Reprinted with permission from Chet Day's Health & Beyond.
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Some paleo advocates encourage large amounts of butter each day. Ditto for pemmican (lean and dried beef in powdered form mixed with animal fat). And you mention 19th century workers who thrived on a large chunk of fatty meat and a big slab of bread. Comments?
The content of this question has been touched upon, in earlier answers. The high reliance on animal products ascribed to the hunters of paleo times is a figment of male imagination coupled with some unfortunate twists of fate.
Briefly. Maybe. If you are a member of a hunter gatherer group back then, and you had either struck lucky and caught a food animal, or stolen reasonable leftovers from a better class predator, then you'd be part of a group contentedly noshing, and chucking the well chewed bones over your shoulder onto the pile from previous meals. Housekeeping skills were not well developed, and anyway, a site may only have served as a base for a matter of days or weeks. If you hadn't been successful - and most hunts of this nature are not - and some obliging lion had failed to leave you his leftovers, then you either sat and grizzled, with a rumbling stomach... or there was an alternative source of provision.
There was. It came via the foraging of the women of the group, and anyone who has seen film of modern groups such as the bush women of the Kalahari will quickly realize that these women know their stuff and can produce a banquet from the most seemingly barren terrain. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, insects, small animals easily caught or knocked over, snakes, worms, maggots, young birds, eggs.
Who needs men?
Unfortunately, if you eat an apple, to use an example, and toss the core over your shoulder, it will rot, as well the husks of seeds spat out, and the bones of small animals or birds. No trace remains within a matter of days or weeks, On the other hand, a great big leg bone from a large deer or other large animal scavenged or killed by hunting doesn't vanish overnight. It gets covered with dust, and then a layer of topsoil, and under ideal conditions, in the fullness of time, much time, it becomes a fossil. Which lies there, through the centuries and through the millennia.
Until along comes a modern paleo. Well, fairly modern. 1700s on. With a passion for digging up the past and pushing back the frontiers of science. Largely by chance, the long lost base camp will be discovered and happily dug out of the soil. To reveal? Yes, fossil bone of deer, lots of them, all piled in a heap. And maybe a pile of fossil oyster shells if the location was close to water.
Conclusion? These folk ate a lot of meat. Follow on conclusion? Boy, we thought these guys were shambling idiots but it looks like they were mighty hunters. You want to continue that line of musing?
There was absolutely nothing to suggest that the early lifestyle was anything other than a high meat diet provided by extremely adept hunters. No other remains to indicate otherwise. And, this is perfectly acceptable to those early paleos. They were men, after all. To a man. Women scientists hadn't been invented until about thirty years ago. Or not women paleos. So, good news all round, it was a man's world then, and so it will remain. Even the good books of the world religions support the theme.
The problem was that apart from the lack of non-meat remains, there simply wasn't the technology to get the fossils to talk. They could identify a species from the anatomical bits but that was it. And there was one artifact commonly found among the fossils, and it was a bit of a joke, and of precious little use except as a curiosity piece. Human faeces. Dehydrated by the sun, protected by the same covering as the bones, and in the fullness of time, fossil faeces. Paleo peoples didn't have flush toilets either.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, time moved on, and technology rocketed ahead, and the structure of DNA was unraveled, and a number of lunatics decided to test out all this new technology on the remains found and stored in museums all over the world. The old bones started to sing. And then one man developed a passion for fossil faeces, and had a closer look at these jokey items, using DNA signature amplification techniques. Bingo. The fossils sang too, and put the skids under the mighty hunters. Far from being hefty meat eaters, meat was a comparatively small element of diet.
The early hunters were totally inept.
Not fast enough, not clever enough to plan strategies, not well enough armed to compete with much more aggressive predators. Total opportunists, in fact. Who didn't get lucky too often, and much of the meat came from scavenging the leftovers from the lions. Sit and scan the skies till you see vultures circling, and go hurtling over to see what they have spotted. Find a safe place and wait for the predator to finish eating, and saunter off for a nap. With lucky, there's enough left for supper. This explained some of the curious marks on bones which had baffled investigators because they appeared to have been made by teeth, but not human teeth.
