Billed as no ordinary weeklong survival course, Cody’s Desert Drifter is designed to “strip you of everything you thought you needed in the wilderness.” And in my case, that also meant missing the fine print on the course paperwork I filled out to join this wandering band that would have allowed me a small bag of GORP (granola, oats, raisins, and peanuts) to tide me over as we chased crickets and rabbits for food in northern Arizona. Hunger set in early for me.

As hungry as I was in those first days of calorie burning hikes in extreme temperatures and rough terrain, and an all night march in near freezing temps (shivering burns a large amount of calories), I was faintly comforted by the knowledge that the progressive effects of heat and hypothermia were more likely to kill me than my hunger pangs. With no blankets and a strict “no fire” rule in those first few days, I was left to snippets of communal body heat when we kind of slept and what nourishment I could forage from a landscape that moved quickly under our feet. We were a tribe of nine, drifting now, and the do more with less mantra of the Aboriginal Living Skills School, founded by our barefooted leader, began to sink in.

After 48 hours of one extreme survival scenario after another and no sleep, I really began appreciating fine print as my body sucked energy stored from my adipose tissue (aka body fat) and began sipping my strategic energy reserves of glycogen from my liver. My system was struggling to feed my brain and its ability to execute the simplest of cognitive tasks – like putting one foot in front of the other, and completing Cody’s primitive skills modules, which also required the dual survival skill of channeling my ancestors with one side of my starved brain and calling up my genetically coded ability to complete fine motor skills with the other. Just another day in the life of our ancient genome, but a rude awakening to a system accustomed to quick energy inputs from a modern nutritional landscape dotted with Chipotle’s and 24-hour Circle K’s.

The course was designed to beat you down, and beat you down it did. But the one thing that helped me through those first few days – and the remainder of the weeklong survival course for that matter – was my understanding of the ancient bioreactor deep in my gut. Nearly five feet in length, the human colon and its trillions of resident bacteria have the ability to generate calories from almost any plant matter no matter how nutrient-poor that matter may be.

Like the fermentation that takes place in the various stomach chambers of cows, goats etc., the gut bacteria breaks down undigested plant material through various processes and produce byproducts such as short chain fatty acids, which are then absorbed into the body and utilized by the muscles and organs as energy. Depending on the type of undigested plant material (e.g., resistant starch, cellulose, hemicelluloses, inulin, pectins [aka dietary fiber]), the gut bacteria can convert 1 gram of plant matter into as much as 1 to 1.5 calories. Not bad when you consider the straight-up digestible carbohydrates available, say, in a slice of bread, converts as 1 gram ingested to 4 calories. In other words, bacteria are the reason horses, cows, deer and similar critters can extract enough calories from blades of grass.

So throughout those first few days I literally grazed as we whisked along, grabbing handfuls of green grass, wild flowers, not so tasty berries, and anything that I could choke down. These handfuls of green matter were broken down by my commensal bacteria and turned into calories. Though it was difficult to calculate, I probably generated 300-400 much-needed calories a day from my new trail diet (but likely burned 6-10,000 calories a day). In order to generate even a modest 1,500 to 2,000 calories from the trail diet, I would have had to literally chew all day, and probably locate more energy dense plants (e.g., root foods) that also contained some straight up carbohydrates and starches. We did eventually eat our way into some nutritious stands of cattails – once Cody allowed us the comfort of fire days into the Desert Drifting to cook them.As with other plant eaters, our early ancestors relied on gut bioreactors to extract calories from otherwise undigested foods. While our colons make up a smaller percentage of our overall gut system today, our ancestors relied on the colonic bioreactor to generate calories from twigs, leaves, flowering plant parts and so on – similar to our tree swinging cousins. But as the quality of our diet improved – through technology and ultimately the advent of fire – the requirement of our bioreactor decreased and therefore its overall size. Even though our colons and their bioreactor function remain a significant part of our gut systems, our modern diet hardly delivers the fermentation products down the pipe as it once did – as I experienced during my week of foraging across the landscape. And there-in lies possibly the biggest unappreciated health crisis facing our modern society today.

With a reduction in the consumption of undigested plant parts – to say nothing of the reduction in diversity of plants – we have literally stopped using the calorie-generating bioreactors handed down to us by our ancestors, and in the process created an imbalance in our microbiota that evolved within our gut ecosystem. By not receiving a steady supply and diversity of plant parts (again, fiber), the bacteria living in our guts cannot do their evolutionary job and fight off invading pathogens by increasing acidity, and therefore compete for nutrients and niches in order to flourish along the colonic wall.

The existence of residential microbiota is ancient, providing evidence of the co-evolution of bacteria and animals. In the case of humans, we are endowed with a “specific” set of bacteria at birth and our life history pushes and pulls that balance on a daily basis. Though there is poorly defined variation among human populations, there exists a genome-specific set of players that are significantly influenced by diet.

Rapid changes in diet in our post-modern era are predictably producing different diseases. In short, changes in human ecology equals changes in our microbiota. Add to this the astonishing increases in Caesarean sections that limit perinatal transfer of maternal microflora, which is further confounded by the replacement of mother’s milks with formula – which creates an imbalance in natural, indigenous flora.

