cent of men with hypertension.32
All of these groups represent humans who have not developed the partial tolerances agricultural societies evolved over 10,000 years that allow them to consume the seeds of grasses. Consequently they, more so than us, show exaggerated responses to consumption of grains and sugars.
The diseases of modernization are unfortunately intertwined with the diseases of poverty, given the disrupted and marginalized lives indigenous people often endure at the heavy-handed ways of modern society. Typically, an overreliance on cheap grains and sugars characterizes the diets of these latecomers to the modern world, replacing gathered vegetation, for instance, with flours, convenience foods and sweets. And if Western aid is required due to starvation and maldistribution (which is common when former hunter-gatherers are disconnected from their traditional lifestyles), do we fly in beef, salmon, coconuts or cucumbers? Nope: we send in the grain – wheat, maize, rice – which feeds humans as well as their livestock.
Type 2 diabetes, in particular, is the defining disease acquired when hunter-gatherer populations join the modern world in dietary and health habits – so much so that anthropologists have labelled diabetes ‘the price of civilization’. And, of course, all of us modern humans, being hunter-gatherers at our genetic core, are experiencing diabetes at an unprecedented rate. This modern disease is expected to afflict a third of all adults in coming years, as well as a growing proportion of children and teenagers.33 The world of humans now obtains 50 per cent of its calories from the seeds of grasses and is increasing consumption of sucrose and fructose. Meanwhile, we’re being urged to further increase our reliance on ‘healthy whole grains’ in the developed world while we resort to cheap, accessible grains of any sort in the less-developed world. Under these circumstances, we can expect no relief from this global man-made pandemic – unless we reject the notion of consuming the seeds of grasses outright.
Dr Weston Price: Snapshots of Westernization
Dr Weston Price was a dentist practising in Cleveland, Ohio, during the early 20th century. He was troubled by the amount of tooth decay he witnessed in his patients, particularly children, and intrigued by reports that ‘savages’ (people living in primitive settings) were virtually free of tooth problems. So Dr Price did something extraordinary: he left his home and, along with his wife, Florence, began a 10-year worldwide journey to chronicle the dietary habits of primitive cultures, documenting his findings with careful examinations of teeth, facial structure and more than 15,000 photographs. His efforts provide a remarkable visual record of what primitive cultures looked like and what happens to primitive humans when they begin to consume modern foods.
His travels took him to the Inuits of Alaska, the native Americans of the Pacific Northwest and central Canada, Melanesians and Polynesians, Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, descendants of the ancient Chimú culture in coastal Peru, and tribes of Africa, including Maasai, Kikuyu, Wakamba, Jalou, Muhima, Pygmies, Baitu and Dinkas. In each locale, he examined and photographed teeth, faces and other features he found interesting. In short, Dr Price produced a fascinating record of people living their traditional lifestyles at a moment in time when it was all about to end.
In every culture of the dozens he studied – without exception – he found tooth decay, tooth loss and dental abscesses or infections to be uncommon, typically affecting no more than 1 to 3 per cent (and sometimes none) of the teeth he examined. He also noted the absence of gingivitis and periodontitis, and few to no crooked or crowded teeth. While a keeper of meticulous records, he also observed that facial structure was different, with primitive people enjoying what he called ‘fully formed facial and dental arches’ and a lack of narrowed nasal passages.
Even more remarkably, Dr Price specifically sought out members of these cultures who had recently transitioned to consuming ‘white man’s food’ – people who were bartering for the breads, pastries and sweets of Westerners visiting or bordering their land. In every instance, he observed an astounding increase in tooth decay, affecting 25 to 50 per cent of teeth examined, along with gingivitis, periodontitis, tooth loss, infectious abscesses, crooked and crowded teeth, and reductions in the size of the maxillary (midfacial) bone and mandible (jawbone). Nearly toothless mouths in teenagers and young adults were not uncommon.
The traditional diets of these societies were typically fish, shellfish and kelp among coastal cultures, and animal flesh and organs, raw dairy products, edible plants, nuts, mushrooms and insects among inland cultures. With only two exceptions (the Lötschental Valley Swiss, isolated by the Alps, who consumed a coarse rye bread, and the Gaelic people of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, who consumed crude oats), grains, sugars and processed foods were notably absent. (The Swiss had an intermediate number of dental caries, more than other cultures studied, while the Gaelic population did not.)
What is even more startling about Dr Price’s observations of the rarity of tooth decay and deformity is that none of these cultures practised any sort of dental hygiene: no toothbrushes, no toothpaste, no fluoridated water, no dental floss and no dentists or orthodontists. While Dr Price’s observations cannot be used to precisely pinpoint the nutritional distinctions between modern and traditional cultures, they nonetheless make a powerful point. Anyone wishing to read Dr Price’s account can find it reproduced in a recent reprint.34
This social ‘experiment’ has also occurred in the opposite direction: a return to traditional diet and lifestyle after a period of Westernization. In 1980, Dr Kerin O’Dea, while at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, conducted an extraordinary experiment: she asked 10 diabetic, overweight Aboriginal individuals living Western lifestyles, all of whom retained memories of prior lifestyles, to move back to their origins in the wilds of northwestern Australia and follow their previous hunter-gatherer diet of kangaroo, freshwater fish and yams. They began their adventure with high blood glucose levels of (on average) 209 mg/dl, high triglycerides of 357 mg/dl, as well as abnormal insulin levels. After seven weeks of living in the wild, killing animals and eating familiar gathered foods, the 10 lost an average of 17.6 pounds of body weight and dropped their blood glucose to 119 mg/dl and triglycerides to 106 mg/dl.35 Of the original 10, five returned nondiabetic. In a 2005 lecture, Dr O’Dea remarked: ‘I was struck by the change in people when they were back in their own country: they were confident and assertive, and proud of their local knowledge and skills. At the time we were not able to measure markers of psychosocial state, however observation suggested a very positive change.’36
Search the four corners of the earth today and you will find that the only surviving hunter-gatherer population that’s untouched by modern diet is the Sentinelese of the North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. Because their language is strikingly different from all languages in neighbouring lands, it is thought that the Sentinelese have been isolated since anatomically modern humans first migrated to this part of the world 60,000 years ago.37 Attempts to visit their island have been met with volleys of arrows, spears and rocks, so observations are limited. From what has been observed, however, they are lean and healthy, hunting, fishing and gathering foods without the ‘benefit’ of agriculture.
We have to be careful not to regard the life of the hunter-gatherer human as idyllic or problem-free: they had plenty of problems. While it is widely believed that stress is a modern phenomenon, this is absurd. Which is more stressful: struggling to pay your bills or having a marauding, bloodthirsty tribe of humans slaughter your friends, seize the women and enslave the children? We need to observe some of the practices of primitive cultures, such as head shrinking by the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon or cannibalism by the Carib of the Lesser Antilles and Venezuela, to remind ourselves that the world of humans can be an inhospitable place. Violence inflicted by and upon humans has characterized our existence from the start. While violence is certainly still a part of modern life, legal and political constraints that became necessary as human populations developed greater reliance on the practice of agriculture make it far less a part of day-to-day life than it was, say, 50,000 years ago. Yes, there is a bright side to agriculture and civilization.
