This text is about why grains and cereals (wheat, rice, rye, corn etc…) are harmful and why you should avoid eating them (this also applies to cats, dogs, etc. – i.e. species who are not seed eaters should avoid grain). This text is based on a branch of medical science called “Evolutionary Medicine”.

N.B: If you are considering changing your diet, you should consult a doctor first!

Background

Among natives, i.e. hunter-gatherer tribes, our western welfare health problems and diseases (cancer, psioriasis, impotence, diabetes, acne, overweight, asthma, Parkinsons, Multiple Sclerosis, allergy, heart disease, …) are completely unknown. In fact, many of our health problems/diseases don’t exist among them. When doctors travel to communities such as the Kitava natives, doctors find no western welfare health problems at all. No one is overweight, allergic, impotent, asthmatic, etc.

When doctors describe certain typical symptoms of e.g. heart attack “pain radiating out to the left arm”, those symptoms are completely unknown. When doctors describe the symptoms of cancer, they are completely unknown. However, one native could remember a cancer case 15 years ago, it turned out to be tropical cancer – which is caused by a virus/parasite(?) or something like that. In short, cancer is virtually unknown, just like heart attack, obesity, atherosclerosis, asthma, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc.

Professor Staffan Lindeberg at Lund University was one of the leading Swedish Evolutionary Medicine researchers and has authored several research articles on the Kitava people [1]. In fact, when Staffan told his medical colleagues he was going to research the hunter-gatherer people of Kitava about cardiovascular diseases, his colleagues questioned his decision because “everybody know that native hunter-gatherer people have no Western welfare health problems”.

One can ask why, we in the West have a lot of welfare health problems, but among native people these problems are completely absent. Well, no one knows why, but more and more researchers are beginning to believe that it is mainly due to our Western diet [2]. There are several signs supporting it. For example. when native hunter-gatherers start to eat western diet, they quickly develop all our welfare health problems as mentioned above.

In the 1950s Nigeria, heart attacks did not exist in the population. Heart attacks leave scar tissue in the heart, which can be observed in an autopsy. Coincidentally, at the same rate Nigerians started to eat Western food, the incidence of heart attacks also began to rise.

How sure can we be that Western food is the culprit of all health problems? Well, we can’t be sure, because what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. But a simple test to see if it can work for you, is that you try it out. If you start eating the same food as the hunter-gatherer peoples and if your health problems start to disappear or decrease in a couple of weeks; overweight, allergy, arteriosclerosis, etc – maybe there is some truth to the claim that wrong food is the main problem – at least for your body.

Many (all?) who try to change their diet along these lines report a lot of health gains and their health problems disappear. Several parents have reported that their autistic children have improved. I and several others who tried out this, have escaped our allergies (cat, pollen, etc).

Evolutionary Medicine Research

So why is diet so important to health? And which diet is the correct one? Although we may never have a final answer to that question, since science evolve all the time and we learn new things, evolutionary medicine has some convincing arguments.

Evolutionary medicine is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution: Survival of the fittest, i.e. all species must evolve and defend themselves, otherwise they become extinct. For example. rabbits are fast and hide so they don’t get eaten. Hedgehogs have spines to defend themselves, etc.

But this also applies to plants. All plants must defend themselves so they don’t get eaten. Some plants have thorns, others are poisonous, if you cut an onion, your tears will start to flow, etc.

Which part of the organism is most important and must be best defended? Why, the reproductive organs of course. So us humans are very fragile there. This also applies to plants, so they have to defend their seeds the most. And how does that happen? Well, nuts have a thick shell, but other seeds are poisonous. Which part of chili fruits are the hottest? The seeds. The seeds are full of capsaicin which is a neurotoxin.

The point is, when you eat seeds, you ingest a lot of toxins, which the plant has developed to protect itself. During Roman times, it is said that a method of execution was to eat a cup of peach pits, which contain so much prussic acid to kill you. It is known that green potatoes are toxic because of solanine, but in fact, all potatoes contain solanine. 1 mg of solanine per kg of body weight is a lethal dose. Kernels and seeds are dangerous, especially if we stuff ourselves with half a kilo of seeds (in the form of pasta, bread, rice, etc.) every day – the most poisonous part of a plant.

Grains and cereals are bursting with nutrition, and these species should have gone extinct long ago, since plants cannot run away to protect itself. It just sits there, ready to be eaten. But it turns out, just as expected of a plant that has survived into modern times, that e.g wheat grains are full of toxins; lectins (an aggressive protein that disrupts digestion), phytic acids (which can inhibit absorption of nutrition), gluten (this is why it cause trouble for some persons) etc. Seeds found in the tombs of Pharaoh 2.000 years ago, can still sprout and grow today – they are full of preservatives and other chemicals. This applies to all other grains as well. Species who are seed eaters (rats, parrots, etc) are constructed differently than humans, e.g. they have a keratin layer in the esophagus so they can better handle the toxins, their intestines can break down the phytic acids, etc. We humans can’t do that and thus we get major health problems.

