used to compare these two categories of peoples is from the remains of nonhuman primates, there is still no consensus on a particular diet for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, nor is there likely to be one. Not only that, it is simply untrue that health declined with the introduction of agriculture. Agriculture and animal domestication alone had nothing to do with the decline of health in humans. There are numerous examples where agriculture improved the health of people by introducing a wider variety of nutritional resources and reliable sources of protein foods.

How long humans have been in a state of declining health cannot be accurately determined through the study of fossil evidence alone. Many as yet unknown factors continue to haunt our past. What can be determined are the observable results of the last 200 years of environmental destruction from chemical agriculture and processed foods on the health of humanity. It is true that some anthropologists have supported the claims of “pre-agriculture health superiority,” but it is just as true that not all anthropologists and experts in the field agree with each other. Harvard anthropologist Ofer Bar-Yosef writes: “Natufian skeletons of the Levant represent robust and healthy individuals.”19 From this same source, we have:

A number of seminar participants (Keeley and Bar-Yosef, among others) did suggest that the most extreme forms of population pressure leading to skeletal pathologies would be unlikely to be related to domestication….20

Several diet gurus have suggested that grain domestication was the deciding factor in the decline of health after hunter-gatherers “transitioned” to agriculture, and therefore, that grains (carbohydrates) are best reduced or eliminated for optimum health. It has even been suggested that the “decline in health” trend from grain eating 10,000 years ago has only, in the last 100 years, began to reverse toward improved health. This is an interesting concept, one that implies that all the chemical agriculture and processed foods we have been eating for the last 100 years has actually helped to improve the declining health of the human species, a decline caused by grain eating. This is not only absurd it is irrational.

This idea is further rationalized by claims that our hunter-gatherer ancestors did not eat grain and were healthier because of it. This is also untrue: it is now well known among anthropologists and archeologists that many early pre-agricultural peoples harvested large stands of wild grains, and it is believed that these grasses were a regular staple in prehistoric hunter-gatherer diets. Today we know that these wild grains are suitable only for grazing animals; the domesticated versions are the ones with high nutritional content and when properly prepared, are an important source of human nutrition. Nevertheless, it is still believed that these large stands of harvested wild grains played a substantial part in many Paleolithic diets, particularly those of the Near East.

It has also been proven that when sustainable agriculture is practiced, including biodiversity along with other ecologically sound methods of animal husbandry, the people thrive. These were the original methods of agriculture, some of which are still practiced today by the Queche Maya and the Incan descendents in the highlands of Peru and elsewhere among modern-day, natural agriculturists. Biodiversity in agriculture and animal husbandry can provide additional varieties of nutritious foods that improve health.

Ancient Eco-Agriculture

The understanding of cosmic cycles was a common theme among many ancient peoples, as were biodiversity and other methods of sustainable agriculture. Because of this, the food produced and consumed by these people living in harmony with nature would have been of a much higher quality (and thus nutritionally superior) to the highly processed food of mono-agriculture systems today.

Our urban populations are nourished mainly on imitation foods devoid of health-promoting properties. We call this “progress” and rationalize it by the needs of a rapidly expanding population, yet the “progressive” methods used in chemical agribusiness to improve on nature are shortsighted and have led to severe degradation of the planet’s natural resources. Civilizations of antiquity used everything that was natural, in stark contrast to today’s world, where we create toxic plastics, sheet rock, and synthetic clothing materials, thereby creating disharmony in our environment and ourselves.

The great civilizations of antiquity were agricultural and pastoral. Most of these civilizations used a wide variety of foods for daily consumption when environmental conditions were stable. The most common dietary links to all of the great civilizations of the world were found in their basic choices of foods and how they were used. All grew an abundance of plant foods and raised various animals with which to prepare their meals.

