A quick glace at the self-help and diet selection in your local library or bookstore will reveal that there is no shortage of ideas on how to improve ones life.  Currently in the United States the rate of overweight and/or obese Americans is almost 70% and the rate of tooth decay after 40 years of declining is once again on the increase.  The only conclusions that can be drawn from that is that the majority of people are not following a diet that leads to optimal and that these self-help books cannot be the answer as they all advise different philosophies.

This begs the question, “What are the characteristics of the ideal human diet?”  The answer can be somewhat complicated but in short it leads to optimal health.  It does not lead to:

-Diabetes

-Heart disease or hypertension

-Obesity

-Tooth decay

-Any other non-contagious chronic disease (NCCD)

Yet these diseases are all too common in modern America and much of the industrialized world. I suggest looking back in order to move forward.  Some answers may be found by examining not only the fossil record but also current populations not eating the Standard American Diet.

Fortunately teeth are made of enamel, the hardest substance in the human body.  It fossilizes and preserves very well.  At a recent conference an anthropologist showed me a human skull that was over 50,000 years old.  I noted that it had room for all 32 teeth and they all met in a perfect bite.  He then told me that he had an entire room filled with skulls from the pre-agricultural era and none had cavities or crooked teeth!  Clearly there is a mismatch between modern diets and what our teeth are designed to do.

More evidence may be found by looking at current populations as such as the Inuit of the far north or the Masai of Africa, as long as they are on a traditional diet there are little or none of the NCCD that seem to plague the rest of us.  Certainly no one is going to adopt the diets of either group, nor is that my point.  What we need to do if we want to maintain the ideal and minimize risk of NCCD is to look at what these two groups have in common, how they differ from how most Americans eat, and finally gain what knowledge we can from the fossils.

While the traditional Inuit diet contains very little plant material and is heavy in fish and sea mammals such as whales and seal.  The Masai eat tubers as well as cattle and some dairy, nothing from the ocean.  The Inuit have almost no fiber in their diets.  The Masai have some but not nearly as much as we are advised to eat so this does not appear to be the issue. Neither has much sugar refined or otherwise.  No surprise that both groups living thousands of miles apart in completely different climates both have perfect teeth. Sugar is everywhere in Western diets.  Even when you are eating cereals or other starches remember that they are just polymers of simple sugar molecules.  Your body is a biochemical machine that is very efficient at turning these into simple sugars.

There is no one correct approach but rather a family of different approaches depending where on the planet you live and the resources that are available to you at the time you are living.  The mosaic that makes up humanity has found many different ways to do it. It seems that a diet that is based on a whole foods approach that does not include sugars or substances that turn into sugar are best. That is what our pre-agricultural ancestors ate.  Current populations following this model have given themselves immunity to these diseases.  Why can’t we replicate what they did?  Humans have been walking the planet for 2.5 million years yet no one had a cavity until 10,000 years ago.

Everyone knows that diabetes is at epidemic levels and it is a disease affecting carbohydrate metabolism. Teeth are not designed to eat sugars.  Perhaps this is an indication that they are not good for the rest of our body?  More and more scientists are studying the linkage between carbohydrate/sugars and obesity.  Now some are look at the linkages to other NCCD.  I hope soon we can have a day when these scourges of Mankind are wiped out by modern medicine but in looking at evolution it appears we already have a vaccine against them. The solutions are there for the taking.  If we learn from the past perhaps, we can relegate these diseases to the pages of history.