|
Home > Healthy Eating > Good Old Days Healthy Eating - It's Not Like the Good Old Days
By Charlotte Watts Dip.ION BANT – Nutritional Therapist – www.totalbeing.com and healthyconvenience.com
No really, and unfortunately there is plenty of evidence to back up this up.
There have been copious studies on the actual nutrient content of our food, carried out periodically since the 1940s, in an attempt to link our changing dietary habits with the consistent rise in the degenerative diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and osteoporosis and also the trend for obesity.
Much research is also done on populations who still live as close to ways of our ancestors as possible. These epidemiological studies show us how our intake of key nutrients has changed through our history, as a direct result of the introduction of farming, processing and preserving techniques.
Firstly, it has been estimated that our average ancestor in the Stone Age could have eaten around 4,500 calories of nutrient dense food1, which means that he/she burnt these off with continual physical exertion, hardship and the threat of danger. Also the food they ate provided the full complement of vitamins and minerals needed to deal with this way of life and keep the human body running on optimum. There was no refined food with its “empty calories” – high calorific intake with relatively low amounts of the nutrients we need to function daily, let alone repair ourselves and prevent disease. So even though modern man only lives on approximately 2,100 calories a day on average1, for many in the West, much of this is food with very little nutritional value. Although we have much more sedentary lives, our nutrient requirements have not decreased markedly and many of us simply do not achieve the levels we need. Even though we burn less fuel than our ancestors, substances such as vitamins and minerals are deemed “essential”; in nutritional terms this means that we must ingest them daily as our bodies cannot make them. These are vital to all our body functions and our health.
So from our hunter-gatherer diet of grubs and roots, we have “evolved” to be farmers and then learnt to process our food, eventually arriving at the fast food culture we see today. The advents of isolating sugar from fruit and learning to refine flour to its white form have led us to the attitudes to food we have in the West today. White sugar and flour were once reserved for the rich and ironically they are now a large component of foods we deem as “junk”.
But it is not just our actual attitudes to food and our moving away from the preparation of our meals from fresh, unrefined ingredients that is the problem. There have been many studies to show that our diets have reduced in nutrient quantity, the FSA (Food Standards Agency) published its new National Diet and Nutrition Survey in February 2004 and showed that a further decrease in many of our nutrient levels has occurred since the last survey in 1994. It highlighted that around one quarter of men and one third of women are iron deficient and there are also widescale deficiencies in nutrients such as selenium, magnesium, calcium and vitamins C, A and the B complex vitamins. (We shall report these findings in full in the near future). It has been estimated that our ingestion of vitamin C may have decreased by half since the Stone Age, going some way to explain the increased incidence of heart disease and degenerative conditions.
These trends can partly be explained by our changing diets, refining and processing, but there is also something else at play. The drop in our nutrient status has been shown in several studies to be matched by a decline in the vitamin and mineral levels in our food itself. David Thomas, a mineralogist and fellow of the Geological Society, in one such study, looked at the mineral levels in 64 different fruit and vegetables. He then compared these with data from the 1940s and saw that the levels of almost all essential minerals had decreased. Of great concern were the findings that vegetables had lost around half of their calcium and potassium, a quarter of their iron and three-quarters of their iron. Fruits also had considerable drops, with iron, copper and zinc reported up to 27% less2.
Jonathan Leake, the Environment Editor of The Times reported these results in February 2004 and cited several other studies. He also spoke to Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition at King’s College London, who highlighted the change that consumer taste has made to farming techniques; in response to the research by the American Government that “apples can comprise up to 15% sugar compared with 8-10% three decades ago”2. Sanders said “for example, in apples this is partly due to new varieties and partly to how they are picked and stored – so that they retain more sugar. As a rule, most fruit juice provides about 10 grams of sugar per 100 grams – about the same as Coca-Cola”.
The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) is an organisation which aims to support the consumer in the face of the EU Directive to be enforced next year (which will make many trusted and effective supplements unavailable to us and will be fully discussed in later articles). An ANH spokesman stated that “the shift to intensive cultivation, the use of narrow spectrum fertilisers (rich primarily in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, but devoid of many of the trace elements) undoubtedly has contributed to the serious depletion that is evident”. Simply put, this means that plants can only derive their minerals from the soil and if that soil is lacking the essential minerals we need, we cannot receive them from those plant sources that we eat.
So, we need to look at our eating habits and realise that we may not derive all the nutrients we need or even expect from our food. We have come a long way from the social and eating habits of our ancestors and this includes the way we view and obtain our food. There are great changes to be made, but some recognition of these facts by governing bodies is always the first step. The UK Food Standards Agency is still reticent to acknowledge the importance of supplementation despite these findings, stating poor methods in the 1940s for measuring mineral levels as a factor, but this is disputed and in fact we have since discovered that more trace minerals are essential to our health!
Total Being Opinion
Looking at the results of these findings can really help us to understand why many people find difficulty coping with the stressors of modern life. We are bombarded with pollution and electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones, TVs and VDUs and eat additives and pesticides that raise our need for nutrients. If the nutrient content of our foods is decreasing, then we need to compensate accordingly with awareness.
The nation’s obsession with “empty calories” has now moved into healthier foods like fruit and vegetables where the lower mineral status and sweeter varieties are a result of our tastes and more intensive farming techniques. This highlights the individual need for as much variety as possible in the diet, opting for organic foods grown in more mineral rich soil, choosing more traditional varieties of fruit such as berries and local older varieties of English apples. This also supports the need for individualised supplementation and the importance of the work by the ANH to support our right to buy vitamins and minerals as we choose (see www.alliance-natural-health.org).
Understanding these changing is crucial to the decisions we make regarding our health and can show us how to have a preventative approach to illness that is seen around us and in our families.
See www.totalbeing.com for a Nutritional Assessment to choose the right diet and supplements to help you get in control of your health!
See www.healthyconvenience.com for help remembering how to get healthy – for posters, shopping guides and recipes.
References
1. Clayton, P. Health Defence, Accelerated Learning Systems, 2001.
2. Leake, J. The Times, 8 February 2004
|