What the feces revealed was the menu, in full detail. DNA profiling achieves near perfect accuracy. So now we know what our ancestors ate, and it wasn't what the history books and movies tell us it was. A lack of technology and an exclusively male investigation together with social structures and the status and position of women in society all came together to unwittingly write up the official history books as works of fiction. It was never a man's world.
Had it not been for foraging women 100,000 years ago, we would not be here today.
The human race would have starved itself into extinction.
Whether or not the history books will ever be re-written to give women back their true place is a question we ponder, with some amusement, at Rea. Its still a man's world and there is some 10,000 years of apologizing to catch up on, because the position of women altered for all time as soon as farming became established, and they were no longer the vital providers of food.
The matter of the farm workers thriving on a large chunk of fatty meat and a big slab of bread doesn't come from the 19th century, but rural East Anglia (in the UK) of the 1940s and 1950s. Dec Twohig comes from that area and in those days, it was an extraordinarily tough life for farmworkers. They worked hard, and worked long hours, getting to the fields by dawn, having wolfed down an early breakfast. By about 9 am, it was time for the second breakfast, which was hauled from the dockey sack. A large piece of cold (very) fat bacon, a slab of homemade bread and a flask of hot sweet tea.
These folk worked hard and they ate hard too. The fat intake was phenomenal, many smoked as well. And yet, they were lean, they were healthy, and they remained fit and active into advanced old age. Vegetable consumption was high, fruit less so - fruit tended to be cooked and made into giant pies. Heart disease was rare, cancer even rarer. The commonest cause of death tended to be pneumonia, which was nicknamed 'old man's friend'. By the standards of today, their diet was horrendous, and yet they thrived on it. And yet again, when you place the diet in the WHOLE context of the life, the community, the lifestyle, an apparently lethal style of nutrition worked, and it could only work in that context. That way of life is long gone, and the health picture of the area is as dire as any other part of the UK. There is considerable food for thought provoked by the questions that spring to mind.
Since your first eBook, E1, makes an excellent case for the nutrient deficiency in most modern fruits and produce, including organics, is not the only answer for each of us to start growing our own foods?
The simple answer to this is that it is a pipe dream, the sort of idealistic fantasy which led to the emergence of self-sufficiency attempts at living on smallholdings 20 years ago. It is not a viable answer in an overcrowded world and in a world where the majority of a population huddle together in towns and cities.
What is possible where there is the will is to use whatever space is available to grow some supplemental foods as a hobby. A growbag of tomato plants occupies little space, requires little skill, and not a lot of time, to produce a crop which will taste wonderful and supply sufficient for several meals. Sprouting is an option frequently bandied about but it is something that many take up with good intent before getting bored, or disillusioned with the small supply possible with one of those plastic sprout gadgets. Large scale production is quite an undertaking, and there frequently isn't the space available in modern flats - or the desire to transform them into inside farmlets.
For most, bearing in mind that a perfect solution is impossible, the closest answer would be to learn to roll with the seasons again, and rotate through the years with native crops as available.
The tendency will be that the produce will be fresher, possibly cheaper than imported foodstuffs which may have been harvested immature, transported thousands of miles, and stored in conditions which gradually wipe out a lot of the nutritional excellence. This too is something of a pipedream because people are accustomed to an abundance of produce of many types available all year round. And the produce on the shelves looks fresh, wholesome and appetizing.
We might comment that a lab analysis of nutrient contents might come as an unpleasant shock, and this is promptly countered by the figures pumped out by the apple marketing board or the pear marketing board or the kiwi marketing board showing that a pear, apple or kiwi contains all these nutrients in abundance. Possibly folk don't want to believe that its the old three card trick. A perfectly ripe fruit or vegetable picked at the right time and analyzed within a matter of hours will give a splendid profile. But that profile doesn't apply to the rest of the produce in the same field which may be kicked around for several months and many miles before it reaches the plate. Its a scam, but it is perfectly legal.