Archeological evidence suggests that ancient peoples knew the importance of biodiversity and the nutritional balance of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Ethnobotanist Edgar Anderson explained that there are ample instances from South and Central America that show that both ancient and modern agricultural peoples had individual gardens, which included vegetables, herbs, a bee yard, a fruit orchard, a dump heap, a compost heap, and a few domestic animals for food. Plants were isolated from each other by intervening vegetation so that pests and diseases could not spread from plant to plant and everything was conserved. Even mature plants were buried between the rows when their usefulness was over.21

Evidence for worldwide trade of foods and other goods among ancient civilizations is also increasing. These trade routes increased the varieties of foods and affected more than only agricultural peoples: many newly introduced foods adapted to semi-wild states in forests and jungles and are now regularly consumed by modern-day hunter-gatherers. One striking example may be the many varieties of medicinal plants, fruits and other foods found in the Amazon jungle. Current evidence strongly suggests that this vast jungle was once engineered and occupied by agriculturists. One wonders how many of the useful plants and animals currently found there were introduced thousands of years ago by early agriculturists.

The Mayan peasants in the Chiapas region of Mexico are often considered “unproductive” by large agricultural companies because they produce only around two tons of corn per acre, but the other foods produced through natural farming methods on that same acre can amount to as much as 20 tons. It has also been calculated that their farm incomes would be reduced by a factor of three if they didn’t use biodiverse methods of farming. In Thailand, a home garden can contain up to 230 species of plants. African home gardens often include 50 species of trees with edible leaves, and while Nigerian home gardens comprise only two percent of total Nigerian farmland, not too long ago these individual home gardens produced almost half of the agricultural output of Nigeria by using the same natural methods as the Thai and other traditional cultures.

Many ancient agriculturalists not only concerned themselves with ecology, they also developed brilliant uses of what today would be considered useless land for farming. China, Peru, and Mexico made use of steep, rocky hillsides through a method of farming called terraced agriculture. Mountain streams were diverted to irrigate layer upon layer of terraces, sometimes extending thousands of feet above sea level. These terraces produced (and still do today) large quantities and varieties of grains, beans, and vegetables. The Aztecs of Mexico created floating gardens in the swampy areas of Lake Texcoco by piling rich earth from the lake bottom onto rafts made of weeds. These raft gardens would eventually be anchored to the lake bottom by the roots of the plants and trees planted on them. Large quantities of food were produced on these island gardens, all without chemicals or harm to the environment.

While the ecological crises of today are caused primarily by the environmentally devastating use of monoculture and other unsound farming methods from industrial agribusiness, many of the ecological problems of the past were caused largely by environmental factors. Granted, there is ample evidence for agricultural devastation in ancient history. One example is the slash-and-burn method practiced by some agriculturists and hunter-gatherers. Environmental destruction caused by human need for sustenance was not uncommon with both groups of people in varying degrees. However, these methods were not the only ones used by these groups in the past or the present. Using our modern, environmentally destructive agricultural methods as a basis for comparison to all ancient hunter-gatherers or agriculturists is extremely inaccurate and does not take into account the sustainable methods of growing food practiced by many of our ancient agricultural ancestors, who were able to nourish large urban populations of hundreds of thousands of people with natural, whole foods.

The fact that the ancients cooperated successfully with nature while possessing advanced technology is cause for deep reflection. Defining life through the science of nature in large urban civilizations, an accomplishment unknown to 21st-century Homo sapiens, does not mean conflict will not arise from external influences or even internal strife. But think how today, with less effective methods, we live with the problems of hazardous wastes, poor food distribution for current population needs, and the threat of global warming.

Many traditional peoples throughout the world still practice the old ways of agriculture and their land has long been producing and thriving. Unlike the denaturing processes that we use on our food, ancient food technology included natural processing methods of pressing, grinding, fermenting, salting, smoking, and other storage methods still used today in many parts of the world by traditional peoples. The ancients chose, grew, and harvested their foods according to nature’s cycles. They adapted to tastes through natural preparation methods. They wisely planned their waste management, drainage canals, and food production—right down to what ended up on the table. Food was a very important part of their daily lives. It played an important role in all scientific and religious beliefs and was treated with reverence and respect. For our own health and that of future generations, it is imperative that we integrate similar methods of cultivation on a global scale.

