What is Soylent Green?
Michael Rose's advice to us is eat what we are designed by evolution to eat. Thesis #3 This implies never eating "Industrial Food" that has only been around for 50 years tops. It also implies pulling back from the Traditional food of agriculture - grains and dairy.
This is hard to do if you buy your food from the conventional supermarket. For you may be avoiding junk food but even your traditional food is not what it was.
Much of what we think of as being "traditional" is not. It has been Industrialized. Let me show you. So let's start with an obvious "Industrial Food". Food that is firstly highly processed and that comes from sources that themselves are unnatural and see how this approach has expanded into foods that you thought were food.
The Chicken McNugget. Here is what is in a McNugget (From Mercola)
These are just two of the ingredients in a McDonalds Chicken McNugget. Only 50 percent of a McNugget is actually chicken. The other 50 percent includes corn derivatives, sugars, leavening agents and completely synthetic ingredients.
Organic Authority helpfully transcribed the full ingredients list provided by McDonalds:
"White boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning (autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (botanical source), safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid, rosemary), sodium phosphates, seasoning (canola oil, mono- and diglycerides, extractives of rosemary).
Battered and breaded with: water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, food starch-modified, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, whey, corn starch.
Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent."
That is what I mean by highly processed.
Then think of how the chicken was fed, raised and processed.
They eat an unnatural diet of mainly corn. They have to be medicated because of the stress of the intensity. They are bred to mature very early with lots of meat.
So even the 50% of the McNuggett that is chicken is itself a highly processed animal that exists in an industrial context. This is not chicken or meat as we know it. It is a science based concoction.
But then what about the regular chicken you buy at the supermarket?
It is likely that it too is raised in the industrial way. By choosing this, you have at least avoided that MCD do to give you a nuggett but you still are eating a chicken that itself has been fed, medicated, raised and killed in a toxic way. This must have an effect on you.
Bread - right? Not the bread that your granny ate. Same issues. Weird ingredients designed to give it shelf life and feel and at its heart a brand new wheat designed for yield and high gluten. An industrial wheat designed for the baker and not the consumer.
INGREDIENTS:
Whole wheat flour, water, wheat gluten, high fructose corn syrup, contains 2% of less of: soybean oil, salt, molasses, yeast, mono and diglycerides, exthoxylated mono and diglycerides, dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium iodate, calcium dioxide), datem, calcium sulfate, vinegar, yeast nutrient (ammonium sulfate), extracts of malted barley and corn, dicalcium phosphate, diammonium phosphate, calcium propionate (to retain freshness)
The wheat itself has been processed into a substance that is almost pure sugar. There are also things in here that your granny never added to her bread.
Even the wheat itself is new. (source)
It's all from the dwarf mutant Triticum aestivum plant, the 18-inch tall product of hybridizations, backcrossings, and introgressions that emerged from genetics research during the 1960s and 70s.
According to Dr. Allan Fritz, Professor of Wheat Breeding at Kansas State University, and Dr. Gary Vocke at the USDA, over 99% of all wheat grown today is the dwarf variant of Triticum aestivum. (For you genetics types, Triticum aestivum is the hexaploid, i.e., 3 combined genomes, product of extensive hybridizations, while ancestral einkorn is a diploid, i.e., a single genome, grass. Hexaploid Triticum aestivum contains the especially hazardous "D" genome, the set of genes most commonly the recipient of genetic manipulations to modify the characteristics of flour, such as gluten content. Einkorn contains only the original "A" genome.)
So even the wheat that people who have some adaptation to is novel.
So yes, you too avoid the Wonder Bread kind of bread. But where does your flour come from? 99% of the wheat is this variety now. So even the best whole wheat multigrain loaf is made of this.
Most of you drink milk - a Paleo no no too by the way. But we have been told it is good for us. But even this is not the milk your granny drank.
Again it has been processed in an extreme way and the poor cow that produced it is a cog in an industrial process where it too has been engineered to have an output that kills in in a few years. Where it is fed an unnatural food. Where it is fed hormones. Where it is kept in unnatural conditions.
Look at what has happened to yields.(source)
It is so hard to escape the industrial grip on all of our food today.
And all of this is new. All of this happened in the last 50 years. Most of the food we buy is not even traditional. So what to do?
Buy local is I think the only answer. It's the only way I can be assured that the food I am eating whether Paleo or Traditional is not "Novel". Even easier - join me and give up even the traditional. For as I hope you have seen, even that is not traditional anymore.
At some point to take our health back we will have to push back at the entire industrial food system. But we cannot wait for that can we? If we drop grains and dairy we put pressure on the system. If we demand meat that is raised naturally, then we create a new demand for a new system.
We become part of the change we want. And we also get healthy. Thesis 54
"For EVERYONE else, the agricultural diet and lifestyle should be considered a potential health risk. I have already discussed the remarkable opportunities that may be available to those who have little agricultural ancestry, if they revert to their recently ancestral lifestyle.
At this point, I would like to propose further that all older adults consider trying elements of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with respect to both nutrition and activity. For most of us, it is quite likely that our aging phase will be greatly ameliorated. I would expect many to enjoy a reduced level of risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and metabolic disorders, like type II diabetes.
This does NOT mean that I expect such chronic disorders to be cured, once they have arisen, or to be entirely prevented. My view is that every adult is at some risk of dying from these chronic disorders, including those on mortality plateaus after the cessation of aging. The prospect instead is that the rate at which such chronic disorders arise, and their severity, should fall among many of those older people who stop living in a manner which elicits the physiological effects of an agricultural way of life, or the still-worse effects of an industrial way of life."