In the end, you do the best you can. It can't be perfect, but it's a sight better than doing nothing. When it comes to nutritional excellence, at this level, sadly, the barbarians have won.
You make a case against supplementation (other than a good multivitamin each day), but how can one get all the nutrients needed without supplementation if all the foods one eats are nutrient-deficient?
We aren't necessarily arguing against supplementation per se. Many foodstuffs are deficient to some degree. We used the illustration of the carrot. Prior to the UK joining the European Community, we imported a lot of carrots from the USA. Your soil is enormously rich in selenium. British soil is poverty stricken. Now the rules say that the UK may not import US carrots. The requirement is minute, but even this minute figure isn't met by the UK diet. Few UK women are up to scratch on zinc - or men come to that.
There is advantage in expanding the range of fruits and vegetables eaten rather than sticking to the same old tired few varieties.
Where one is lacking, another may be able to supply. The fresher the food, the higher the nutritional content, which is another vote in favor of eating indigenous produce by the season, rather than imports. The position can be improved greatly by this ploy, and what we do suggest is that a background insurance policy is worth considering by way of a well balanced formulation of vitamins and minerals. It cannot substitute for a good diet, but it can knock some of the rough edges off where some of the intake of individual nutrients is lower than might be wished.
Furthermore, the RDAs are the minimum level at which deficiency symptoms can be avoided. If you live a stressful life, in a polluted environment, your requirement may be substantially higher than the rda in some elements.
The biggest problem is that once again commercial interest has homed in on people's concerns. The margins on supplements is gigantic. Most cost coppers to make and retail at a whole lot more. So there is a commercial edge in encouraging people to take supplements bought over the counter, and it is an extremely successful and sophisticated marketing operation.
Which raises other questions. Too many corners are cut in the effort to rack up margins and many (most) OTC supplements are of very low quality, contain unbalanced formulations or individual ingredients which are poorly absorbed because the makers opt for the cheapest form. Many supplements contain cheap fillers or fillers of doubtful quality and quite spurious colorants, some of which fall into the E number question mark area. Which is useful, which is not. Without some degree of knowledge, the average person is faced with a totally baffling array on display in the pharmacy.
Furthermore, vitamins and minerals are therapeutic substances.
Some require the presence of another for absorption in specific ratios, e.g. calcium needs half the amount of magnesium for effective absorption or you might as well insert a stick of blackboard chalk for all the good it will do. Too much of one may affect the absorption of another, or, worse still, deplete the bodies existing reserves. This is not an area for amateurs, and those who do want to consider formal supplementation are off their rocker if they think they can succeed by trial and error without the advise from a qualified nutritionist on what to use, how much to use, when to use, and different conditions for taking i.e. with food, without food, morning, evening.
The supplementation we suggest that the interested consider is a totally different ballgame. In 15 years, we have come to trust only two makes of multi out of hundreds available In both cases, the formulation is sound, the ingredients are of impeccable quality, and as background insurance, they fit the bill, perfectly. To go beyond this level, it is reaching a point where you need a nutritionist qualified to advise on an individual basis.
Both American and UK meats are questionable because of contamination and hormones and antibiotics and so on. Is there a healthy source of meat? How about fish?
Oh dear. This isn't going to be a lot of help in the USA. And it's also a case of caveat emptor!
No member of the Rea Centre will touch beef or lamb with a bargepole, and hasn't since the 80s. We simply are not prepared to take that level of risk ourselves or for our families. However... meat is one area where going organic makes a lot of sense, unlike fruit and vegetables. Up to a point. The position may change. There is a growing interest amongst farmers because their produce attracts a premium sale price. There is a growing interest amongst retailers because the margins make their eyes light up. And collectively, the supermarket chains have a lot of muscle to influence matters.
