Why We Eat (Too Much) Page 15

  The Tasty Offal

  The food quality of these organs, many of which we now commonly discard, is exceptional – they contain many essential fats, vitamins and minerals. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors prized one nutrient above all others – even above the sugar in honey – fat. Any food that contained high proportions of fat within it would be favoured. They would laugh at current expert advice (we will discuss this in more detail later in the book) that fat makes you fat. Our ancestors instinctively knew that fat was essential for making them strong and healthy.

  If you look at the fat content of different animal organs compared to animal meat you can see why they would choose any type of offal first. Lean meat has a fat content of only about 5 per cent, compared to kidney, which has 15 per cent fat, the intestines (tripe) 18 per cent, the heart 25 per cent and the liver 30 per cent.7 And the organ with the most fat? The brain – up to 50 per cent of brain tissue is fat; it contains high levels of the essential (and currently very misunderstood) type of fat we now call cholesterol. In addition to the animal’s organs, the fat under its skin and inside its abdomen would be prized. One of the most highly nutritious parts of any animal is the bone marrow, the congealed tissue within the long bones of mammals that is responsible for making blood cells. Bone marrow is made up of 84 per cent fat (in all caveman excavations, there is evidence that animal bones and skulls would have been smashed to access these nutrients). There is good evidence that when hunters fell on hard times they would scavenge the bones of animals already killed by other predators to access this precious source of energy.

  Vegetables, Fruits and Carbohydrates

  You can imagine the difference in the quality of foods foraged and hunted by our ancestors compared to today’s equivalent food types. The vegetables, fruits and tubers would all have grown wild and would not have gone through our terribly wasteful supermarket quality control. In today’s world, up to a third of all fresh foods grown for supermarkets do not reach us because they do not measure up to the supermarkets’ standards, because they either do not look right, or are bruised, or are just not fresh enough. This has not always been the case. Early man was used to a rich variety of wild fruits, berries, green shoots and root vegetables. They may not have tasted so sweet and ripe as today’s hybridized, genetically engineered, odourless and perfect-looking equivalents, but the variety would have far exceeded what we consume today. In temperate regions over 100 different types of plant foods were consumed, and in tropical climates many more. The dietary amount of carbohydrate consumed by our ancestors was much lower than today and the carbs that they did manage to obtain were totally unrefined – certainly they would not have been the major source of food satisfaction that carbohydrates are for us today. Their equivalent might have been grilling to a crisp a piece of wild boar liver!

  The Palaeolithic Diet

  We will leave our hunter-gatherer friends for now and look at what happened to them as they evolved. But, before we go, let’s consider a summary of the food they actually consumed. This shows what the real Palaeolithic diet consisted of: lots and lots of meat, fatty offal and bone marrow, with a top-up of a staple unrefined carbohydrate and seasonal foods as a treat.

  Extending the Food Supply

  So, what happened after the cave dwellers evolved into early humans 150,000 years ago? They spent a lot of time doing what they did best – roaming and colonizing the Earth. They became more proficient hunters and developed language and kinship.

  When foods were plentiful and the weather was OK and they were in a safe place, we might assume it was like the Garden of Eden, a paradise on Earth. But the reality was very different. They had evolved as humans because of their relationship and fascination with food. Food was obviously critical for survival, but cooking and preparing foods had also been instrumental in their ability to evolve and become ‘human’. The problem was that hunted, or foraged, foods were unreliable. Foods were seasonal. Our ancestors had to trek to different areas depending on the migration patterns of the animals they hunted and the weather. They were constantly upping camp to find seasonal foods.

  Figure 7.4 The hunter-gatherer food pyramid – if it had existed Adapted from M. Sisson (2012). The Primal Blueprint. London: Ebury Press.

