100 Million Years of Food (32 page)

“Some of the GM corn is so sturdy it can shred tractor tires,” Jon notes. He leads me into a cavernous shed housing massive, gleaming combines, trucks, tractors; all told, perhaps a million dollars' worth of equipment. There's a tree-lined river near the house where people fish from little boats; the river would be lovely if the waters weren't murky brown from nitrates and other chemical runoff. Jon refuses to eat fish from the river, but he knows people who do. His two boys love to play on the ATV, but when a plane swoops by the house, Jon and his wife yell at the boys and usher them into the house.

“Don't like the kids playing out here when they're putting out pesticides,” he tells me.

Like everyone else, however, Jon's family corporation uses herbicides and pesticides to allow for easier harvesting and greater profitability. A farmer out here makes a comfortable living, as long as the crop prices stay high enough, and profits are rolled back into equipment purchases. To increase their profits, farmers are constantly on the lookout for more land, which would increase their scales of economy. When an elderly farmer appears ready to pass away, inquiries about purchasing his land arrive like vultures catching the scent of carrion.

In the evening, Jon and I set off for a jog. Jon is in fantastic shape, while my right calf cramps up and I have to slow down. The gravel roads inflict pain on my feet, poorly shielded in my five-toed minimalist shoes, with a hole in one toe for good measure. In a way, my slow pace is a good thing, because Jon and I haven't seen each other for almost a decade and have a lot to catch up on. The air is clear of city smog. The sun sets dramatically over the prairie landscape. We make a right off the main road and run past cornfields. A mile or so down the dirt road, we make a left and run past more cornfields. Then another left. More cornfields. I imagine bringing up a family out here, in this expansive biotech paradise. It could be a healthy, peaceful lifestyle, the quiet nights lit with an expanse of stars.

However, the heavy use of chemicals on the crops is depressing. The long-term effects of such intense chemical exposure are largely unknown, but it seems an avoidable risk, if one is willing to accept lower profit margins. Jon tells me that although buyers of corn and soybeans pay higher prices for organic crops, the lower yields and extra work involved make organic crops unappealing for his family corporation.

*   *   *

Another health challenge of living in rural Iowa is the necessity of vehicles and the consequent epidemic of physical inactivity. Jon is in tip-top triathlete condition, but most Iowans don't have Jon's passion for exercise and have to drive long distances to go anywhere, as I found out from hanging out with Jon's family. Jon's family-run farming corporation is mechanized from top to bottom, and like most other rural Iowans, his relations struggle with obesity. However, scattered around the United States are places where farmers of various religious and ideological persuasions resist the onslaught of Big Ag and practice old-fashioned labor-intensive agriculture on small farms. Among the best-known of these traditional farming groups are the Amish. At first glance, many people might find the Amish to be bizarre and impractical in their choices, but I wondered how life appeared from the inside, to people who lived a life that eschewed technology and most modern conveniences, and whether the long-term health prospects of these people were better than those of people in mainstream society.

Friends of mine in Des Moines take me to visit Jonathan Stutzman, about the same age as my longtime buddy but long-bearded and, on this particular Sunday afternoon, barefoot. Jonathan greets us on his porch. On a farm of 240 acres an hour's drive south of Des Moines, he and his family grow sweet corn, tomatoes, peaches, cucumbers, grapes, and cantaloupe, along with beef cattle and a few dairy cows, without the use of tractors. He travels by horse and buggy to sell his produce at a market. They have no refrigeration, so canning is important for preserving leftovers—nothing goes to waste. Two long-haired blond boys watch us curiously and quietly (the Amish speak a German dialect in their homes, and hence children generally do not learn English until they go to school), then bring over their pet rabbits to show the visitors. Girls carry buckets to and fro and bring out watermelon for the guests. I ask Jonathan what his family does for entertainment. Jonathan glances at me in astonishment. “We don't have time for entertainment. Sleep is our entertainment!” With eleven children to rear (two have already married) and no electricity, Jonathan and his family toil day to night. On this particular day, however, a languid Sunday, the children have guests over at the house, singing psalms.

Jonathan and I chat about the practice in some of the stricter Amish communities of not permitting rubber tires on vehicles. He recounts a tragic accident, in which a car struck and killed a man on a tractor, a few miles down from Jonathan's farm.

