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 The culture generated and fostered by our parents is obsolete.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