Corners are being cut within the rules, and there are some grey areas. For instance, the regulations say that an animal must be fed on 90% organic, untampered with foodstuffs. That leaves 10% open to question, and if you wonder why the delivery lorry of recycled human sewage, tastefully pelleted, stopped off at the organic farm gate, you might start to get twitchey. Since the content of this 10% doesn't have to be declared, it isn't going to be too long before some legal whiz kid figures that you can shunt the food supplements and prophylactic drugs and growth promoters into this sector perfectly legitimately, and you don't have to confess to any naughties. The additives occupy a minute volume of the 10% bulk so it is perfectly feasible. A cost saver with chickens is to shovel up the faeces, and carefully weigh out 10% of the food bulk to be stirred into the expensive grain the rules demand. Unaesthetic, but legitimate.
When it comes to beef, we ourselves, won't budge.It is off the menu.
But for those who do want to eat beef, and have a reasonable level of security over the BSE problem, Scottish Black Angus herds are grass-reared, localized and with a provenance going back to when the old Queen died. And there have been no recorded cases of BSE amongst these herds.
The meat isn't cheap, but it is excellent quality, and there is a reasonable level of safety. But we invite the British contingent to try a small test. Pick any supermarket chain at random and visit the beef counter. Check the labels and you will find Scottish beef. This is the real McCoy. Close to it you will discover Scotch beef. This is certainly not the real McCoy and it comes close to criminal fraud. Truck an English cow across the border and back again, and hey presto, you can chuck its birth certificate in the bin and stamp it Scotch beef. The buyer, knowing no better may well assume there is no difference between Scotch and Scottish. Oh yes there is! And you'll be robbed blind on the price too.
But, in general terms, it is worth making the effort to seek out organic meats.
It will either cost you more, or you can absorb the differential by cutting down on the amount of meat consumed, which is no bad idea anyway. And you can be relatively certain that the animal has not been reared in a concentration camp.
Fish is another matter. Some varieties are becoming increasingly rare because they are over-fished by the huge factory fleets, and some are in danger of extinction. The modern nets wipe out entire shoals whereas the older wide mesh nets only trapped the mature fish.
The largest area of concern lies with fish farming of trout and salmon. So far, it hasn't been possible to mass produce the deep sea fish like cod. Fish farms are piscine concentration camps where the inmates are fed garbage, and need to be dosed with medication to tamp down disease outbreaks. Does that sum up our regard for fish farming?
I currently encourage people to detox the body with a good detox program and to then follow-up with a healthy traditional diet like the Mediterranean Diet or the Latin American Diet or the Asian Diet or a dietary they work out for themselves by experimenting with foods and various traditional diets. What frank and honest comments do you have about this approach?
We aren't going to cross swords on this one, Chet. Our "new variant" paleo approach has a lot of room to rumba within the guidelines too, and we certainly suggest that people play and experiment to discover what suits them best.
On the matter of detox diets, there is a slight greyish area. Here, we do assess on an individual basis and frequently put people on a short detox program. Via the net, there are constraints. We have people all over the world visiting the website and the club, and there is a stumbling block. Many have been through the dieting mill, and as you may have noticed we use more than simply a nutritional approach.
So rather than add to the misery of following another formal plan, however brief, and for some, their internal state is going to mean that they will not remain oblivious of the detox process going on anyway, we go on a slightly different tack. Relax, make haste slowly and do not go for a total revolution. That's one of the problems with some of the diet regimes - one day you are living 'normally', the next up to the ears in cabbage soup. And it is a culture shock. Everything familiar has gone on a forbidden list, and this can create a lot of problems.
So, our suggestion is to build things up over a period of weeks so the changeover becomes hardly noticed. Start by experimenting with a higher fluid intake of water, move on to tackle one meal of the day - breakfast is the most convenient for most, and work through. It isn't a perfect answer, compared to a detox regime, but it holds the fort. Simultaneously, there are plenty of other things going on, and once the goodies in the toysack start to kick in, well, there are some squeaks of joy littering the clubhouse. Taking back control and responsibility isn't going to be achieved overnight so that side dovetails nicely with the nutritional aspects.
