Food for health

18 Dec 2019

I tell the story of the greatest wonder of the world, human intelligence and how it has changed the world sometimes for the better and other times for the worse.

 The story starts some million years ago when our humanoid ancestors were happily swinging from branch to branch in the trees successfully avoiding the ferocious beasts below.

Then disaster struck, the climate changed – this time due to natural causes – and the trees disappeared and our humanoid ancestors were easy prey for the ferocious beasts and the population dropped to just a few hundred. We were on the verge of extinction when we made the greatest innovation that mankind has ever made – speech.

And with every innovation there is always a change in the social structure – how we live. So we talked to each other and decided that if we all worked together (social change) and we all threw stones at the ferocious beasts they might just nick off.

And it worked and we had mass hanky panky to become the dominant creature on earth.

But with every innovation and accompanying social change there is typically a dark side. Having learned the power of forming tribes, which was the bright side of the speech innovation we started to kill people from other tribes – the dark side of that innovation.

Then we made the second most important innovation of all time – the control of fire for protection on dark nights and for cooking food. And the extra nutrients available from cooked food enabled our brains to grow to become the biggest user of energy in our bodies.

So we kept on innovating and changing our social structure – developing nation states – which stopped the tribal fighting but replaced it with war – killing people on a grander scale. That is until our weapons became so terrifying that even the most extremest leader could not face the consequences of another major war.

Then we developed the greatest innovation of the modern era – the web, which goes beyond the nation state to a global social change – which we are still grappling with.

But the dark side of globalising our food is we have created what has been called the black death of the twenty first century – the modern health epidemic which really starts in our guts.

We have two brains, one in our head and the other in our guts formed by trillions of cells talking to each other and our head brain to create our intelligent control system which manages our body – but specifically how we store fat.

We need to store fat, that is what our chubby bums are for. But if we screw up our guts they go into panic mode and store fats in the wrong place, in our organs particularly the pancreas which leads to diabetes, our brain which leads to dementia or anywhere and everywhere which we call obesity.

This web book is the story of how our great capacity to innovate and our limited capacity to manage the corresponding social change has led to this modern black death.

But there is no point in telling a story if it does not lead to change. We have the technology, we know how to grow healthy food but it is the social change where we are loosing out.

But that may be easier than we think, we know that our gut biology comes from our mums, particularly during birth but afterwards while breast feeding.

 

The social change may be as easy as a bunch of new mums, sitting outside their clinic deciding that they want healthy babies so they (or get their hubbies) to go out to the local farmers and ask them to grew the food which will makes them, and hence their babies, have a healthy gut.

I have written this web book with pages and posts which tell the story like a conventional book with chapters so you can read just like a book by following the links at the bottom of each page so the information follows in some form of logical sequence, and I add a new chapter to the book when ready, which could be in a week of even a couple of months if that is what it takes.

But it is also like a conventional web as you can hop from page to post as you fancy. Just click on food for health or post in the menu above.

But however you decide you want the story to unfold it is a living story so there is no final page, the story just keeps on unfolding before our very eyes. And when new information comes to light I may go back to modify a page – that’s why I date every page.

I tell how my wife, a qualified doctor, became diabetic from our current food system and how she was misinformed by our medical advisers who told us that diabetes could not be reversed but just got steadily worse needing stronger and stronger medication – that we should accept that she would probably die young from a heart attack.

And they were just plain wrong!

It is a little stand alone sub story but it does explain why I am motivated to write this story.

Next I sugest you read about how we need to change our thinking on food at food for health 18 Dec 2019

Then you may be interested in how I got into food by going to  Goto mission

or skip to the more technical article

our-intelligent-control

or you can join our Facebook group Biofoodie

go to mission