Our Nutritional Blueprint: Human Evolution & Diet
“When conditions of life for any animal population deviate from those to which is has genetically adapted, biological maladjustment – discordance – is inevitable. The human species is no exception”
–Eaton, Shostak and Konner
What is optimal human nutrition? What dietary parameters are most healing in their qualities? These questions have driven research agendas in nutrition science and medicine for decades and resulted in a plethora of research. Yet confusion and divergent ideas are endemic both in the scientific community and the general public. The scale and complexity of the modern-day food environment means that most aspects of food and nutrition now demand an exceptionally high level of critical thinking. Most of us do not have a direct understanding of how our food is produced and what we should ideally be eating. As Michael Pollan says, “what other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?”
Utilising an evolutionary paradigm for understanding human health and optimal nutritional requirements is intuitively appealing and scientifically valid because it utilises the most basic premise of biology, which is that living organisms function optimally when their life circumstances most closely match the conditions to which they were selected and became adapted to over the course of evolution. Modern day ‘conditions of life’, including our food supply are changing rapidly and are now markedly different from our evolutionarily tailored context. The majority of the population is disconnected from the process of hunting and gathering food, as well as the nutritional characteristics of a wild food menu. The health implications of this are staggering. Chronic illness and mental health difficulties are affecting more people in society than ever before – in fact, mental health concerns are the leading cause of healthy life years lost in Australia today.
The inherent health advantages of hunter-gatherer diets and the wild food supply are not just based in the exclusion of ‘recently’ introduced agrarian and industrial food groups (i.e. dairy, cereal grains, fatty domesticated meats, and refined and processed foods), nor are they necessarily found in the replication of specific hunter-gatherer dietary characteristics (e.g. macronutrient composition, fatty acid balance). Rather, the full therapeutic benefits lie in a whole matrix of nutritive components found in whole foods that are grown and produced with a high index of biological authenticity – which refers to the degree to which food resembles its wild-type counterparts. This requires transparent knowledge of a food’s lifecycle and a deeper awareness of the way food and health decisions are imbedded in the modern Australian psyche.
A simple guiding principle for making nutrition decisions can be used: Choose the freshest and most unrefined foods available from both plant and animal sources that are themselves optimally healthy, and consume these foods in quantities reflecting their availability in the wild. This principle ubiquitously supports health. It means selecting a variety of hunter-gatherer food groups – seasonal, fresh and unprocessed vegetables, fruits, fish, shellfish, unprocessed meats, eggs, seeds and nuts and a very small quantity of natural sweeteners (e.g. honey). Other whole foods include wholegrains and dairy products.