In E1 you say, "We've mentioned that some folk have killed themselves by overloading on carrot juice and wiping out their liver." Please expand on this since many of my readers drink 16 oz. or more of carrot juice every day.
I don't think anyone need worry about a couple of glasses of carrot juice, Chet. The example we used actually comes from the craze of a few years back for using carrot juice as an artificial tanning agent. The people who came badly unseated were those who were knocking back a gallon or more! The liver is a singularly long-suffering and accommodating organ, but this level of vitamin intake achieves toxic levels effortlessly.
Do you consider freshly extracted vegetable juice to be a good way to get a nutrient flood into the body? Please explain why you think juice should limited to occasional treats. Though I personally rarely take time to juice these days, my thinking is that a juice of no more than 20% carrot and the rest dark green veggies and other veggies makes more sense that straight carrot juice. Your thoughts?
It certainly is a good way to get nutrients into the body, at least as far as vegetable juices are concerned, and the vegetable cocktail you suggest makes perfect sense.
If you juice dark green vegetables, the juice is going to have a very powerful flavor which might prove too powerful for many palates.
The only problem with juicing is that the valuable fiber elements end up in the compost bin. It is an excellent way to produce a substantial vitamin hit but maybe not on too regular a basis from that point of view. (I disagree here, but only if one is consuming large amounts of vegetables in addition to, not in place of, juicing -- Dr. Mercola)
Fruit juices are another matter.
These commercially available packets are a total pain because the contents have very limited nutritional value. There is no indicator of the quality of fruit used. Many are concentrated down for transport ease and reconstituted for packaging. By which time the pH of the juice is highly acidic, and unfortunately many tetrapacks are lined with aluminum foil. There are more than enough indicators to suggest that high tissue levels of aluminum and dementia are not unconnected. The juice inside is simply a sugar insult to the system. If you want to do a rough calculation, bear in mind that we view calorie counting with considerable contempt, and check the proportion of a 10-ounce glass of packeted orange juice for breakfast in relation to an average days calorie intake. It is quite an eye opener!
Fruit juices definitely are best kept on an occasional basis, and perhaps also diluted down, particularly for children.
It may be fresh fruit juice, prepared in your kitchen but it's a hefty sugar insult to the system, and fructose swiftly converts and eases into the bloodstream. You'll have a swift energy high, and the blood sugar level will then plummet like a stone. Fruit smoothies may be a slightly better option plus they contain the fiber.
Please share your thoughts regarding cravings.
Suggestion. If you want to abstract the diagram from E1 with the text accompanying it, I think it might clarify the position. But in this format, a briefer overview. The general idea that seems universal is that cravings are a bad idea, and you fight the good fight and batter them to death before they get you. Apart from our horror that anyone should be so out of touch with their inner self that they would contemplate this sort of self-abusive behavior, it's a really stupid idea to start with. Here is our perspective.
We see cravings as vital messages at subconscious level. This area of mind function has total, or almost total, responsibility for the overseeing of cell functions on an automatic basis. We need no conscious involvement and if you think of a cell as roughly comparable in complexity to a capital city, the average individual has 40 billion body cells. To co-ordinate all of them every second of life is an unbelievably complex and miraculous task which our subconscious achieves with effortless ease.
Lets use a 'standard' illustration of the alleged 'bad guy' chocolate. Lets also assume that you are indulging in something as dire as the cabbage soup diet. If this doesn't create instant depression, nothing will. So for some reason, your brain production of a substance called pheylethylalanine shuts down. It is sometimes known as the "happy" drug because it keeps you buoyant. If the level in the body dips, depression ahoy bells start ringing in subcon, and it has to kickstart production pronto. Which might not be possible depending on the reasons for the shutdown. Here is a crisis situation that is going to have a knockon effect on 40 billion cells, so it isn't a minor matter.
