Friday, January 10, 2014

A Short History of Human Food

A Short History of Human Food

We are doing our children no favors, we are in fact failing in our duty as parents, to raise them to live the addictive, waste and pollutant generating lifestyles we were raised to want. The culture generated and fostered by our parents is obsolete. We must not pass it on to our children.

But we likely will. Throughout history,  humans have never shown a capacity to change bad habits in time to avoid destroying their habitat. Now, to destruction of our external habitat, we are are adding destruction of our internal habitat, our bodies, in which our immune systems and our souls, must reside, or die.


As I understand from my own eating history and researches into same, it goes like this. For about 1 million or so years of human history, evolution adapted us to eat a wide variety of seeds, nuts, berries, root vegetables plus some meat, fish, eggs, all wild and gathered quite often on the move. There was not likely a lot of animal products in the food, but some. Certainly there were no products of domesticated animals, meat or dairy or eggs. Whatever we ingested was at times contaminated with bacteria or poisons from whatever source. But there were not many sources of pollution in that non-industrialized wilderness, and the plants and animals were all adapted with immune systems sufficient to deal with much of whatever there were.

Current research ( nutritionfacts.org and a host of other sites) shows there are factors in all animal products, whether meat, fish, eggs, dairy, cheese, that induce inflammation in the body, then support the growth of cancer cells (normal cells that become rogues and start growing uncontrollably)  which preferably form at inflammation sites, then support the spread of these rogue cells to other places in the body. Factors in animal products also appear to damage the body’s immune systems, particularly, the necessary conversion of vitamin D to an active form that plays a large and vital role in much of our immune function.

In the distant past, our bodies were adapted, like all plants and animals, to deal with most inflammation caused by ingestion of damaging substances. So our bodies fairly capably dealt with the inflammation caused by animal products, and this let us live long enough to procreate and raise children to the age of 10 or 12 when they were all sufficiently skilled in the indigenous arts of survival and could set about living without parents if need be.

The good news is that plant based foods have many factors that actually boos the bodies immune systems, repair damaged cells, and kill off damaged cells before they can start the inflammation process. In addition, we can get all the vitamins, and minerals, and energy and proteins we need from plant based foods. The standard food diet proclaimed by Health Canada, in spite of the fact that it contains deleterious meat and dairy products, also contains enough protein and energy from the recommended plants, so that, in effect, the meat and dairy it recommends is unnecessary. (Except for vitamin B12, for which we need to take a supplement, if not eating meat). And nobody gets excessively fat eating plants.

Today though 300 years of rapid scientific and engineering advances in manufacturing and dispersing pollutants, has caused carcinogenic (meaning causing deadly cell breaking) inflammation and excessive damage to our immune systems. This is exacerbated by our habits. We don’t get enough Vitamin D from sunlight in the way our early ancestors did. We eat huge quantities of meat products manufactured by animals who have been concentrating in their flesh the environmental pollutants, dioxins, pcbs, radioactive tritium and so on which our engineering and factory farming has put into their food, the products of the soil, the air, the water, we and they ingest. 

We raise, slaughter, and process these animals in ways that create enormous bacteria and hormone loads in their flesh, which wind up on our plates, and are a chief source of inflammation in our bodies. Note that bacteria are killed by cooking, but the deadly products of these bacteria, so called endotoxins are NOT killed by temperatures less than 800 degrees F.

All the diseases we fear, many of which are now in an epidemic stage, are incited by our meat and dairy food addictions. A partial list is heat disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis. Add to all this, the well-known deleterious effects of stress in our home and work places, again stresses that were simply not present hundreds of years ago, damaging further our immune systems ability to deal with the harmful substances we routinely ingest.

The worst things we do ourselves are to live without sufficient exercise, with too much mental and emotional stress (too much flight or flight arousal, even when crossing the street) and our addictions to and excessive consumption of many forms of pollution saturated meat and dairy products, made worse in their effect by our failure to eat lots of fruit, nuts, berries, seeds, and vegetables as immune system boosters.


We are threatened by the likelihood of global pandemics caused by superbugs, bacteria which are and now and will be even more in future immune to all our scientifically derived drugs. These bacteria have been generated by farmers who feed their cattle and chickens on antibiotics, so those animals can survive the onslaught of our scientifically engineered environmental pollutants long enough to make it to the slaughterhouse upright.