  They started to solve their food supply problem in around 20,000 years BC. In a part of the world that is now Egypt, the first farmer to ever live discovered that some grass seeds (particularly early forms of wheat like buckwheat and spelt) could be planted and grown in the moist and fertile soil that is unique to the area. This significant development meant that their food supply could be predicted and controlled and the hunter-gatherer clans did not have to keep moving to find food: it was the advent of the agricultural age. As well as controlling plant food, they learned how to tame and domesticate animals so that herds of cattle, goats or sheep could guarantee an easy, all-year-round supply of meat.

  Now that they finally had a stable food supply, our ancestors could put down roots and build permanent settlements that later developed into towns and cities. Farming made the food supply much more predictable and much more efficient. A small number of farmers could supply food for many people. Agriculture meant that much of the population of a town did not have to spend their day in the pursuit of food, unlike their nomadic ancestors. Their time was freed up for tool-making and later to develop the other benefits of civilization such as science and education.

  Agriculture and civilization all sound great. Now our ancestors’ relationship with food – the very relationship that had made them different to the chimps – was developing. After discovering fire and learning to cook food, they now had control of their food supply, and with this came the power to utilize their brains.

  However, something unusual happened to the health of the populations in the new towns and cities. Even though they were safe from predators and from famine, the populations of the early post-agricultural age were weaker and shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Many became poorly nourished as they were now eating the limited foods that were available from farming, instead of the wide variety of plants and animals that the hunter-gatherers had consumed.

  The impressive and inquisitive brains of the humans didn’t stop evolving when they were able to harvest their own crops and butcher their own cattle. The agricultural age continued developing at an increasing pace as communication and transport between towns improved. Clay pots were created to cook with, as well as to eat on, and store food in. The wheel used by the potters was spotted by someone with an inquisitive mind and adapted to make the wheels of the first carriages, kick-starting a transport revolution. The wheel principle was also used much later to build mills, often powered by river water, to help grind wheat down. Iron was used to make useful farm tools like the plough. Irrigation, dams and crop rotation were developed.

  As the productivity of farms improved, so farmers found that they had an excess of food. More food than they needed to feed their family and neighbours. They started to trade and sell their wares in local markets, increasing the types of food available to them.

  With improved transport, local markets which would serve an area of a 10-mile radius soon progressed into national markets. Merchants became involved in trading between local markets, purchasing foods in bulk in one market and selling it at a profit in a distant area where there was a need. This development is important because it heralded a shift to people no longer eating products that were grown in their own local area. The profits that merchants made from trading food and transport were good. The people were also happy that they had a variety of foods from many miles away to choose from. But the genie was now out of the bottle – and the results of this new trading economy would seal our future relationship with food, with unexpected consequences.

  THE VICTORIAN GIRL COMING OF AGE

  Imagine London in Victorian times, maybe around 1850. A mass of humanity had descended on the city from surrounding towns and villages – poor people with a dream to make their fortune
, but in reality just about surviving. Dirt, noise, disease and crime fill the rat-infested streets. But there is another side to this Victorian scene.

  In exclusive Arlington Street, overlooking a lush Green Park, a young aristocratic lady sits at her dresser and makes the final preparations for her coming of age celebration. She smiles at herself in the mirror, admiring her wealth and status. She glows with excitement. The mixture of powdered iron filings, water and vinegar that she had rubbed on her teeth had done the trick – they had turned black! The culprit of this seemingly inexplicable fashion faux pas? Sugar.

  The Irresistible Pull of Sugar

  Black teeth as a fashion statement? This was a sign of our evolutionary Achilles heel coming to haunt us. There is a lot of skipping backwards and forwards through time here, but I’m afraid we must go all the way back to the ancient savannah now to explain our weakness for sugar. Evolving humans, with lots of new environments to explore, had to develop a safety mechanism when choosing new foods to eat. They needed to know what was nutritious and what was poisonous – and to facilitate that our ancestors developed sensors in the mouth that would give them clues as to whether something was safe to eat or poisonous, and whether it was nutritious. These sensors are still with us today: they are the taste buds located on our tongue. There are six types of taste that we can differentiate: bitter, sour, salty, fat, protein (called umami) and sweet. Any food with bitter or sour flavours would make us cautious before eating it. Foods with mainly salty, fatty or protein flavours would get the ‘OK’ signal. But any food that lit up hunter-gatherers’ sweet taste buds would also light them up too.