Who Do We Think We Are?

Historians to describe our ancient Homo sapien ancestors who appeared on the evolutionary scene around 200,000 years ago often use the term “modern humans”. This is a generally accepted timeframe for when humans resembling those of today began their long, gradual path toward civilization. However, it is often suggested that primitive hominids were well on their evolutionary path to becoming modern humans as long ago as 500,000 years ago. The theory that nonhuman hominids evolved through mutations into Homo sapiens is based on scanty fossil records and is steeped in controversy; what is indisputable, however, is that nonhuman hominids did coexist with the earliest humans and their alleged relatives, Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and Cro-Magnon.

As mentioned in the introduction, two cultural groups of modern humans are recognized as having existed within the last 200,000 years. The first group, who according to most anthropologists are the first and only cultural examples of Paleolithic humans, are hunter-gatherers. The second group represents agricultural and pastoral peoples who supplement their cultivated foods with hunted and gathered foods from the wild. These two groups of people represent the only non-ape, non-monkey specimens of hominids alive today, with the exception of the elusive giant hominids, about which we know little, who live in the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest, inaccessible mountain regions, and a few other remote parts of the world.

Hunter-gatherers and agriculturists while anatomically alike, differ in their cultures and dietary traditions. Agriculturists are thought to have evolved from hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago when the domestication of plants and animals are thought to have first begun. Recent discoveries suggest that this “guesstimated” evolutionary timeline is way off the mark and that agricultural peoples have existed along with hunter-gatherers for a much longer period than the 10,000 years allotted. A print of a shoe sole has been found in Triassic rock in Nevada dating from 213 to 248 million years ago. Another example reveals human footprints—not those of an ape or missing link—preserved alongside those of a dinosaur.22 These examples have yet to be challenged effectively by any Paleo-scientist or anthropologist.

What are we to make of this unusual evidence? Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that these particular anomalies were isolated occurrences made by a time traveler from the future? Could these tracks be from highly evolved humans who coexisted with cave men and dinosaurs? What if the methods used to date these tracks are highly inaccurate, and the tracks are actually from a more recent period, say, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago? If so, then dinosaurs may not be as old as we thought they were. The possibilities for explanation are endless, yet there are too many examples like these to ignore them, and addressing these anomalies by denial or by discrediting the individuals who bring them to our attention does little to further our understanding. For numerous examples of evidence pertaining to traces of human existence in prehistory, I strongly suggest reading Forbidden Archeology by Cremo and Thompson.23

Did a few small bands of hunter-gatherers from different parts of the world evolve beyond all other hominids and convert to farming a mere 10,000 years ago? A hypothesis held by the orthodox view is that agriculture was established by small bands of hunter-gathers who had depleted their regional food supplies. These people then introduced it to others, and it spread. Meanwhile, in about seven other parts of the world, similar situations occurred.

Many historians hold to the “small bands of hunter-gatherers” part of this theory but also believe there would have been ample supplies of game and other resources in the regions where agriculture began when it did, and therefore suggest that there would not necessarily have been a need for agriculture. Why, with all those resources available, would they have then turned to farming?

A theory based on evidence from Scandinavia suggests that there was colonization by other people. It is suggested that these colonists were other bands of hunter-gatherers who might have been advanced in their own proto-agricultural experience and experiments. These groups could have practiced some seed planting or basic harvesting techniques. Another assumption is that the spread of agriculture occurred with an increase in the populations of the original agricultural groups. Once agriculture was established, we learn, it led to increased fertility, which in turn created an increase in population and greater dependency on agriculture.

Were the majority of Paleolithic peoples so well supplied with edible flora and fauna that they didn’t need to convert to agriculture 10,000 years ago? Or is it possible that the road to agriculture was not a slow, gradual evolutionary process instigated by a few groups of imaginative hunter-gatherers after all? The genesis of agriculture is still highly disputed by many historians.