“The driver was using an iPod,” he says.

I hear the anger seeping around the edges of his words. I think about the collision between new and old, one society oriented toward the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of inconvenience, the other focused on community, family, and faith. The roots of the Amish can be traced back to the sixteenth century, when a group of reformers in Switzerland decided that Martin Luther's proposals resulted in insufficient separation of the church from the demands of the state. In particular, these Swiss radicals believed that a true interpretation of the teachings of Christ argued for the renunciation of violence; they also maintained that children were too immature to choose religion, and therefore teenagers had to decide whether they would accept the teachings of Christ. Only upon this confession would the teenagers undergo baptism, rather than as infants, as commonly practiced among Protestants and Catholics. For their beliefs, the Anabaptists (i.e., rebaptized) were subjected to torture and/or killed, which led to the scattering of Anabaptist offshoot groups around Europe and eventually to the New World. The most conservative of these were the Amish; the Mennonites are a well-known, less conservative branch of the Anabaptists.

In order to maintain community cohesiveness, conservative Amish groups today renounce or voluntarily limit their access to most forms of technology, including electricity and personal possession of telephones. Since Amish also generally ban ownership of gas-powered vehicles, they end up walking a great deal. A pedometer survey of an Old Order Amish group in the province of Ontario found that the men walked an average of eighteen thousand steps per day, while women walked fourteen thousand steps per day, both far outstripping the average of four thousand daily steps taken by Americans. With all the walking and the farm chores required to survive, there isn't much time for lazing around: The Amish men and women studied sat down about three hours per day. As a result, the prevalence of obesity is extremely rare in this group. None of the men in the survey were obese, and only 9 percent of the women, compared to an obesity rate of around 15 percent among the general Canadian population and 30 percent among the general U.S. population. Walking and lack of sitting must be the reason that these Amish were slim, because their diet was typical North American farm fare of meat, eggs, potatoes, bread, and vegetables, and rich in fat and sugar; moreover, Amish living in areas where people engage in much less farm work, such as Ohio, had obesity rates as high as or even
higher
than the average American population. The Amish may not just be physically healthier than people in mainstream North America; they also seem to do better in measures of mental health. While the closely knit nature of Amish communities may seem overly restrictive to outsiders, Amish women can draw upon the support of their communities and families, and thus suffer from far less depression than most American women.
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If the lifestyles of conservative Amish seem extreme to us, bear in mind that just one hundred years ago, this was the lifestyle of the majority of people living in North America. In the 1930s, only 10 percent of U.S. farms had electricity, while motorized tractors made their debut in 1900. From the point of view of our genes, the Amish are familiar, living in a manner more consistent with what our genes were made to accommodate. Modern mainstream lifestyles, based on sitting at a desk or in a car, interacting with many casual acquaintances and strangers but lacking in strong emotional support, and being shielded from the sun and the presence of common parasites, befuddle our genes and have spurred the rise of diseases like obesity, diabetes, depression, and allergic diseases. Our future well-being depends on whether we can recognize the monumental shifts that our lives have taken in just a hundred years and take action to restore our health.

 

AFTERWORD

Rules to Eat and Live By

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

—
M
ICHAEL
P
OLLAN
, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

My main goal in writing
100 Million Years of Food
was to explain what we should eat and how we should live by combining the latest in scientific studies on human nutrition and medicine with a dose of evolutionary biology and a review of how people past and present ate and lived. Over the course of this book I've examined a wealth of data, both scientific and anecdotal, about various lifestyles and diets. While many people are defined by their genes and the region where they live, there are certain universal truths about diet and health that apply to almost everyone.

1. KEEP MOVING

Although daily workouts and self-restraint in eating are commonly touted as the most effective means of avoiding food-related diseases like obesity and diabetes, neither scientific experiments nor an examination of human history supports these recommendations. Vigorous exercise makes people hungrier and often leads to physical injuries, while voluntarily cutting back on calories takes superhuman control and is probably an unnatural thing for humans to do, as our lean and fit hunter-gatherer relations had pretty hefty appetites. Instead, the most important thing you can do is to aim to walk like our ancestors and amble for at least two hours every day (around six to nine miles) or as much as feasible, or sit for a maximum of three hours a day, like the Old Order Amish mentioned in the previous chapter. Walking is free, requires no special equipment, and during summer daylight hours can also provide the benefit of sunlight/vitamin D exposure. Doing more moderate exercise for longer periods of time also cuts down on the health risks of sitting and watching TV.