  Evolution has hard-wired our sweet taste buds straight to the pleasure area of our brains. If the signal is strong enough – if the sweet food is sweet enough – the signal we get, straight to our brain, is the same as if we had taken an opiate drug like morphine or heroin (maybe not a large dose – but the signal is the same). The sweetness signal calms our emotions and improves our mood.

  In fruit, the sweet taste is a signal from the plant to the animal (or us) to eat it. If the fruit gets eaten, its seeds get propagated far and wide. Sweet-flavoured foods obviously contain glucose and, as we know, our brains are expensive to run. They need a constant supply of glucose to work – otherwise we will fall into a coma rapidly. This explains the importance in our evolution of prioritizing sweet foods by making us go crazy for them.

  In hunter-gatherer times, sweet foods were very hard to come by. They tended to be seasonal like fruits and so our ancestors’ taste for sweet foods prompted them to trek far and wide to find them. But at this time hunter-gatherers only had access to the great feeling during the summer seasons. That was until farming and transport and our friendly merchants stepped in.

  In most parts of the world farmers grew a staple food for their population, depending on the climate. In North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, that staple was wheat. In India and China, it was rice, and in America it was originally maize. Yet none of these staple foods gave the early humans the ‘high’ they craved when they consumed sweet food.

  Then, 10,000 years ago in Indonesia, farmers first cultivated a type of stout grass that accumulated sugar in its stalk: sugar cane. People loved to chew and suck on the cane to release the sweet juice. Sugar cane farms soon spread across Asia. But sugar cane, unlike wheat or rice which contained the nutritious part in the seeds and could therefore be stored, needed to be consumed soon after picking, otherwise it would rot. This meant that trading sugar cane on anything other than a local scale was not possible. Then a breakthrough came in India around AD 300. Farmers discovered that if the sugar cane pulp was squeezed or crushed out and left to dry in the sun it would form solid sugar crystals, meaning that sugar could be processed into a commodity fit for transport and trade. It became a valuable ‘spice’ used in cooking and in medicine to treat illness (or, in actual fact, to make ill people feel better with the opiate effects of sugar).

  In the Middle East, techniques to refine sugar progressed and it became an integral part of Arabic culture. Delicious sweets were produced that were revered by anyone tasting them. European civilization was not exposed to sugar until much later. Probably the first contact with sugar traders was during the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. French, Roman and English soldiers started to bring ‘sweet salt’ back to Europe, stimulating the interest of royalty and other wealthy citizens. Spain, Cyprus and Portugal (Madeira) started to produce their own sugar, but the price remained extremely high due to intensive labour costs in growing and processing it. It remained a rare, expensive delicacy.

  Sugar and Slavery

  Then the story of sugar gets darker. On discovering the Caribbean islands in the late fifteenth century, early explorers noted that the climate would be ideal to grow sugar cane. Within a few years, the first Caribbean sugar plantation was established in Cuba in 1501. The demand for sugar in Europe was extraordinary and merchants saw an opportunity to make huge fortunes – but they desperately needed people to work on the labour-intensive plantations and sugar mills. They turned to the slave trade and eventually 10 million Africans were forcibly transported to work on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil. The merchants lined their pockets with every transaction – filling slave ships in West Africa and selling the slaves to plantation owners in the Caribbean, then loading the ships with sugar (and rum) in the Caribbean and selling it in Europe. Finally, they would complete the triangle by transporting guns and munitions from Europe and trading them with African warlords for the slaves they had captured from neighbouring tribes. It became a highly profitable trade in misery.