Education as a Factor of Civilization

As an animal, man is the most plastic, the most adaptable and the most educable of all living creatures. Indeed, the single trait that alone is sufficient to distinguish man from all other creatures is the quality of educability—it is the species character of Homo sapiens, according to British-American anthropologist Ashley Montague. The differences between human and other primate intelligence are that humans possess discernment, vision, and determination when faced with life’s challenges. These qualities enable us to creatively work out problems by using our brains beyond the basic level of primate instinct. Using fire and creating clothing are two basic examples of human ingenuity that apes and chimpanzees have not achieved.

Based on current research, the earliest humans and Neanderthals shared these fully developed brain qualities, as did Cro-Magnon, though until recently they were considered illiterate primitives with still much to learn. For some unknown reason, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon would not survive long enough to utilize their brain capacity to the extent of modern humans.

We are told that Homo sapiens evolved “because they had reasons to evolve.” These reasons are generally presented as a series of accidents, happenstance, mutations, and various other ways of describing how we developed from primitive to civilized people. Were language, writing, agriculture, metallurgy, and all the other earmarks of civilization really accidental discoveries or sudden brainstorms by evolving and insightful cave men and women?

For that matter, if the world was populated with primitive cave people with fully developed brains, why is it that only a small percentage of them evolved to the point of agricultural awareness in only a few places in the world? Why didn’t the rest of the world’s populations evolve as well? Many groups of hunter-gatherers never evolved at all beyond their original states, and this was not due to being isolated from those who had so evolved. One would think that after a good 500,000 years (or at least 200,000 years) of hunting, gathering and scavenging, all modern humans would have finally evolved from simple stone tool usage to a more settled agricultural lifestyle, especially if we are to believe that nutrition played a role in this development and that agricultural awareness and civilization in general was a process of evolution.

Research has shown that both apes and chimpanzees can learn how to paint pictures and communicate with sign language; these are two things they wouldn’t do in their natural habitat, yet clearly they do have the necessary intelligence to learn these things. If prehistoric hunter-gatherers had all the necessary intelligence to evolve to the point of modern civilization, why did it take almost 500,000 years for them to do so?

There are several theories that suggest answers to this question. One is that there was no reason to evolve from a leisurely life of hunting and gathering with abundant available resources. Another reason is that early humans evolved in stages and developed only what was necessary for daily living. For example, stone tools were essential for hunting and butchering animals; eventually pottery was needed to hold and transport water, so someone somehow came up with the idea of pottery and the use of ceramics…and so forth, right up through the invention of smelting copper and iron.

Let’s go back to the apes and chimps for a moment. If they had the intellectual capacity to learn how to paint pictures and communicate with sign language for millions of years, why didn’t they eventually evolve to do it naturally? The answer “no need to” would certainly make sense, because they have no need to do so now, either. Nevertheless, let’s see where this reasoning leads. Given that humans have had the intellectual capacity to evolve at a rapid rate, create civilizations, and practice agriculture for half a million years yet didn’t, can we use the same reasoning to say that we had no need to create civilizations while we still existed in small, communal bands of hunter-gatherers? And if this is true, then why did a few select groups of people throughout the world “evolve” to create agriculture and civilizations, while most did not evolve at all, relatively speaking?

Nutritional differences, hunting practices, reproduction and population pressures, settlements, the use of stone tools, environmental changes, social pressures… some historians say these are responsible for the advancement of civilization. These factors are doubtless critical aspects that are associated with and contribute to civilization—but what actually motivated certain humans to literally leap forward while others remained as they were? We have already discussed the issue of ample wild food resources in areas where agriculture began, so there doesn’t seem to be a need to learn how to domesticate crops and domesticate animals or develop civilizations. In the development of civilization, however, education is intertwined within the social fabric of human relationships.

Illiteracy is a common problem in our modern world. We are faced with the unfortunate situation where some children do not have educational resources. Other children and adults are often faced with educational challenges for different reasons. And while proper nutrition plays a major role in brain and nervous system health, many uneducated children and adults simply lack the guidance from qualified teachers to lift them from their ignorance to a point where they can read and write. It is likely that most humans, were they raised without teachers and education, would remain illiterate their whole lives. There are many unfortunate examples of people living this way throughout the world.