Advances in molecular and genomic techniques confirm the role of infection in an increasing number of acute and chronic diseases, made more likely by diet and lifestyle-induced imbalance. Disease was heavy on my mind as I drug my weakened body from one cattle tank to another to scoop stagnant, muddied and often dead animal-laden water. But unlike my GORP-eating fine-print-reading colleagues, my steady but limited diet of grass blades and flowers meant my microbiota was bolstered for anything that may have slipped past the iodine drops.

While the biggest threat I faced was diarrhea from bad water, I wouldn’t have experienced the impact for a day – or even longer – as I wouldn’t have experienced any symptoms at the time of consumption. In fact, the connection between “dirty” water and diarrhea was not made until the 1800s. This same delay from infection to symptom is what delayed acceptance of infectious causation of other vector-borne diseases such as malaria – transmitted by mosquitoes.

But what if many of the chronic diseases plaguing us today, like heart disease, breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, all in fact could be ascribed to infectious causation? What if these terrible diseases had a more acute phase, would we then recognize them as the result of infection? Is the lag time between infection and manifestation that characterizes a particular chronic disease shifting our medical attention away from the obvious? I think medical professionals who ignore infectious causation of many of the big chronic killers today will look as myopic to medical historians in 20-30 years from now as the researchers who dismissed infectious causation for pneumonia, chicken pox, and diarrhea did not that long ago.

As we rounded out our desert drifter week we did finally get to enjoy some freshly gathered crawfish from the Verde River along with some crispy grasshoppers roasted on a stick. This was made all the more enjoyable by the fact that I, and everything I ate, was covered in dirt teaming with natural microorganisms that my ancestors had long ago forged a symbiotic relationship with. Dirt is good. Cody, you the man. I never felt so alive. Peace.

As Bittman and so many others suggest, investing in the problem now may save us trillions downstream. Seems simple enough. But the trillion-dollar question is, of course, where best to spend our energy and resources if such an effort was “really and honestly” undertaken by government and industry. Bittman and others obviously and rightly argue that altering lifestyle choices is the best and most affordable means to attenuate the problem. But the combat-diet-related-diseases-by-changing-my-diet drumbeat at the behest of the food police predictably makes the general public flinch. And too often behavioral modification, when served up government style, misses the point all together – such as the notion that posting calorie info on menu boards in 20% of the eateries in America will actually have a meaningful impact (click here for our two-cents on posting caloric info).

It’s simple enough to continue morally shouting from the rafters that disease prevention through lifestyle modification is a better long-term strategy than treatment of disease and costs through legislatively mandated improvement of the bureaucracy of the health care delivery system from bed pans to pill companies. Until we come to the realization that mind-jarring paradigm shifts are needed to honestly and cost effectively address the issues, insurance companies will continue dancing on our graves.

The first big shift will need to be the role of government in research priorities. In our current system, our tax dollars go towards funding profitable treatments for private companies, rather than investing in research that makes people healthier and cheaper. If the long-term outlook of rising costs are as dire as they appear, it would make sense, at least on the research investment side of the equation, to aggressively treat illness in the short term so as to make the overall investment more profitable in the long term. In other words, it should be the role of government to fund good things that are not profitable as it should be obvious that private business is poorly suited to address such things as prevention given the inherent conflict of interest — whether its stated or not. Said differently, funded research that makes people healthy cheaply, instead of making people healthy profitably, reveals that prevention rather than treatment should be the desire of government.

If we are going put some of our eggs in the prevention basket, then we will need a massive investment in education, as our current understanding of what a healthier lifestyle looks like is colored by myths, half truths, and the interests of the same free market entities we so like beating up on the treatment side. It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that we are poorly equipped as a nation of people, when it comes to truly understanding our own biological past and the role of diet in our health and well-being, may in fact be a bigger hurdle than the more headline-grabbing rants against the health care system and government meddling. This is unfortunately well-illustrated in a recent Facebook poll we conducted asking the question, “Do we have millions of diabetics in America because we don’t eat organic foods?”

Even though there is zero connection between diabetes and organically grown foods, 26% of the 517 respondents think that there is and a full 21% are not sure. (Click here for our take on organic foods and the science). In other words, 46% of the respondents think organic foods do or “might” have some causal role in diabetes. The fact that a nutritional fetish such as organic and similar fantasies has replaced reason in our understanding of what causes disease, and thus how to exercise meaningful lifestyle prevention, positions us as the proverbial sitting duck. A cynical person may think this is where they want us — in the cross hairs. Either way, that is where we are — uninformed about biological sciences and evolutionary processes. A nutritional opiate for the masses. Stupidity.

It’s not enough to create nanny states and industries that suggest we should just prevent by changing our lifestyle. We must first agree on how we define health and well-being, and then initiate sweeping reform and begin re-educating our nation about the biological realities that underpin our unique species. Fortunately, many of the most interesting and useful answers are coded in our genes and our evolutionary past if we are brave enough to look there.

