development of civilization and the cultivation of the seeds of grasses: two processes that ran parallel over the past 10,000 years that led to concepts such as sedentary non-nomadic life, land ownership, centralized government and many other phenomena we now accept as part of modern life. But when we observe what happens to cultures unexposed to the seeds of grasses who are then compelled to consume them, we observe an exaggerated microcosm of what the rest of the world is now experiencing.
Eat Like an Egyptian
Tooth decay, dental infections, crooked teeth, iron and folate deficiencies, diabetes, degenerated joints, weight gain, obesity: I’ve just described the average modern person. Take a member of a primitive culture following their traditional diet and feed them the processed foods of modern man – complete with the enticing products of the seeds of grasses – and within a few years, we’ve given them all the same problems we have, or worse. Yes, without ‘modern civilization’ they might succumb to the greedy ambitions of a violent neighbouring clan, but with grain in their lives they’ll have to engage in battle while sporting a 44-inch waist, two bad knees and a mouth that’s missing half its teeth.
While obesity and the diseases associated with it are virtually absent from hunter-gatherer cultures, neither are they entirely new. Diseases of affluence developed even before geneticists introduced changes into grains. Hippocrates, a Greek doctor in the 3rd century BC, and Galen, a Roman doctor of the 2nd century AD, both made detailed studies of obese people. William Wadd, an early-19th-century London doctor and a lifelong observer of the ‘corpulent’, made this observation after the autopsy of an obese man:
The heart itself was a mass of fat. The omentum [a component of the intestines] was a thick fat apron. The whole of the intestinal canal was imbedded in fat, as if melted tallow had been poured into the cavity of the abdomen; and the diaphragm and the parietes [walls of organs] of the abdomen must have been strained to their very utmost extent, to have sustained the extreme and constant pressure of such a weighty mass. So great was the mechanical obstruction to the functions of an organ essential to life, that the wonder is, not that he should die, but that he should live.38
What is new is that overweight and obesity have been transformed from that of curiosity to that of epidemic. The situation we confront in the 21st century is all the more astounding because modern epidemiologists and health officials declare that the causes of the epidemic of overweight, obesity and their accompanying diseases are either unclear or that the burden of blame should be placed on the gluttonous and sedentary shoulders of the public. But the answers can be discerned through observations of primitive societies plagued by none of the issues plaguing us.
More than the presence of grains distinguishes primitive from modern life, of course. Hunter-gatherers also drank no soft drinks; consumed no processed foods laced with hydrogenated fats, food preservatives or food colourings; and consumed no high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose. They were not exposed to endocrine-disruptive chemicals released by industry into our groundwater and soil, and which taint our food. The civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and of 19th-century Europe also did not consume these components of the modern diet (except for increasing consumption of sucrose beginning in the 19th century). No Coca-Cola, hydrogenated fats, brightly coloured sweets lit up by FD&C Red No. 3 (E127) or polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-laced water graced their tables. But they did consume the seeds of grasses.
So just how much can we blame on the adoption of the seeds of grasses into the human diet? Let’s consider that question next. Each variety of seeds of grasses poses its own unique set of challenges to nonruminants who consume them. Before we get under way in our discussion of regaining health in the absence of grains, let’s talk about just how they ruin the health of every human who allows them to adorn his or her plate.
I asked the waiter, ‘Is this milk fresh?’ He said, ‘Lady, three hours ago it was grass.’ Phyllis Diller
Grasses are everywhere.
They grow on mountains, along rivers and lakes, in valleys, vast steppes, savannahs, prairies, golf courses and your garden. And they now reign supreme in the human diet.
Grasses are wonderfully successful life forms. They are geographically diverse, inhabiting every continent, including Antarctica. They are a study in how life can adapt to extremes, from the tundra to the tropics. Grasses are prolific and hardy, and they evolve rapidly to survive. Even with the explosive growth of the human population, worldwide expansion of cities and suburbs, and tarmac spanning the US coast-to-coast, grasses still cover 20 per cent of the earth’s surface area. Just as insects are the most successful form of animal life on the planet, grasses are among the most successful of plants. Given their ubiquity, perhaps it’s not unexpected that we would try to eat them. Humans have experimented with feasting on just about every plant and creature that ever inhabited the earth. After all, we are creatures who make food out of tarantulas and poisonous puffer fish.
While grasses have served as food for many creatures (they’ve even been recovered from fossilized dinosaur faeces), they were not a food item on our dietary menu during our millions of years of adaptation to life on this planet. Pre-Homo hominids, chimpanzee-like australopithecines that date back more than 4 million years, did not consume grasses in any form or variety, nor has any species of Homo prior to sapiens. Grasses were simply not instinctively regarded as food. Much as you’d never spot an herbivorous giraffe eating the carcass of a hyena or a great white shark munching on sea kelp, humans did not consume any part of this group of plants, no matter how evolutionarily successful, until the relatively recent past.
The seeds of grasses are a form of ‘food’ added just a moment ago in archaeological time. For the first 2,390,000 years of our existence on earth, or about 8,000 generations, we consumed things that hungry humans instinctively regarded as food. Then, 10,000 years or just over 300 generations ago, in times of desperation, we turned to those darned seeds of grasses. They were something we hoped could serve as food, since they were growing from every conceivable environmental nook and cranny.
So let us consider what this stuff is, the grasses that have populated our world, as common as ants and earthworms, and been subverted into the service of the human diet. Not all grasses, of course, have come to grace your dinner plate – you don’t save and eat the clippings from cutting your lawn, do you? – so we’ll confine our discussion to the grasses and seeds that humans have chosen to include on our dinner plates. I discuss this issue at some length, because it’s important for you to understand that consumption of the seeds of grasses underlies a substantial proportion of the chronic problems of human health. Accordingly, removing them yields unexpected and often astounding relief from these issues and is therefore an absolutely necessary first step towards regaining health, the ultimate goal of this book. We will spend a lot of time talking about how recovering full health as a non-grass-consuming Homo sapiens of the 21st century – that means you – also means having to compensate for all of the destruction that has occurred in your body during your unwitting grain-consuming years. You’ve consumed what amounts to a dietary poison for 20, 30 or 50 years, a habit that your non-grain-accustomed body partially – but never completely – adapts to, endures or succumbs to. You then remove that poison and, much as a chronic alcoholic needs to recover and heal his liver, heart, brain and emotional health after the flow of alcohol ceases, so your body needs a bit of help to readjust and regain health minus the destructive seeds of grasses.
So what makes the grasses of the world a food appropriate for the ruminants of the earth, but not Homo sapiens? There