In other words, humans from an early age need teachers, experienced educators who often become role models, leaders, and guides in order for civilization to progress. Some people are easy to teach, while others represent more of a challenge and require extra time and patience. Our traditional sources (oral, written, and legendary) of history and prehistory suggest that many of our primitive ancestors were taught the basics of agriculture and civilization by experienced teachers. Perhaps this was an experiment, similar to modern educators teaching chimpanzees how to paint and communicate today.

Even though many prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not advance to the point of civilization, it doesn’t mean they didn’t continue to learn from each other and whomever and whatever they encountered in life. For them, much of their education and learning experience came from the absorption and assimilation of the natural world through the direction of a shaman, medicine man, or other spiritual teacher. This form of leadership is common among modern bands of hunter-gatherers and may have been part of many Paleolithic groups as well. However, sophisticated agricultural practices and other earmarks of civilization are not a part of their education. This would tend to validate the evidence of our traditional sources, which suggest that civilization and agriculture were handed down from qualified teachers to selected peoples.

On the other hand, paleoanthropologists and archeologists are persistent in hanging onto the human and cultural evolutionary model when explaining the beginnings of pre-agricultural peoples. Orthodox scientists disregard the oral traditions of many modern hunter-gatherers that claim origins from ancient, agriculturally based civilizations destroyed by cataclysmic events.

Similar stories of this type of ancient heritage can be found around the world today among all types of traditional peoples. Gradually more kernels of truth are emerging from these legendary stories as new discoveries are being made, corroborating the idea that the great civilizations of the past were fully formed and show little signs of an evolutionary process from the onset.

We know that many of our ancient ancestors left either oral or written traditions that describe their lives. We don’t know how ancient civilizations originated, and so we blindly accept the conventional theories as answers. The decomposition of natural materials, used by our agricultural ancestors may be part of the reason why we find so few traces of their legacy before 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, if conventional scientific paradigms fail to acknowledge the evidence for the advanced civilizations that existed in prehistory, how can scientists claim to know what occurred millions of years ago in Precambrian and Cambrian times? The truth is that we really do not know with any certainty, as available evidence can only take us back a few thousand years.

Unlike with hunter-gatherers, who are mainly content with a lifestyle similar to that of their ancestors, the agricultural lifestyle and diet have changed considerably within the last few hundred years. Most urban and rural humans are now so far removed from the precepts of their ancestral heritage; it appears the stage has been set for an ultimate showdown between man and nature. Greed, arrogance, and strife have become the distinguishing characteristics of 21st-century Homo sapiens. Refined foods with their artificial additives contribute to unprecedented health problems, and forced growing methods have adversely affected agricultural conditions and ecological balance throughout the planet.

Meanwhile, we as a species have become addicted to constant entertainment and other distractions that suppress creativity, spiritual awareness and the ability to think for ourselves. While we may have prevailed through our intelligence as the majority in developing certain technologies, most us have become oblivious to rational thought. How do we reverse this destructive “cultural” trend? Could we adopt a hunter-gatherer diet and lifestyle and live a life devoid of technology and distraction? No, we have come too far for that and it wouldn’t work anyway, as this lifestyle could not support our current population. We would very quickly decimate our food supply. Not only that, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not conducive to progress and intellectual advancement, as has been shown by more than 200,000 years of continuous repetition around a stone tool technology.

While agricultural technology has not been properly focused, this is not to say that science and technology haven’t helped us better understand the elemental nutrients in food. Rather, it is that every attempt to improve real, natural food has been unsuccessful. Today’s nutritional science lacks traditional wisdom and fails to acknowledge the importance of food quality; its agenda is geared to support large food corporations that have little interest in health. With profit-only goals, these corporations buy science in order to support the kind of technology that creates artificial and highly processed foods, emptied of the ingredients essential to sustain our species. Homogenization, pasteurization, growth hormones, steroids, synthetic vitamins, preservatives, and genetic modifications are some of the facets of modern technology that have failed to improve the food our agricultural ancestors brought to the table.

