Just what is a natural diet?

Health gurus frequently tell us to adopt a natural diet, but what is natural.  If you go right back to the early days of mankind, the diet would be very different from today’s.  Game – once he’d worked out how to catch it and kill it – nuts, berries and leaves would have been the mainstay.  No doubt a few brave souls would have perished whilst the poisonous berries were tested and a mental note made of the safe edible varieties.

Natural Diet - Wild Cabbage

The early flora and fauna were very different from what’s available today.  Centuries of selective breeding has produced creatures that would be unrecognisable to our ancestors.  Similarly, our caveman would probably recoil in horror if presented with a head of broccoli or cauliflower; both members of the mustard family,.  The Brassica family of which broccoli is a member have been traced back to the wild cabbage that still grows on chalky coasts in Europe. This vegetable was being cultivated 8,000 years ago and found it’s way to the Mediterranean region via Persia.  The wild cabbage is a very different vegetable from the present day broccoli, cabbage, kale, spinach, turnips etc.  The range of nutrients would be totally different from the original and even vary according to the cultivar and even the region in which they’re grown.  In terms of diet and nutrition – who knows what was being eaten?

This is a layman’s look at just one vegetable and the mind boggles at the variety and complexity of today’s food intake.

These arguments also apply to the meat we consume today.

Any thoughts of a “natural diet” are pure fantasy.

What we can do is look at what is available in our part of the world and make the best choices we can, based on present day knowledge.  Here again we hit a snag as the differing ideas about what’s good for us and what isn’t cause at the very least frustration and at worst, a danger to health.

We are told fruit is good for us but diabetics who care about their blood glucose levels, know that today’s varieties of super sweet fruit create havoc with their blood sugar levels and by no stretch of the imagination are part of a natural diet.  Going back to the distant past, fruit was nowhere near as sweet as the modern varieties.  It’s simply marketing.  A market has been created for sweet things and the fruit has been selectively cultivated to satisfy the demand.  This inevitably followed by the cultivation of even sweeter fruit to grab a bigger share of the market.  The modern apple has been described as a “Sugar bomb” and it’s unfortunately true.  A sharp tasting apple would be much healthier.  All of this doesn’t even scratch the surface of the problems facing those trying to stay alive and healthy.

We are being misled in so many ways.

The advice given to the obese and type 2 diabetics is a prime example.  How can it be right to be told to eat more fruit and cut down on sugar?  Especially as the fructose in fruit is one of the most damaging.  We’ll look at this in greater depth elsewhere.

So, how do we find an approximation of the natural diet?

All we can do is avoid processed food as much as possible – tinned and ready-made items in particular.  Fast food such as burgers etc. is not as bad as you may think provided you eat the burger and salad but dump the bun!  Yes, the bun is full of sugar and has no nutritional value.

What about fat in a natural diet?

Avoid artificial spreads at all costs.  They are have an unbalanced fat content – high Omega 6 and low Omega 3 -  and contain substances with a known association with cancer and coronary heart disease.

Stick to natural fats.  Animal fat, butter, olive oil, coconut oil and rape seed oil contain a balanced selection of nutrients and are healthy.  It should be noted that although rape seed oil is safe, this was not always so as it naturally contained high levels of erucic acid which is thought to have health implications.  All of the Brassica contain this substance at varying levels this is the reason mustard oil is banned for food use in Europe.  Other brassica contain small amount that are totally harmless.  The evidence for a health risk was assembled from experiments on rats so it isn’t certain if there are risks for humans.  The prime reason for cultivating a low erucic acid varieties was palatability and the aim was to reduce glucosinolates by accident, erucic acid was reduced as well.

A totally natural diet requires natural food which is not available from you local store.  All you can do is eat a variety of ingredients that are fresh or frozen to try to emulate a natural diet.