Nutrition has everything to do with health.  This isn't news, 
exactly, but looking around at the crazy information on the 
market, one wonders if anyone actually makes the connection: 
what you eat affects how you feel.  It's that simple.  Your 
health depends on the food choices you make in both the short 
and long term.  

Take a pill, and all you've done is treat a symptom.  Change 
your eating habits, and create a lasting change in your 
well-being.  There are so many approaches to eating, however, 
and so much conflicting information that it's come down to 
this simple question: does whatever you're eating right now 
make sense?

Well, sense isn't common, and it does depend on some good 
information.  So here is something to consider: what kind of 
foods are humans evolved to eat?  Cheetos?  Don't think so.  
That's a no-brainer, but what about some others that we counted 
as healthy staples until recently, like bread and pasta.  Go 
way back in your imagination, to hunter gatherer days - before 
agriculture and the obesity which followed for the first time 
among humans - and consider what would be part of our ancestors' 
normal diet.  If you're about to pop something into your mouth 
that wasn't around before agriculture, (a relatively recent 
development in human history), then eat it knowing it's not 
considered a 'normal' food by your body.  Foods your body 
considers 'normal' contribute to your health, other foods are 
either neutral or harmful.  How simple is that? 

A well-known exploration of this concept that certain foods 
help our bodies thrive is Dr. Peter D'Adamo's book, "Eat Right 
4 Your Type," in which he bases his lists of what to eat and 
avoid on blood type.  D'Adamo asserts that type O is the oldest 
type, and the newer A type didn't show up on the scene until 
agriculture.  So, Os should eat lots of meat and veg because 
that blood type doesn't know how to handle too much grain.  
Type As can eat grain, but not dairy.  Dairy is a category 
reserved as a 'normal' food only for the yet more recent human 
blood type, AB.  (Maybe we'll evolve a new type that can handle 
Cheetos and red licorice, my personal favorite abnormal foods).

D'Adamo supports his blood-type theory with all kinds of careful 
research, and so what?  Does it make sense that humans should 
rely primarily on foods that occur naturally?  Absolutely.  If 
you're going to eat a grain like wheat then, eat it whole, or 
don't eat it at all, and don't eat much of it anyway because 
humans pretty much made wheat up!  I'm not going to take the, 
"Does it occur naturally?" debate too far, because it's time 
to look at another researcher's take on the food and evolution 
connection.  

Dr. Phillip Lipetz wrote "The Good Calorie Diet," a book for 
the weight loss market, but he also has supported his theories 
with all kinds of careful research.  His describes how the human 
response to starvation that was developed during the ice age 
carries on today.  Ironic, isn't it, that the food available 
to us today - rich and sweet and abundant - causes our bodies 
to behave as though starvation is at hand. 

The short story for how this works is that up until the ice age, 
humans ate whatever was readily available, like roots, plants, 
fruit, and a little tasty carrion now and then.  Along came the 
ice ages, and those foods became scarce.  Now humans were forced 
to hunt, but it was dicey and the weapons were primitive, so 
spans of time occured between kills.  The result: our ancestors 
evolved ways to make the most of the conversion of excess blood 
sugar into stored nutrition in the form of body fat.  When they 
starved, they lived off stored fat.     

Today's diet mimics the ice age diet: high fat and high protein, 
and our genetic programming says, "Uh oh, we're facing starvation 
again.  Better store up some fat."  Lipetz goes into convincing 
detail about food combinations in his book.  He describes some 
that cause the creation of excess fat, such as butter on bread. 
More useful are his combinations that actually inhibit fat 
formation, like lean meat with most vegetables.  In a society 
where obesity and its attendant health issues are rampant, these 
food combinations are helpful places to focus our attention.  
Yet the single most useful bit to remember from his research is 
that foods which cause our bodies to create excess fat all have 
one thing in common: they weren't part of our ancestors' normal 
diet.  

Armed with this overview, next time you're about to pop 
something in your mouth - whether your focus is health or weight 
- you don't need to have a bunch of rules and whacky information 
in mind.  Just use common sense.  Ask whether it's a food that 
was around before the advent of agriculture.  If it was, go for 
it.  If it wasn't, then consider that your body won't consider 
the food 'normal,' and in both the long and short run, that's 
got health consequences.   
  

© 2004 Judith Schwader