In every instance where modern, Western culture-bearers have introduced their food, which indigenous peoples know as “white man’s food,” the people’s health has declined. By contrast, when our ancient ancestor culture bearers introduced new foods and farming methods to other cultures throughout the world, the recipients thrived. To this day, the peoples who use traditional foods and natural agricultural practices do well. It stands to reason that these simple, basic ancestral foods of traditional agriculturists must be the proper nutrition for modern civilized humans as well.

One would think that with all our scientific knowledge, we would have improved on the more than 10,000 years of traditional dietary practices—but we haven’t. Perhaps this is because traditional foods cannot be improved.

Ancient China and India are two examples of traditional cultures with a very sophisticated understanding and long history of food as nourishment and food as medicine. In many ways, their holistic food science is far superior to our modern, left-brain methods of nutrition analysis. Modern nutritional science has done little to solve the problems of malnutrition and obesity, either in the “developed” nations or “third world” populations. What it has done is to contribute greatly to the hundreds of extreme and absurd dietary fads so prevalent today, which in turn have done little more than create greater confusion and ill health.

One can imagine future residents of planet Earth 20,000 or more years from now, uncovering traces of artificial buildings and other examples of today’s civilizations—perhaps an intact package of preservative-laden pastry: What will they think? Will they recognize a connection with this evidence and the demise of civilization?

The Interconnection of Science and Religion

All was not peace and love with the ancients. Indeed, human history as we know it was not exempt from periods of violence and warfare. However, some sort of paradisiacal “golden age” is mentioned in nearly every ancient culture. Architecture of past civilizations reflected nature’s designs and used materials from the surrounding landscapes. Ancient peoples were aware that the frequencies of energy in nature flowed in constant, recurring cycles. Ancient civilization itself synchronized with the natural world to the extent that religion was their science—and science their religion.

Our ancestors equated nature with the divine in all they did and had a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of physical and spiritual worlds. This unique unification between science and religion extended throughout the ancient world and distinguished the great civilizations of the past from those of the present. While ancient beliefs are often confused and misrepresented by orthodox views as “ritualistic cults,” ancient peoples had a working concept of the soul and its purpose in the universe. Some of their ideas, though altered over time to fit the changing religious and political climate, were filtered down to us as days of fasting and other “holy days.”

What conclusions can we say we have reached through research pertaining to our hunter-gatherer and agricultural ancestors and their traditions? Try as they may, researchers cannot define either group as having consistent qualities within their respective cultures. Let’s summarize what we do know about some of their known cultural qualities and see what new ideas we have gained.

1. Ancestral Lineage. Long-accepted beliefs about prehistoric humans are changing as both groups turn out to be more advanced than previously depicted. New discoveries challenge the dating for agricultural origins and show there is little evidence to support the theory of cultural evolution from hunter-gatherers to agriculturists.

2. Art, Religion, and Ritual. The myths and legends of both groups of peoples reveal the great depth and broad scope of understanding of nature that extends well beyond the basic survival concepts of primitive culture. Rituals, once interpreted as primitive rites of passage, idol worship, and religious superstition, are now coming to be regarded as exercises based on profound wisdom. While peaceful, spiritual lifestyles may have predominated at some time, regular instances of cannibalism, incest, and other practices unacceptable to modern civilizations occurred among both hunter-gatherers and agriculturists. Links between different ancient cultures and tribes are being discovered that reveal cross-cultural communication over vast distances. These cross-cultural links are supported by archeological evidence and further confirmed by universal legends of culture bearers and global catastrophes. New discoveries are shedding light on these issues, again causing us to reevaluate past interpretations about cultural evolution.

