I used to think grains must be bad since we only started eating them ~10,000 years ago, but since reading about some of the groups Weston Price documented in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, I'm starting to rethink this. The Isolated Swiss towns he visited lived off rye bread and milk products and were perfectly healthy, as were the Gaelics he visited living off oat cakes and fish. There are countless examples of grains used as a staple in groups with perfect health.
And you make a good point that diseases of modernity weren’t common even in modernised societies until mid 20th century.
I will say though, I thought in Victorian times the people in general had terrible dental health because of all the sugar? That would seem like a disease of modernity based on the perfect dental health of the non-modernised people Weston Price documented.
> I will say though, I thought in Victorian times the people in general had terrible dental health because of all the sugar?
This is an extraordinarily good question and I notice that I am confused here. Please continue to comment here and help me debug my half-baked ideas!
I think the problem goes back to Elizabethan times, when sugar first started being imported to these islands. Apparently tooth decay was at one point fashionable, and people who couldn't afford enough sugar to destroy their own teeth would paint them black, to look like the people who could.
But it's a real puzzle. Tooth decay is obviously a fatal problem, especially pre-antibiotics.
Like the appendix, it needs explaining.
How can
(a) sugar causes tooth decay and
(b) people really like the taste of sugar
both be true over evolutionary time scales, given that 'liking the taste of things' is probably under genetic control?
I'm going to bite this bullet and say that they can't.
Maybe no ancestral population of the English ever had access to sugar?
Maybe sugar didn't use to cause tooth decay?
To be honest, four hundred years sounds like the sort of timescale where evolution should have occurred here. Why do English people still like the taste of sugar after four hundred years of it destroying their teeth with fatal consequences? I must say I never really have as an adult, but I did as a child I think, and even now, I'm not averse to it. I still like the odd ice-cream now and then.
Anyway I'm going to go off and find out. I feel a blog post coming on. Thank you very much. I've subscribed to your new substack and I look forward to your essays.
Maybe we can narrow it further. I assume it is related to something about how we *process* our food. There must be examples of Western peoples who eat whole food diets (Amish) minus the doritos, bottled salad dressings, enriched flours, and other modern process changes. If they don't have the same metabolic syndromes then figuring out the cause should be far simpler.
Oh interesting! I would have put money on them still being ok. Were they ok until recently? What have they changed recently? Is it all of them at once? Do you have references?
I used to think grains must be bad since we only started eating them ~10,000 years ago, but since reading about some of the groups Weston Price documented in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, I'm starting to rethink this. The Isolated Swiss towns he visited lived off rye bread and milk products and were perfectly healthy, as were the Gaelics he visited living off oat cakes and fish. There are countless examples of grains used as a staple in groups with perfect health.
And you make a good point that diseases of modernity weren’t common even in modernised societies until mid 20th century.
I will say though, I thought in Victorian times the people in general had terrible dental health because of all the sugar? That would seem like a disease of modernity based on the perfect dental health of the non-modernised people Weston Price documented.
> I will say though, I thought in Victorian times the people in general had terrible dental health because of all the sugar?
This is an extraordinarily good question and I notice that I am confused here. Please continue to comment here and help me debug my half-baked ideas!
I think the problem goes back to Elizabethan times, when sugar first started being imported to these islands. Apparently tooth decay was at one point fashionable, and people who couldn't afford enough sugar to destroy their own teeth would paint them black, to look like the people who could.
But it's a real puzzle. Tooth decay is obviously a fatal problem, especially pre-antibiotics.
Like the appendix, it needs explaining.
How can
(a) sugar causes tooth decay and
(b) people really like the taste of sugar
both be true over evolutionary time scales, given that 'liking the taste of things' is probably under genetic control?
I'm going to bite this bullet and say that they can't.
Maybe no ancestral population of the English ever had access to sugar?
Maybe sugar didn't use to cause tooth decay?
To be honest, four hundred years sounds like the sort of timescale where evolution should have occurred here. Why do English people still like the taste of sugar after four hundred years of it destroying their teeth with fatal consequences? I must say I never really have as an adult, but I did as a child I think, and even now, I'm not averse to it. I still like the odd ice-cream now and then.
Anyway I'm going to go off and find out. I feel a blog post coming on. Thank you very much. I've subscribed to your new substack and I look forward to your essays.
> Something that happened in the 20th century in America, and has spread round the world in recent times.
You're welcome?
Our fault for copying! We should have the courage to make our own disastrous mistakes, like we did in the good old days.
Maybe we can narrow it further. I assume it is related to something about how we *process* our food. There must be examples of Western peoples who eat whole food diets (Amish) minus the doritos, bottled salad dressings, enriched flours, and other modern process changes. If they don't have the same metabolic syndromes then figuring out the cause should be far simpler.
Hard agree. Where are the whole food nutters? How are they doing?
Have you seen the state of health in the Amish?!!
I don't know what has happened there but many are now overweight and have appalling dental health.
Oh interesting! I would have put money on them still being ok. Were they ok until recently? What have they changed recently? Is it all of them at once? Do you have references?