To keep yourself motivated, find friends to walk with and get a pedometer or download a free app onto your smartphone to keep track of how many steps you take a day. In my case, walking for two hours results in around fourteen thousand steps, somewhat more than the current recommendation for ten thousand steps a day. You'll likely also experience a surge in spirits once you start walking regularly for two hours a day. A quick tip: Build up slowly to the two-hour goal. It is possible to injure yourself while walking, so better to take it easy for the first few months by taking shorter walks until you develop the necessary endurance. Carrying a little weight in your arms, like a water bottle or groceries, will give your upper body a suitably moderate workout as well. For people who lack the time to walk for two hours a day, adding as much walking, cycling, and other moderate exercise as possible and reducing time spent in front of a TV are sensible measures to take. New desk treadmills allow people in offices and libraries to walk while reading or typing.

2. DRINK ALCOHOL MODERATELY

Medical experts are generally conflicted over the merits of drinking alcohol because heavy drinking can harm the liver, increase the risk of metabolic syndrome, and increase the risk of violent death. On the other hand, when intake is moderate—two drinks a day for men, one drink a day for women—the health benefits of alcohol for mitigating heart disease and mortality in general are stronger than any known benefit from any other food item, including vegetables, fruits, and fish. That being said, the benefits of drinking alcohol accrue mainly to people over the age of forty living in developed countries, because infectious diseases rather than heart diseases tend to be the main killers in developing countries, and because for people under the age of forty, heart diseases are not an issue, whereas alcohol can exacerbate the risks that younger people face, such as accidents, homicides, and suicides.

3. EAT LESS MEAT AND DAIRY WHEN YOUNG

The current mainstream nutritional advice on meat is to eat sparing amounts; conversely, advocates of low-carb diets challenge the low-meat paradigm and assert that people should eat a lot of meat for better weight control and overall health, because starches are fattening and dangerous for heart health. Both sides are close to the truth. Younger people should eat less meat and dairy, because meat and dairy promote faster overall growth via hormones like IGF-1, which is a risk factor for certain types of cancers. On the other hand, for people over the age of sixty-five, eating more meat is likely a good thing, because the cancers that are promoted by meat take a long time to develop, whereas the real risk factors for an elderly person in the developed world stem from frailty and wasting, which may be mitigated by eating meat (dairy is more complicated, due to the high concentration of calcium). The common wisdom advises letting youth indulge in food and exercising restraint in later life, but this is exactly wrong; instead, we should advise younger people to eat meat and dairy sparingly, while people over the age of sixty-five should be encouraged to indulge in the pleasures of meat.

4. EAT TRADITIONAL CUISINE

While some food writers like Michael Pollan, Dr. Daphne Miller, and Sally Fallon Morell advocate eating some versions of traditional diets, most mainstream nutritionists are leery of traditional diets, which tend to be moderate in fat, cholesterol, and/or salt. I advocate traditional diets for three reasons: 1) In studies, traditional diets typically do at least as well as nutritionist-approved low-fat, low-salt diets in maintaining health. In part, this is because the functions of dietary fat, cholesterol, and salt throughout the body are numerous, while nutritionists have necessarily devoted their limited time and resources to narrow views on the harmful effects of these substances. 2) Traditional eaters didn't bother with scientific studies; they cooked and combined food in ways that maximized their health. The older the cuisine, the better: Five-hundred-year-old-cuisines are a good starting point, because at that point industrially processed foods had not yet made significant inroads into people's diets. 3) Traditional cuisines were moderate in fat, cholesterol, and/or salt and therefore tasted good; thus getting ourselves to stick with these diets is not difficult. The Mediterranean diet (olive oil, bread, nuts, goat cheese, fish, red wine, pasta, vegetables) is perhaps the most widely known and touted traditional cuisine these days, but many other traditional diets, from American southern and Mexican to Japanese, Okinawan (sweet potatoes, fish, vegetables, soybean), and Australian Aboriginal (kangaroo, crocodile, wild plants and fruits, tubers, honey), have been found to be superior to modern diets in mitigating chronic diseases like cancers and type 2 diabetes.