3. Diet and Health. Neither hunter-gatherers nor agriculturists can be pigeonholed into a specific dietary category. Diets vary among both modern and ancient groups, with a wide range of foods depending on environment and lifestyle. Both groups have experienced examples of reverting to the other as a result of environmental changes: drought, famine, floods, and depletion of resources have resulted in agriculturists reverting to hunter-gatherer lifestyles and vice versa. Both groups include examples where their diets are nutritionally sound and healthy, and other examples where their diets have been inadequate, leading to deficiencies and health problems. Many of the positive health aspects both groups have experienced have been largely due to their close interaction with and exposure to nature. This type of lifestyle, along with high quality foods, enhances endurance, immunity, and overall strength.

Today we have disrespectfully distanced ourselves from the natural world, to our own detriment. We are well aware of the repercussions of living against nature, which include rampant disease, environmental devastation, and a pervasive sense of psychological, emotional and spiritual alienation that lead to a host of societal ills, including profoundly criminal and self-destructive behaviors. Perhaps this is why some few individuals and enclaves of people have chosen lives of celibacy and meditation in isolated environments, where they can reconnect with the knowledge of the ancients, the source of wisdom.

To know that our ancient ancestors were so highly evolved, both scientifically and spiritually, is an inspiration for many of us—and hopefully one that will motivate us to seek our species’ continuance in a more sublime expression than our present path would suggest.

Here we are, against evolutionary odds, living at a fraction of the cultural potential expressed by the wisdom of civilizations past. It would seem that we are treading a delicate balance. If we begin to fill in some of the missing pieces of our heritage with what we know to be true, we can undoubtedly rebuild our planet’s ecosystem, ensure our longevity, and fulfill our cultural destiny.

References

1. A familiar term used in place of “hunter-gatherer-scavengers,” the more correct term due to a recent scientific update.
2. Harlan, Jack R.; The Living Fields; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK; 1995, p. 89, [url=http://www.cup.org]www.cup.org[/url]
3. Associated Press; December 18, 2003, [url=http://www.startribune.com]www.startribune.com[/url]
4. “Ancient Artists,” The Boston Globe; December 23, 2003.
5. Guilin Xinhuanet; December 23, 2003.
6. Lhote, Henri; The Search for the Tassili Frescoes: The Story of the Prehistoric Rock-Paintings of the Sahara; Hutchinson Publishers; 1973 ASIN: 0091123801.
7. “Ancient Amazon Settlements Uncovered;” Seattle Times; The Associated Press (Washington); September 18, 2003.
8. “Amazonian Find Stuns Researchers,” ibid, September 20, 2003.
9. Harlan, Jack R.; cf. ante, p. 179.
10. Hancock, Graham; Fingerprints of the Gods; Three Rivers Press, New York, NY; 1995, [url=http://www.randomhouse.com]www.randomhouse.com[/url]
11. [url=http://www.westonaprice.org/nutrition_greats/price.html]www.westonaprice.org/nutrition_greats/price.html[/url] May 24, 2004.
12. Price, Weston A.; Nutrition and Physical Degeneration; The Price-Pottinger Nutrition Foundation Inc., La Mesa, CA; 2000 ISBN 0-87983-816-7.
13. UPI Science News; January 27, 2003.
14. Harris, Marvin; Good to Eat, Waveland Press, Inc., Prospect Heights, IL; 1985.
15. Price, Weston A; cf. ante.
16. Viegas, Jennifer; “Study: Human DNA Neanderthal-Free,” Discovery News; May 12, 2003, [url=http://dc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030512/neanderthal.html]http://dc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030512/neanderthal.html[/url]
17. Reuters; March 27, 2000.
18. Harris, Marvin; cf. ante, p. 225.
19. Hayden, Brian; “A New Overview of Domestication,” Last Hunters—First Farmers (Price & Gebauer); School of American Research, Santa Fe, NM; 1995, p. 280.
20. Loc. cit.
21. Anderson, Edgar; Plants, Man, and Life; University of California Press; 1967, ISBN 0-52000-021-8.
22. Mysteries of the Unexplained, pp, 36–38; published by Readers Digest (1982), ISBN 0-89577-146-2.
23. Cremo, Michael A. & Thompson, Richard L.; Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race; Torchlight Publishing; 1998 ISBN: 0892132949