We use the simplistic illustration of a computer system for conscious and subconscious with 2-10% representing the proportion of the first and 90-98% for the second. So you have a gigantically powerful and fast computer system with a bouden duty to rectify this crisis situation. Only it's spun through the standard options to get PEA levels up, and no joy. Second step takes nano seconds. Check all memory databases to find a potential alternative solution. Eureka. You were three years old, the doctor gave you an injection and you cried your eyes out. So you were bribed with a square of luscious chocolate. a) it's a quick sugar fix and b) chocolate is one of the only external sources of phenylethylalanine, and it is absorbed rapidly c) it tastes nice.
So end of tears and you are happy once more. Simple memory, lost in the neurological junkyard. No matter. Subcon discovers it in the fraction of a split second, evaluates it and realizes that this might be the answer it needs. Step 3. Subcon knows the answer. Conscious does not. The former can hardly pick up a telephone and say 'Hey, I need a choc supply, like last week'. The two-way communication system is kinesthetic i.e. via feelings.
So the message goes out and you get a tap on the door announcing the polite request, 'May I have some chocolate, soonest, please?' Do you respond affirmatively, with the same courtesy? No, you take a club and batter the messenger to pulp. Poor little guy limps back to base to report the misfortune, and this is where the 'beat the cravings to death brigade' come badly unglued.
Subcon needs that chocolate and the messenger, i.e. the craving, has to continue returning to the door and knocking.
Only several batterings later, it starts to wise up and kick the door hard. Your response remains the same, clobber it with a blunt instrument, and so the exchange goes on, but escalating in intensity until a totally teed off messenger kicks the door down in its despairing efforts to deliver a simple, polite, request. And if you translate the outcome at this point, you are out at the candy store buying up their entire stock because the craving is no longer a whisper but a roar. And bang goes the diet rule with a crash which wakes up guilt, and guilt was bunking with anger which also gets disturbed, and there's a rare old dingdong going on in your head.
And all so tragically, totally un-necessary. The message was important. If you had heeded the craving and slipped a square of chocolate in your mouth, no harm would have resulted, guilt wouldn't have come calling to bawl you out for waking him up, and, heck, don't you get the point? Cravings are valid messages from subconscious level to conscious level. And they must have an answer, or they simply keep repeating and intensifying until you do respond. Respond first time, you stay in control, and all parts are happy as sandboys. Particularly subcon which has the solution to its PEA shortage plugged in and calming things down. End of crisis. No harm done. So message loud and clear is that cravings are friends and not enemies. Respond first time and you stay in control, and a little of what you crave will end the crisis. Go to war on yourself and you'll start a forest fire.
What are your thoughts on salt? Does the human body need salt? Celtic sea salt? RealSalt? Minimally processed salt?
This topic always reminds me, personally, of honey. You know that one? Honey is natural. Bees make it. They even have these cute little bottling plants inside the hive, and a worker bee slapping labels on at the front door. Honey is good for you. Its a natural product and its crammed with unspecified magical nutrients. So you resist the urge to throttle the noisy enthusiast and propagandist for worker bees, and patiently explain that honey may taste very nice, and it may even have minute trace elements of the occasional nutrient to be found if you have access to some pretty powerful spectrometry equipment.
But underneath all the goo lurk perfect molecules of something called SUGAR, and that is all honey is. Cute tasting liquid sugar. Besides which, most commercial honey is heated to 131 degrees and standardized so the taste is reduced to bland, and any nasty nutrients are boiled to death.
Well, salt may have some marginal saving factors because it isn't boiled up, and it is crammed with some pretty dubious anti-caking agents but its a bit of a non-starter.
We need minute amounts of salt in the diet.
We are talking teeny pinches and only one per day if you are exceptionally greedy. Excessive salt wrecks the body sodium potassium balance and is clearly signposted 'heart problems this way' by the most obtuse and blinkered physicians, these days. But humans take to salty flavors like addicts take to heroin, and any food processor worth, no, lousy pun, knows how to hook the customer. Bump up the salt content, even if it is a sugar laden milk shake. We consume far too much, and it seems no foodstuff is edible unless it gets dusted with salt. The ideal solution is to cut it down and cut it out - you aren't going to suffer from salt deficiency, and on the rare occasions when you've been jogging in the noonday sun, and sweating heavily, a pinch of salt in a glass of water will remedy any shortfall.
