One of my favourite foods as a boy and a young adult was to have cereal and cream as desert at dinner.
But starting about 15 years ago - whenever I had this I felt terrible.
Why was this? A meal that I had had all my life was now a problem? I can't eat cream any more. It's not just cream - I don't drink milk. But now wheat!
Why do I now feel awful when I have more than a small amount of pizza? I love white bread but I can't eat it and feel well anymore.
And Sugar! Half a chocolate bar and I feel as if I am going to die! As a boy I lived for candy.
What has happened to me? Why is dairy, wheat and sugar causing me so much distress?
The answer is in my evolutionary history.
I have a Scots and Scandinavian heritage. I am part of a quite small group of people who are "evolved" to be able to tolerate lactose.
(Source) The answer is in how I and you adapted to the new foods of agriculture and what this evolutionary story tells us about whom we are and how we react to food.
If I was a native MikMaq who have been living in Atlantic Canada for more than 10,000 years - I would never have been comfortable eating any dairy. For the first time a Mikmaq had dairy might have been from a French settler 250 years ago.
Dairy and Wheat are NEW FOODS for most people. This map shows how and when milk came to Europe. Most other people from anywhere else has little or now tolerance for lactose. Milk is a "New Food" that only certain Europeans can eat and feel ok. Most other people cannot. Here is an interesting article that says more about this.
An unusual circumstance has made this research possible in the first place. Homo sapiens was originally unable to digest raw milk. Generally, the human body only produces an enzyme that can break down lactose in the small intestine during the first few years of life. Indeed, most adults in Asia and Africa react to cow's milk with nausea, flatulence and diarrhea.
But the situation is different in Europe, where many people carry a minute modification of chromosome 2 that enables them to digest lactose throughout their life without experiencing intestinal problems. The percentage of people with this modification is the highest among Britons and Scandinavians (see graphic).
This Milk adapted people migrated into Europe about 7,000 years ago and pushed out the locals who could not compete.
Dairy is not a food that is naturally good for all people and only a few of us can tolerate it and then, as in my case only for a period of time - more on this later in the post.
The same is true for wheat. It is also a NEW FOOD. New in these terms. That for millions of years we ate only meat, berries, insects, roots and nuts. We did not eat milk or ANY grain. Humans have only eaten wheat for a few thousand years.
There is evidence that we lose our evolved adaptation to wheat also as we grow older:
A recent study at the University of Maryland reveals that the prevalence of people suffering from gluten-intolerance and celiac disease has significantly increased over the past 30 years.
Researchers found that more people are losing their tolerance to gluten, the gluey protein found in wheat, barley and rye, as they grow older.
Since 1974, in the U.S., the incidence of the disorder has doubled every 15 years. Using blood samples from more than 3,500 adults, the researchers found that the number of people with blood markers for celiac disease increased steadily from one in 501 in 1974 to one in 219 in 1989. In 2003, a widely cited study conducted by the Center for Celiac Research placed the number of people with celiac disease in the U.S. at one in 133.
As the people in the study aged, the incidence of celiac disease rose, echoing the findings of a 2008 Finnish study in Digestive and Liver Disease that found the prevalence of celiac disease in the elderly to be nearly two and a half times higher than the general population. The recent findings challenge the common speculation that the loss of gluten tolerance resulting in the disease usually develops in childhood. (University of Maryland School of Medicine)
We have been eating sugar for a few hundred years. Most kids can't get enough of it. But again, for many as we age, sugar can poison us.
We have been eating corn for no more than 50 years and it now is the base of our entire food system. There is hardly anything that is not part of the corn base - most of our meat is corn fed - cows and chickens never had corn before 1950 either. Corn based sweeteners are in all processed food.
Here is the punch line.
The industrial age has made foods for which we are not adapted the core of what we eat. No wonder we are facing a health crisis.
Peoples such as Native Canadians who are only 2 generations from a Hunter Gatherer diet are especially vulnerable.
Paiute Indians in 1850 - look at their bodies. That is not where most First nation people are today. The issue is that they have not evolved to cope with the industrial diet. But they now rely on it.
There is a a range of ancestry that has evolved to cope with dairy and wheat and grains. But none of us are adapted well to corn and to sugar.
The Industrial diet has spread around the world and many places such as India and China now face a diabetes and obesity epidemic that has just begun.
More than 160 million Chinese have high blood pressure and 20 million suffer from diabetes, the ministry said. Those rates and other obesity-related ills are rising. China Daily
The new study released this week found the proportion of overweight adults in China has jumped by one-third, to 23 percent, since 1992. It said the number of people considered clinically obese had nearly doubled to 60 million, or 7.1 percent of adults, though it didn't say how that category was defined.
In most parts of the world there is little evolutionary adaptation to dairy and wheat and none for corn and sugar.
But even for someone like me from Scotland and the Orkney - who is well adapted to dairy and wheat, I lose this adaptation as I age. I also have no way of coping with corn.
So this then is the evolutionary context for the health epidemic that confronts the world today.
We are adapted to a Hunter Gatherer diet. Millions of years of eating meat, grass fed by the way, berries, tree nuts, insects, fish, roots. has adapted us well to these foods. Only a few of us can tolerate dairy and wheat and then in middle age we seem to lose this and fall back onto our heritage.
None of us are adapted to corn and to sugar - both grasses.
Even our farming ancestors paid a high price for the shift to grains. They lost about 6 inches in mean height!
The bottom line is that our agricultural diet is not that great for us and is bad for many. Our Industrial diet is even worse.
The risk is NOT FAT! on it's own. It is our inability to adapt to grains.
The Canada Food Guide as shown here is a marketing ploy - much of what is in it is bad for us. The emphasis on grains and dairy in particular.
What is becoming clear is that many of us are not adapted ever to this diet. AND that as we get older all of us lose this adaptation and need to return to our more Natural Diet - our Paleo diet.
If you wish to enter middle age and your senior years in good health, one of the core steps is to get the industrial diet off your table and to get as much of the agricultural diet out too. Not easy but a lot at stake.
All the more reason to get the industrial diet off the table for our kids.
And the good news - booze is Neolithic! Beer came before bread!
So in closing what is your ancestry? How do you feel when you eat certain foods? What is your tolerance?