We could solve our massive global warming problem, eliminate most of our ballooning health care costs, and our fear of being overwhelmed by global superbug pandemics,  by taking the eating of cows and their products, and driving cars, right out of our lives.

We are doing our children no favors, we are in fact failing in our duty as parents, to raise them to live the addictive, waste and pollutant generating lifestyles we were raised to want. The culture generated and fostered by our parents is obsolete. We must not pass it on to our children.

But we likely will. Throughout history,  humans have never shown a capacity to change bad habits in time to avoid destroying their habitat. Now, to destruction of our external habitat, we are are adding destruction of our internal habitat, our bodies, in which our immune systems and our souls, must reside, or die.

As the Greek god Hermes, messenger from the Underworld, so presciently said, “As inside, so outside. As outside, so inside.” Look around your big city’s downtown streets. The clutter, the waste, the mess, the utter unsustainability of it all. What you see is replicated inside your body and its mind. What you see is what you, your culture, has made of what’s inside.
Donato Cianci  Jan. 10  2014

Religion of Religious

Religion or Religious

I am a religious person. A sweat lodge leader, a Pipe Carrier, but I belong to no religion. All the organized religions are corrupted by the will to power of their leaders, and the neediness of their congregations, who need to be told how to worship, what to do; who are out of touch with their own internal moral compass, their own sense of natural justice, and so demand a leader. Then they complain about how they are led... taking no responsibility for defining the path for themselves, just sitting in the weeds throwing spitballs, when Daddy brings them results they don’t want... So I am a priest in my own religion. If so moved, I change.

Clearly, The Universe is born out of and carries a deep longing for self-fulfillment which manifests in continuous creation. Every entity, part of the whole, including myself and yourself, carries that same longing and manifests our own creation daily. So I am a creator, part of Creation, and so are you. I need no leader, nor do you. My companions are companions in Creation, all one. Hallelujah!



Donato Cianci Jan. 10 2014

For My Partners in Creation

Had I a garden
Full of roses
All singing
To each other
I would not think
Of them more often
Than I think of you
My days these days
Are full of such roses
Full of such thoughts
Singing to each other
Under the busy work
We do masking our sounds
Only hearing our harmonies
In the silence around us
When we are together
In creation.

Donato Cianci  Apr 24  2006

All One

All One

What do you mean It’s all one? said my friend. I, he said, am different from everyone else, unique, am I not? Thinking about this I conclude ( as have many before me!) as follows. I understand my body comprises many millions of little entities, some of which are clearly free swimming little beings. Which of them is “not me” ? Which part of General Motors is not General Motors? The man on the assembly line ?, the one changing the bosses tire in the parking lot? The dust on the floor of his office? The files in the filing cabinet?  Which part of the Universe is not the Universe? That rabbit? That pine tree? Myself, my apparatus standing here? My soul? The Universe is all one and I am that one, or nothing. Since it is all one, it can’t have a name, having a name implies there are other things, with other names. Clearly there is No thing, nothing here. So I am nothing, no thing, at one with the all of it.

Whatever relations I have in my daily life are all mine, my creation. My work is the work of creating myself. And when I look around, I see I have created myself to this point of being able to participate in the oneness of all, all my creation. I may judge it, find it wanting in some way, but that's the apparatus talking, not soul. No blame, I’m just doing what I was asked to do, by the Manitou, the Mystery. What I’ve got today, is what I set in motion yesterday, and yesterday I had what I set in motion the day before, and so on, right back to the beginning of time, 14 billion years ago and maybe earlier. Once It was a rock, now It walks upright and talks, all one, hallelujah!!

Donato Jan. 10  2014

To Forgive

A post on Facebook by Julia Cianci made me think of the word "forgiven". Seems to be about relationship, mine with others, whether outwardly in reality or inwardly in thought, but at a deeper level its all about myself. My relationship with myself. I forgive so I won’t have to carry around resentment which is dangerous to my health and maybe to the other’s too!. But then, who is myself? Its all one, so I am just an apparatus at one with all the other apparatuses on the universe, and a soul the same as all the others. All one. Now I don’t want to bother with forgiveness, just pay attention and enjoy the show, never have any resentment in the first place, so no need to forgive. Just say oh listen to this, isn’t this interesting, look at what I’ve created here today! All of it all I experience is my soul’s creation of  the day. Everything I see and experience is part of the whole and all of it is me.

Jan 10   2014