Why do humans get such problems? Well, how long have we been eating grains? How long have we been eating bread? How long have we had access to mills, water irrigation, scythes, farming, etc? Researchers suggest that grains entered the human diet around 20 000 years ago and increased in importance around 10 000 years ago. In such a short time on an evolutionary scale, it is reasonable to believe that the human body has not evolved to deal with these new toxins. These toxins in grains are so new we get problems. But onions, chilies, and other poisonous vegetables we have eaten for a very long time, because they do not require modern inventions such as mills or water irrigation. The human digestive system is half a million years old, so the poisons that existed back then we can handle, because our organs have slowly evolved to be able to handle them. It is reasonable to believe that in another 100.000s of years, our bodies can handle the toxins in our new food sources, i.e. grains and cereals. But not today. If you mix wheat flour and water, you basically get… wallpaper paste. And eating wallpaper paste can not be optimal food for humans?

Skeletal remains show that when humans became settlers and started farming, which increased the proportion of grain in their diet, those skeletons are crooked and the teeth are full of caries. Their health was really far from optimal. Skeletal remains before the age of farming, were well-grown with regular facial features. Just as the first white people to come to America reported, the North American Indians were well-built with clean, symmetrical beautiful facial features. But that was before American Indians started eating Western food.

The point is the following; eat food that were eaten in the Stone Age and we will become healthy again, because such diet is what our bodies are designed to eat. This means we should eat minimally processed whole food ingredients such as fruits, vegetables, berries, nuts, meat, fish, etc. And avoid grains or cereals, because they can only be eaten if you have access to modern tools like mills, scythes, etc. This original cave man diet is called the Paleolithic diet. So now a question arise, how can you know which food to eat, and which food to avoid?

The rule of thumb is, if a cave man did not have access to a certain type of food, we should avoid it. French fries did not exist in the paleolithic times so fries should be avoided. Fruit salad could be eaten by a cave man, so fruit salad is allowed to eat even today. Fried eggs could be eaten by a cave man, so we can eat fried eggs even today.

So the grains don’t want to be eaten and contain lots of alien toxins to protect themselves. Then, what kind of food is not harmful? What can we eat without problems? How about fruits? Yes, fruits want to be eaten so you poop out their seeds so the species can spread. Therefore, many fruits are not poisonous at all, instead they become sweet when they ripen, with the purpose to attract hungry animals to eat them. Before they are ripe, fruits are sour to signal they should not be eaten. When they are ready to be eaten, they turn sweet. Fruit is one of the most harmless foods you can eat. Have you heard of fruitarians? People who only feed on ripe fruit – but I think that’s extreme. One sided diet cannot be good. You should eat a diverse diet.

So if you start eating as per the Paleo diet, you might wonder if this can help against allergies, or overweight, or…? And yes, it seems to work against allergies! Although there are no large scale studies yet which can prove it, I have gathered plenty of anecdotal evidence and have had a very clear experience of this myself. All allergic people I have spoken to, and who tried changing their diet in this way, attest that it worked for them- their allergy symptoms disappeared (pollen, fur animals, stone fruits, etc.) in 2-3 weeks. One woman told me she has a peanut allergy, and her throat gets swollen. So she tried the paleolithic diet according to my instructions, and in 2 weeks her peanut allergy disappeared. She could eat peanuts again. In the summer vacation she traveled to Turkey and ate bread, potatoes, rice and other cereals. And as she was used to, she ate peanuts but at once her throat got swollen. She learned the hard way, only as long as she eats paleolithic diet, she has no allergy. IMPORTANT, however, if you have severe or life threatening allergies, you should be very careful and do not make experiments exposing yourself to allergens unless this is a very controlled environment and under the supervision and guidance of a doctor!

Along with mitigation for allergy, you gain many other health benefits which I will explain in following posts. If you nail this single thing and start eating a paleolithic diet, it is likely the majority of your health problems will disappear in a couple of weeks. You will lose -8 kg in two months, as I did. My chubby friend who struggled for years to lose weight trying different diets, including eating only eggs and drinking coffee, lost -9 kg in two months. My younger brother lost -18 kg in three months. My older sister lost -7 kg in two months, and could wear her daughters jeans. In all the cases, no one exercised, nor counted calories, nor were hungry. If you starve yourself to loose weight, you are doing it wrong. BTW, here I explain why you should never count calories. In addition to weight loss, your allergy will disappear. Your erection will improve. Your toilet visits will improve. You will get a much better skin. Etc. So eating paleolithic diet is basically how I eliminated almost all of the health problems as detailed in my list here.

I will later post recipes on paleolithic dishes to ease your transition into your new healthy life style to get fit, slim and strong again – as you once were. However, when you change your diet it is common to get sweet cravings. I explain here, how to stop your cravings for sweets and I also discuss cancer and diabetes. If you need help with your sweet cravings, that post could be worth a read?

Here I have an interesting post that explains why Jordan Peterson is wrong about his Carnivore diet. He claims that beef makes you healthy, which is wrong. Quite the opposite, actually.

Subjectively, I think that my health improved around +100% from switching to the paleolithic diet. The health benefits were enormous. However, I discovered something else (based on research of course), and when I implemented that diet change, my health improved another +200% or so. These latest health gains were much larger than going from Western diet to the paleolithic diet. I will write about it in later posts. If you liked this post, you dont want to miss out the next! 🙂

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REFERENCES

[1] Lindeberg, Staffan ^LU ; Berntorp, Erik ^LU ; Nilsson-Ehle, Peter ^LU ; Terent, Andreas and Vessby, Bengt, Age relations of cardiovascular risk factors in a traditional Melanesian society: the Kitava Study, (1997) In American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 66(4). p.845-852

[2] Balzer, Ben, Introduction to the paleolithic diet, https://benbalzer.com/original-introduction/