This gets to be a little like talking about different grades of heroin. Are any of them non-toxic? Sea salt may be the least tampered with, but it doesn't really clothe it with the robes of respectability. Best idea is to wean off added salt.
What about distilled water?
Another topic you have covered wonderfully and there is little to add.
There are no aspects of distilled water that make any nutritional sense, and the best use for it is in the car battery.
Some people do well eating mini-meals six or seven times a day and others do well eating less often. Does the Rea Center have an ideal on this?
This is browsing, and it goes all the way back to when food was available if and when, so you ate if and when. Goes with the ground if you are a hunter gatherer. Seriously, the three meals a day system is really modern and goes back only as far as the Industrial Revolution. With all the factories running full tilt, it would have led to anarchy
if the workforce were eating at inconvenient times, so fixed eating periods made perfect sense. Those East Anglian farmworkers use to have a breakfast pre-dawn, second breakfast at 9 am, lunch, an evening meal, and 'supper'. Browsing actually suits some people a whole lot better than fixed formal meal times, and it's a tactic we have suggested to many over the years as something worth experimenting with.
I'm very concerned about diets for expectant mothers, babies, infants, children, and teenagers. I'm convinced that a strict vegan diet is dangerous for this group, even short-term. What recommendations do you make for this group at the Rea Center?
This has actually come up twice within six months with a colleague and in both cases he persuaded the expectant women to discontinue as a matter of urgency.
Veganism is too restricted a diet for most adults and our opinion is that it is profoundly unsafe in pregnancy.
Most of the pregnant women, with only a (literally) handful of exceptions in 15 years, intend to nurse their infants. In former times, even in this country, where a mother was, for some reason, unable to breastfeed, there were other lactating women who could step in, and in a forager society it certainly wouldn't have been a problem with a group of women sharing childcare.
We do, actively, promote breastfeeding, wherever it is possible because quite simply it gives a child the best possible start in life. I do have some practical experience of this in that my two step children were bottle-fed because my wife's first husband refused to be inconvenienced by the needs of the children taking precedence over his own. Our daughter was breast fed for over a year. The results in general health and immune response could hardly be more startlingly apparent. As far as older children are concerned, there are no concerns over the safety of our modified paleo approach.
Your literature is very anti-diet, correctly pointing out that the diet industry has exploded in size the past 50 years and that most people who diet yo-yo themselves into misery. You say if a perfect diet existed, then everyone would follow it and the diet industry would be out of business. Why has this not happened with the program you advocate?
This one gave us so much innocent merriment that I have the strictest instruction to pass on thank yous and assorted hugs. The fantasies, I would guess, are amazing and colorful. The UK is a tiny island compared to the might of the USA. Can you imagine what would happen to the economy of the country if 60 million citizens simultaneously ceased to purchase a whole range of food products as superfluous to dietary needs? The Government would have to evolve a new and suitably horrendous crime with which to charge us, and probably re-introduce the public gallows at Tyburn, to boot.
Actually, it's a very useful question, because amusing or not, the effect on every facet of UK life would be profound from farming right the way down to the cashiers in the supermarket. Total catastrophe, in fact. Now, perhaps, you can appreciate why no Government can ever afford to tell the truth about BSE and CJD. The economic and social cost would be beyond belief. So, at all costs, and by any means possible, this information has to be kept sealed. And should the outcome be as horrendous as feared, can you imagine that any government has failed to consider contingency planning in the event that the hospitals and health services are overwhelmed by large numbers of terminally ill and untreatable CJD victims? The crack, metaphorically speaking, of humane killers would echo round every hospital in the country. A political hot potato so hot ,it is incandescent.
