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 Image via Amazon Maybe the locovores are tapping into something more than just a habit that is good for the planet. Dr. Daphne Miller has spent a lot of time and energy studying the indigenous diets of global cold spots to figure out what it is that makes them so darned healthy and she found that the local diet of these areas were largely responsible for the continued health of the population. Some of them ate a ton of omega-3-rich protein, some of them ate a heck of a lot of sea vegetables, while others ate a lot of potatoes, but they were all eating what was widely available to them. I guess it makes sense that if your ancestors were eating a bunch of a certain thing and thriving on it, you would share with their genes and therefore might need that same balance of nutrition. But check it: most of the people in Dr. Miller's study only had about 20-30 actual ingredients available to them. Dr. Miller discusses this in depth in her new book, The Jungle Effect, but when I consider my average week, I can't imagine being limited to about two dozen ingredients. Heck, I have a soup recipe that would be lacking some prime flavors without each of the 35 things that get thrown into that stock pot. But if I had to go without things like frozen yogurt and Starbucks and assuming that spices and salt were not included in the equation, I'd stick with the following: whole milk, yeast, flour, rice, chicken, tuna, eggs, vinegar, apples, carrots, olive oil, garlic, honey, cocoa, mushrooms, squash, bananas, peanuts, corn, beans of some nature (black, pinto, etc.), baking soda, almonds, maple syrup and strawberries. I could make butter, yogurt and cheese from the milk and could make a plethora of things from drying the corn and turning it to cornmeal or extracting the starch. For the most part, these items all can combine in various ways to create a lot of what I eat normally now. In fact, in order to be happy in my life, I require peanut butter and banana sandwiches with the occasional squirt of honey, and I've got that covered. Interestingly, only four of the things on the list (rice, olive oil, bananas and tuna) were things that wouldn't have been available to my northern European ancestors. So maybe my love of edamame and coffee is making me fat? Nah, probably the fact that in order to obtain said coffee and edamame, I only exert the teeniest bit of energy, whereas my ancestors actually had to farm and gather and harvest and process and hunt and then, on top of that, avoid bees to get honey. If I did limit myself to 24 things, grocery shopping would be a LOT easier (and probably wouldn't require a list) but my love of varied foodstuffs would require me to spend a lot more time in the kitchen, rolling out fresh pasta dough or whipping fresh cream into a lather (and my ancestors probably didn't have shiny red Kitchen Aid mixers either). Wait, I just realized...no grapes = no wine! WOE! Do over? Ah well...what about you? Could you live on just 24 food items? Even for one week? What are your 24 staple foods? The comments suspect that ketchup might be a vegetable. 7 CommentsLeave a comment |
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Oh, dude, I could totally live on 24 food items. Let's see: artichokes, tomatoes, garlic, cheese, butter, cucumbers, avocadoes, pork chops, olive oil, citrus fruit (any kind, am not picky), flour, salt, pepper, basil, baking powder, buttermilk, spinach, carrots, rice, potatoes, honey, green tea, chives. Tadaaa! That's either 21 or 22, and it's what I eat pretty much year-round -- I eat the pork/rice/potatoes/homemade bread in summer with a few steamed veggies, and I eat the tomatoes/basil/cucumbers/carrots/salad greens in summer with occasional protein and/or carbs.
I never thought about how reductionist I am in my eating. I mean, I can make 30 or 40 different entire meals from that list, you know? Also, now I'm wondering how this ties into my genetic heritage -- I'm three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Blackfoot Cherokee, no additives. You've got me thinking, Weet.
That first "summer" should actually be "winter." Clearly, this eating pattern is not so good for my BRAIN. ;)
I DO probably live on around 24 items per week, but I switch it up...lets seee
Bananas
Pineapple
Apples
Oranges
Berries
Pears
Lettuce
Kale
Collards
Tomatoes
Carrots
Onions
Avocados
Walnuts
Almonds
Popped corn kernals
Olive Oil
Rice protein powder
Flaxseeds
CHOCOLATE/ Cocoa powder
....I don't want to go look in my fridge, but I do eat from nature.
Caveman diet and Local diet and all these other "eat the way your ancestors did 500 years ago" diets all presume that your ancestors were healthier than you.
Does history not teach the opposite? What was the life expectancy back then, about 30?
marie, the idea of this book, actually, is to eat the way cultures eat where the indigenous diet has been preserved (at least in part) and they currently have extremely low-incidences of certain diseases: greece, okinawa, japan, iceland, an area of mexico, western africa. it's not to eat what people ate in the past -- it's to eat what people still eat in these places because food is an integral part of their culture. that was a mouthful.
That's a good question. I'm not sure I buy the premise--right now it sounds like another eat right for your blood type book--but I haven't read it, so maybe there's hard science there. 24 items...
eggplant
cauliflower
greens
mushrooms
cheddar cheese
goat cheese
parmesan
fish/seafood
beef (side of cow to be turned into a variety of items)
whole chickens
a pig
olive oil
eggs (could make mayo w/eggs and oil)
squash
zucchini
smoked oysters
butternut squash
lemons/limes
canned salmon
onions
tomatoes
celery
butter
cream cheese
Those are the main things that we eat, so that might work--not at all what my Scottish/Welsh ancestors ate though.
Daphne Miller here. The family doc who wrote this book. I love this discussion. No, this is not another eat right for your blood type book. In fact it seems like if you eat any of these traditional foods (regardless of your genetic heritage) you do better than if you eat our Western diet chock full of high fructose corn syrup, refined grains and processed oils. But, at this point, that is probably obvious to all of you and who needs yet another book that tells you what you are doing wrong? Why I traveled around to these disease "cold spots" (places with low rates of our modern chronic diseases) was to learn what we could do differently. The truth is that I had many surprises.
For example, those Icelanders with the surprisingly low depression rates seem to hate vegetables. Oh no. How could that be? Maybe we don't need to be salad fiends to be healthy.
Okinawans rarely get prostate cancer and breast cancer but they seem to love pork. Wait a minute, isn't pork bad for you?
And those Tarahumara Indians in Mexico eat a high carb diet but hardly ever develop diabetes. Gee thats strange. Here, in the US we are all talking about eating "low carb" to control blood sugar. Hmmm. Maybe their recipes and eating traditions have some lessons to offer. Clearly, as a culture, we have some learning to do.
The sad part of the story is that all these traditional diets are swiftly vanishing. Each place I visited, I was getting a last glimpse of a way of eating that was swiftly being eclipsed by McDonalds, Coca Cola and Nestle. I felt I needed to document what I saw before these delicious and healing food traditions are lost forever.
Daphne Miller MD
Author of The Jungle Effect