Healthy Aging 2.0
As written earlier, aging gracefully (healthy) is greatly influenced by diet. In this article I want to show you how our evolutionary past still affects our health today as well as give you another view of the why to eating whole foods and drinking water.
If you take 74-77 steps and mark the start when you reach the end you roughly get 193 feet. Imagine that each inch of your short jaunt is 1,000 years of human evolution/history. In years that is 2.39(ish) million years. The last 10-23 inches (10,000-23,000 years ago) is when the very beginning of farming is theorized to have started in what is now Iraq/Iran. The very first evidence of farming in Europe starts 5,000 years ago (the last 5 inches). From the very beginning of this jaunt to last 5-10 inches there was no farming, only hunting and gathering. You can now see that the vast majority of our evolution/design/bodies/history was developed under hunting and gathering rather than farming. This exercise gives you a better understanding of scale of time. It takes 1,000’s of years to make the smallest change to our delicate but resilient balance.
It roughly takes 333 generations to make a bodily/physiological change to conditions that stress the human species. That is 10,000 years. We have, by the ideas laid down, adapted to eating farmed foods (including domesticated animals). Now, this is not a vast difference from the foods eaten when we hunted and gathered as compared to where we are today after the advent of processing and fortifying foods. In the 1890’s we started to send the food from the farms to a factory to make the food stay on a shelf longer and at that point the nutritional quality of the food changed. In our minds we started to make chemicals into food and food into chemicals. We reduced the food that has given life and fertility to 1000’s of generations into crude matter that science felt impressed to promote. We took living things and mined their elegant minerals, vitamins and many other co-factors our bodies’ grew to love, and left them in the factories, far away from our mouths. Today the foods in the middle of the grocery store that are in boxes, bags and cans are these foods. The greatest cost to the manufacturer was the marketing of the container the food is in, than the food itself. For greater depth and clarity to the adulteration’s of foods please go to : https://www.drroyallee.com, and https://www.westonaprice.org.
So, what does this mean and what is my point with all this as it pertains to gracefully aging? What I am trying to convey is that our bodies are still in the stone age, farming age and the post-industrial age. A majority of its mechanisms and processes were shaped more by eating uncultivated food (based on amount of time in our history) than the foods we eat now.
This simple idea is what I want you to understand. We are in the stone age bodily, eating more things that have been altered from its original nature and our bodies have not wholly made the proper changes to accommodate. This causes stress to our health by the alterations and the depletion of known and unknown nutrients. This was speculated in the early 1900’s to cause cancer, heart disease, diabetes and infertility. Which all of these diseases were existing then but not at the amounts we see today.
Know your nature, use it as a guide and grace, and health will follow. Food and water is the medicine that will never fail us.