The fact is that there would have to be a massive promotion and education program to transform the entire eating habits of a nation, and it isn't likely. From what we know, going back about 8-9 years, those who followed our suggestions for nutritional change with an interest in losing weight seem, in the main, to have adopted this approach as a long term ideal, long after the weight issues have been resolved.
It was never designed specifically as a weight loss program in the first place, but the shedding of excess weight is a happy side effect.
There probably isn't a perfect diet that would suit everyone, in the first place, and there is room within the Rea program for all sorts of individual variation.
What we find a little intriguing is that this exchange should go on in the first place because, unwittingly, and innocently, and with the best intentions in the world, we too are almost a part of a global industry. We sometimes make a point that humans have been successfully feeding themselves without outside advice and intervention, and without weight problems, for most of 100 millennia, and nothing too serious has broken in the species. And here we go, discussing the finer points of a dish of salt. A little ironic. Unfortunately, it is indicative of the way the modern world functions. People no longer know how to take care of themselves in this most basic, essential and pleasurable area of life without consulting the oracles, and it is really very, very sad.
Please tell us about The Rea Center. When, why, and by whom was it established?
The Rea Center was founded in 1985, by Dec Twohig, Tony Carter and Tony Hays. We had backgrounds in biochemistry, cell physiology and microbiology, respectively. All three of us had left research careers, disillusioned, and saddened, by what we saw as the direction research was headed in, and the constraints imposed on it. We shared a common interest in complementary therapies, and all of us had qualified in either hypnotherapy or neurolinguistic programming, separately, before we met. So, there was already quite a wealth of resources with which to combine in an experimental practice, with a slightly unusual approach.
We felt that some of the directions that the mainstream orthodox healing arts were taking were increasingly based on a mechanistic viewpoint, and that there were too many schisms on the complementary side, and frequently, inadequate training of practitioners which invited attack that was often justified.
We were also motivated by what we saw as a rapidly increasing trend generally that absolved individuals of involvement in self-care, and encouraged a reliance on external agencies. In the space of a mere two generations, responsibility and power has passed from the individual to the doctor, the scientist, the dietician, and the individual frequently lacks the most basic knowledge upon which to make informed decisions about their own health, well-being and bodies.
The general aim was to synthesize a slightly unusual methodology from our collective knowledge in such a form that it could be taught and used by individuals, rather than applied to them. Although most of a first session went, in depth, through a very detailed history taking, it merged into a seemingly innocuous "story telling" which prepared the ground for the main work, so our people would leave with seeds for thought implanted and ready to bear fruit the subsequent session.
We were joined a year later by Lin Turner, a nutritionist, with a long-term interest in paleo nutrition, and some intriguing ideas on the subject, which were outright heresy to many of her former colleagues. The collaboration reached a point where we realized that something 'stank' in the early history of evolutionary nutrition. So we began looking for the principles that underpinned what was known and recorded, and integrating them into our existing methodology, which already centered around the idea that to separate the physiological from the psychological and emotional was not sound practice. It was the work of paleos such as Richard Leakey that led us to another piece in the puzzle - that our ancient bodies housed our modern intellect, and the two co-existed uneasily in the modern world. Furthermore, much of the old learning and neurological 'wiring' was still extant, and still fully functional, under a veneer of modernity.
In those days, it was largely informed guesswork and a hefty dollop of intuition. Now, it is becoming easier and even more exciting as new analytic techniques decode more and more of the past, with incredible accuracy. DNA signatures can be used and are being used to reveal, for instance, the daily diet of our ancestors from 100,000 years ago. What is emerging is a staggering picture that brings into serious doubt the recorded history of early man. Those errors have enormous relevance for us today, and nowhere more so than in the field of nutrition. They also provide us at Rea with the raw material with which to modify our methodology in such a way that it is uniquely applicable to women, with ramifications that spill over into many other areas of life.
Rea Centre
19 Ranston Street
London,
NW1 6SY
Main Tel/Fax: 0207-262-8572
email: claddaghrs@hotmail.com
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