Our species has survived and thrived for about 300,000 years. Humans slowly evolved over that time period and yet in the last 30 years we as humans now suffer from a variety of diseases that were relatively rare until the late 1980’s. How is this possible that we live in a time that has more to offer than any other time in human history? What happened and where did it all go wrong?
Most of us, myself included, that were born in the 1970’s or later don’t remember a time before the health decline of the population. We grew up eating the way we were told, we believed in the government guidelines, and we wanted to be healthy as we unknowingly ate our way into poor health. We as a nation, especially here in the United States, eat what is known as the “Standard American Diet” or SAD for short. It’s a very fitting acronym. This diet is what we have all been told is the best, most healthy way of eating through extensive research and science. Yet, more than a third of Americans are considered obese, more than 70% of Americans are overweight and roughly 80% of our country is suffering from some sort of metabolic disease. We are told to eat a certain way on this SAD, then we are given medications to “control” our ailments as we get older. No time in the 300,000 years of human history have we needed so many medications to live a “normal” life.
I was always skeptical of these “new diets”, the next fad and so on. I was raised to adhere to the Food Pyramid because that was the best human diet derived from “scientific research”. I never questioned it. Then one day I was awakened and began to research the history of our food. This is actually quite an interesting, eye opening and alarming story of how we ended up in this unhealthy state of human history.
First, let’s take a look at a picture from the 1960’s and a picture from today. Do you notice anything different? (insert pictures)
How many obese or overweight people are in the first picture versus the second one? We were not always fat as a nation. So where did it begin?
Researchers, doctors and scientists began studying nutrition seriously in the early 20th century. I’m sure people have been studying nutrition since the beginning of time, but it started here in the US in the early 1900s. However, due to war, famine, the great depression and then another war, the study of food was shelved. People didn’t care what they were eating, times were tough, rations and all. Most people just needed to eat something. So nutrition science went to the back burner. The progress that was made in the early years was forgotten about.
Then the 1950s came around and all of a sudden, we were interested in food again! The post WWII era brought prosperity, inovations and comforts to the growing middle-class homes. Prior to WWII, families were lucky to have a radio, let alone a television. There were ice-boxes, but the modern refrigerator wasn’t even invented yet. There were no real highways to move supplies efficiently, most families didn’t even have a car. That all changed in the years following WWII. Factories that once made supplies for the war effort were ready to pump out anything. The technology learned from feeding troops all around the world was improved and scaled up to now feed American families. Homes now had televisions, which you wouldn’t think would be a factor in our food story, but you would be wrong. You see, television brings commercials and advertising into the home. In the years before, wives and mothers would make meals from scratch using recipies handed down from generations. There was very little processed food, so almost everything was made from scratch. Now, there were new frozen dinners, canned soups, snacks, desserts all made in a factory, shipped to the store. There were refrigerators and freezers to keep them cold until needed. The televisions advertised and the families bought it.
The 1950s brought great prosperity to many Americans, but there was a new growing trend, heart disease. In the years following WWII, the number one killer of men was heart attacks, research began. Then in 1955, President Eisenhower had a heart attack in office. This was something that shook the medical establishment and they wanted answers. So, researchers began looking into why this was happening and how to solve it. They looked into what he ate, he was a meat and potatoes guy. So, that had to be the cause of his heart attack, probably not the four packs of cigarettes he smoked a day, or the accumulated stress of running the entire war in Europe and now being President of the United States. Nope, it was the food.
One prominent researcher at the time was Dr. Ancel Keys. Dr. Keys was a nutrition researcher from the University of Minnesota and had done some great research throughout his career. He was key (pun intended) in solving the food supply for our troops. I’m sure you’ve heard of the K-Ration? Named after Dr. Keys. He also conducted the “Minnesota Starvation Experiment” in 1944 to study the effects of prolonged starvation, both psychologically and physically. This study was used to help our allies in war torn Europe to aid the famine victims. The study was one of a kind and is still referenced today since we really can’t do studies like that anymore.
In 1956-1958 Ancel Keys conducted the “Seven Countries Study” as his theory that high saturated fat diets resulted in higher cholesterol and thus heart disease. He actually studied 21 countries over the next 20 years, but used only 7 of the countries that fit his theory. There are many critics to this study citing that he “cherry-picked” his data to fit his hypothesis and that the years after WWII many of the countries that were studied were still recoving from the war. Some of those countries were not eating their traditional diets due to the destruction of agriculture in the years following the war. Either way, his study became the primary reference for the US in the years to come.
The 1960s and 1970s brought more research to the food and nutritional forefront. There were studies into everything from food stamps to a national famine. This time is during the height of the Cold War. World War II was still fresh in the minds of our government leaders and the rations that were in place during those years. They feared if there was a war with Russia, one of the main factors would be feeding not only the military, but the populace. Raising enough animals would be difficult, but wheat is not. We can grow some wheat here in the Midwest. But the question remains, is it healthy enough to feed the population? While this was being put in motion, what’s known as the McGovern Commission was working on a new method for food stamps. Food stamps had been used since 1939, however it was brought to light that it was not working very well. This commission opened a study that started in 1968 and was finished in 1977. During those nine years nutrition science was put to the test. One of the main influencers of that time was Ancel Keys and his Seven Countries Study.
In 1977, the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was put into action. What started as a way to help impoverished people in the country, became the basis for all nutritional guidelines. This is what the diet would go on to be for all government programs. The government can’t feed poor people a diet that’s unhealthy, so they made the least expensive diet the healthy diet. This then translated to the entire country and all government food programs which include schools, prisons, hospitals and the military.
I would like to believe those that designed this program had no ill intention. They had no idea that the plan laid out in 1977 would be the beginning of so many health problems 10 years later and get worse every year.
Talk about GMO, wheat and corn
History of vegan and vegetarian
Human existance can be traced back almost 750,000 years. Most of the data put homo sapiens, which is our current lineage, about 300,000 years ago. Think of that timeline as a calendar, where January 1st is the beginning of our lineage and December 31st is today. Each month would be about 25,000 years long. In that calendar, we didn’t even start basic farming until December 12th which would be about 11,000 years ago. That was very basic “farming”, nothing like today. Row cropping and tilling the land started with the Bronze Age, around 4,000 years ago, or December 26th. Our modern food and nutrition is not even a second ago.