  The Sugar Glut

  By the 1700s and 1800s the glut of sugar being produced in the Caribbean finally meant that sugar products were much more available to those living in the West. Sugar was seen as highly profitable by the government, which taxed the import of ‘white gold’ prohibitively. A pound of sugar cost 2 shillings or the equivalent of £50 in today’s money.fn5 It was now becoming a delicacy for the common working man, but a staple for the aristocracy. The excessive consumption of sugar by the Victorian aristocracy led to an excess of tooth decay in this group. The presence of black and rotting teeth in a person signified that they had the financial means to have bought enough sugar to rot their teeth – at the time this was deemed a desirable look! Of course, if you were too young to have rotting teeth, the fashion was to mimic this affluent look by painting your teeth black.

  As she peers out of the window of Arlington Street into the park, our young lady feels pity for the poor people down there – those who cannot afford to sample the delights of sugar, and certainly cannot afford to dye their teeth a fashionable black. But she should not feel too sorry for them. One of the hidden secrets of the Victorian poor was that they were, by chance and not by design, living in a nutritional golden age.

  The Victorian Miracle Diet

  Average life expectancy in Victorian England was forty-one years. However, infant mortality for the poor was shockingly high and skews the average life-expectancy statistics. In poor working-class areas of England, infant mortality reached almost 25 per cent; in the slums it could be as high as 50 per cent. Most children died through infectious diseases, such as dysentery, cholera or typhoid fever, due to poor sanitation.

  However, if infant mortality is excluded from the health statistics of the time, then the life expectancy of a poor Victorian, as long as they had made it to their fifth birthday, was similar to that of today.8 Even without the benefits of modern medicine Victorian life expectancy mirrored ours.

  The health of these poor Victorian populations (who had survived their early childhood) was down to the unique diet of the time. There was no food shortage. Fresh foods could be purchased from the markets relatively cheaply. The diet consisted of vegetables and roots, including onions, leeks, carrots, beetroot, turnips, Jerusalem artichokes and large bunches of watercress. In the summer cherries and plums would become readily available, an
d by autumn gooseberries and apples were in abundance. Dried fruit was a common treat for children. Legumes such as beans and peas were plentiful as was the winter delicacy of delicious roasted chestnuts.

  Being an island nation there was an abundance of fish, including salted or pickled herrings, eels and shellfish such as mussels. Meat was less commonly consumed, but when it was, it was eaten in its entirety; just like our cavemen ancestors, the Victorians knew the health benefits of bone broth and certainly enjoyed the delicacies of offal: the heart, kidneys, ‘pluck’ (intestines and lungs) and, most importantly, the brain. Most of the meat they consumed was in the form of this cheap offal – rich in essential micronutrients and in saturated fats, especially cholesterol.

  The Victorian diet of the poor was low in sugar and refined carbohydrates and high in fresh vegetables, fish and the health-giving properties of bones and offal. People smoked less frequently than today and beer was watered down, meaning alcohol consumption was also lower than now (the role of alcohol will be explored later in this book). Combine all this with an active job and soon you get to live the same age as we do now without having access to modern healthcare to achieve it. However, the healthy mid-Victorian diet would not last longer than a generation. By 1870 beet sugar from Europe was flooding the market and undercutting Caribbean sugar cane imports. The price of sugar had started to plummet, meaning that the golden diet of these Victorians would never return.

  Pandora’s Food Box

  Just as, by chance, we had stumbled on the perfect, healthy Victorian diet, another massive change to our food environment occurred. In the Industrial Revolution farms became mechanized and therefore more profitable, transport became more efficient, and food became a business. For the first time in human history the population had access not only to locally produced fresh foods but also to foods from long distances away, sometimes from different countries or even different continents. This food had to remain edible, despite the long distances travelled. Ideally, food would be produced that could have a long-term shelf life. This meant that the food had to be altered to extract the parts that would make it go off (in most food this includes omega-3 ‘good fats’ – we’ll discuss this later) which would then be replaced with a substitute that could act as a preservative (various of the E-numbers you now see on food packaging) and other ingredients that would make the food more palatable (mostly sugar, salt and fat combinations).