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Health Matters with Trust Marandure
THE critical importance to health of a whole foods diet cannot be overstated. Most naturopathic physicians utilise certain principles to help educate and inspire their patients to attain a higher level of wellness.
Although the human gastrointestinal tract is capable of digesting both animal and plant foods, a number of physical characteristics indicate that Homo sapiens evolved to digest primarily plant foods.
Specifically, our 32 teeth include 20 molars, which are perfect for crushing and grinding plant foods, along with eight front incisors which are well suited for biting into fruits and vegetable.
Only our front four canine teeth are specifically designed for meat eating. Our jaws swing both vertically to tear and laterally to crush, but carnivores’ jaws swing only vertically.
Additional evidence that supports the body’s preference for plant foods is the long length of the human intestinal tract. Carnivores typically have a short bowel, where as herbivores have a bowel length proportionally comparable to that of humans.
Thus the human bowel length favours plant foods.
Nonhuman wild primates such as chimpanzees, monkeys, and gorillas are also omnivores, or as often described, herbivores and opportunistic carnivores. They eat mainly fruits and vegetables but may also eat small animals, lizards, and eggs if given the opportunity.
Only one percent and two percent respectively, of the total calories consumed by gorillas and orang-utans are animal foods.
The remainder of their diet is from plant foods. Because humans are between the weights of the gorilla and orang-utan, it has been suggested that humans are designed to eat around 1.5 percent of their diet as animal foods. Most Americans, however, derive well over 50 percent of their calories from animal foods.
Although most primates eat a considerable amount of fruit, it is critical to point out that the cultivated fruit in American supermarkets is far different from the highly nutritious wild fruits these animals rely on.
Wild fruits have a slightly higher protein content and a higher content of certain essential vitamins and minerals, but cultivated fruits tend to be higher in sugars.
Cultivated fruits are therefore very tasty to humans, but because they have a higher sugar composition and also lack the fibrous pulp and multiple seeds found in wild fruit that slow down the digestion and absorption of sugars, cultivated fruits raise blood sugar levels much more quickly than their wild counterparts.
Wild primates fill up not only on fruit but also on other highly nutritious plant foods. As a result, wild primates weighing a tenth as much as a typical human ingest nearly 10 times the level of vitamin C and much higher amounts of many other vitamins and minerals. Other differences in the wild primate diet are also important to point out, such as a higher ratio of alpha-linolenic acid [an essential omega-3 fatty acid] to linoleic acid] an acid essential omega-6 fatty acid.
Determining what foods human are best suited for may not be as simple as looking at the diet of wild primates. There are some structural and physiological differences between humans and apes. The key difference may be the larger, more metabolically active human brain.
In fact, it has been theorised that a shift in dietary intake to more animal foods may have been the stimulus for brain growth. The shift itself was probably the result of limited food availability that forced early humans to hunt grazing mammals such as antelope and gazelles.
Archaeological data support this association: the brains of humans started to grow and become more developed at about the same time as evidence shows an increase in bones of animals butchered with stone tools at sites of early villages.
Improved dietary quality alone cannot fully explain why human brains grew, but it definitely appears to have played a critical role.
With a bigger brain, early humans were able to engage in more complex social behaviour, which lead to improved foraging and tactics, which in turn led to even higher-quality food intake, fostering additional brain evolution.
Data from anthropologists looking at hunter-gather cultures are providing much insight as to what humans are designed to eat, however, it is very important to point out that these groups were not entirely free to determine their diets.
Instead, their diets were moulded by what was available to them. Regardless of whether hunter-gatherer communities relied on animal or plant foods, the incidence of diseases of civilisation, such as heart disease and cancer, is extremely low in such communities.
It should also be pointed out that the meat that our ancestors consumed was much different from the meat found in supermarkets today.
Domesticated animals have always had higher fat levels than their wild counterparts, but their desire for tender meat has led to the breeding of cattle that produce meat with a fat content of 25 to 30 percent or more, compared to those with less than 4 percent for free-living animals and wild game.
In addition, the type of fat is considerably different. Domestic beef contains primarily saturated fats and is very low in omega-3 fatty acids. In contrast, the fat of wild animals contains more than five times as much polyunsaturated fat per dram and has good amounts of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids [approximately 4 to 8 percent].
About the writer: Trust Marandure is a Naturopathy Practitioner based in Bulawayo. He can be contacted on Cell: 0772482382 or email: [email protected]
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