In this video, Jeff Leach talks about what he’d consider the healthiest item in the produce section vs. public patterns of consumption.

Thanks to Robért Fresh Market for letting us film at their Carrolton/Claiborne location!

In this video, Jeff talks about how we fill our shopping baskets. Today’s baskets look much different than those of our ancestors.

Thanks to Robért Fresh Market for letting us film in their awesome grocery store!

In this video, Jeff Leach talks about how people used to intake a significant portion of healthy bacteria by consuming soil and dust.

Repeat after me: modern human beings are genetically adapted to the environment in which our ancestors survived and which conditioned our genetic makeup. Translation: the ancient genomes we carry with us today make us ill equipped to deal with the rapid changes in technology and culture that has shaped – and continues to shape – our modern nutritional landscape. When this happens, discordance occurs and we get sick. Sometimes it manifests acutely, such as in the case of diarrhea, but more often than not chronically, as with the case of autoimmune diseases, some cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and so on.

As the rallying cry it’s your lifestyle stupid puts points on the board with the American public, diet is finally assuming its dominant role over other variables such as ethnicity, climate and geography in shaping when and why we get sick. What we eat, and what we eat eats, does matter after all. It matters because we are mammals – just like the other ones – just a little better dressed. But no less dependant on an ancient genome that got us here. And Ya gotta dance with the one that brung ya, as they say.

Every so often the scientific community publishes a well-designed study that so elegantly captures this discordance dance between our ancient genome and the modern food supply that we nibble on, that it should be mandatory reading for anyone who can, well, read.

Writing in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Italian researchers studied 15 or so healthy children from a rural village in the African country of Burkina Faso, and the same number of children from an urban area of Florence, Italy. In short, the researchers wanted to know if the bacteria in the stools from these children varied between Africa and Italy and what role diet may play in any differences. And what they found has far reaching implications for global health.

Though we do not completely understand how the foods we eat impact the microbial ecology of the human gut, we do know that the diverse complexity of the trillions of microbes in our guts do protect us against invading pathogens, modulate the development of our gastrointestinal system and educate the immune system.

Collectively known as our microbiome, the bacteria in our guts are considered an “essential” organ – i.e., life would be impossible without them and we get sick when 1) diversity goes down and 2) certain genus and species of bacteria dominate the ecological wonderland that is the human gut.

Ranging in age one to six, researchers found by looking at the bacteria in the stool samples of children from the rural village of Burkina Faso in Africa had fewer of the bacteria that cause common tummy aches and diarrhea, such as Shigella and Escherichia, the E. coli bug, than did the kids from Italy. This finding is particularly surprising as the African children often drank water polluted with such bacteria in their rural village. While the African children ate a diet consisting mainly of cereals (millet grain, sorghum), pulses (e.g., black-eyed peas) and vegetables grown, gathered and harvested locally, their Italian counterparts consumed much higher amounts of meat, fat, highly processed carbohydrates and sugar. Said differently, even though the African children lived a lifestyle more like our ancient ancestors following the agriculture revolution over 10,000 years ago, they carried with them a much healthier balance of good bacteria compared to children living in an environment typical of the developed world.

When the researchers looked at the overall diversity of bacteria between the two groups, they found much greater diversity of bacterial species in the African children. This is important, as a reduction in microbial “richness” is one of the undesirable effects of globalization and eating of high processed, generic and uncontaminated foods. By contaminated, I mean the African children are exposed to a large variety of environmental microbes throughout their day – from the way they play (outside) to how foods are collected, prepared and consumed. In the developed world, our produce is often triple-washed and bagged for “cleanliness” where in the undeveloped world it’s often pulled from the ground and consumed – attached microbial-rich soil and all.

Interestingly, the African children also carried with them the genus Prevotella and Xylanibacter, which contain a special set of genes that are particularly good at fermenting dietary fiber. The researchers were astonished to find these bacteria missing from the European children. The bacteria, which essentially live off the high fiber diet of the African children, produce more short-chain fatty acids, which have been proven to protect against gut inflammation. Increased production of short-chain fatty acid in the guts of the African children could also help prevent the establishment of some potentially pathogenic microbes causing diarrhea and other ailments, as seen by the fact that these pathogens were underrepresented in the African children than in the European children. By the way, the African kids’ diet contained nearly twice as much dietary fiber.

Perhaps one of the more interesting outcomes of the study came when the researchers compared the intestinal microbes amongst the youngest study members – aged 2 years or less. In Burkina Faso, children are breast-fed on average 2 years, compared to only 1 year for the Europeans. Even though bacterial diversity existed among the groups, as discussed above, the microbial diversity was much similar between the two groups, while breast milk was the dominant diet. Once weaned, diet seems to have played a bigger role than sanitation, ethnicity, hygiene, geography and climate.

It is now widely appreciated that humans did not evolve as a single species, but rather that humans and the microbiomes (gut bugs) associated with us have co-evolved making us a super organism. We are intertwined, we are one

as a “super-organism”, and our evolution as a species and the evolution of our associated microbiomes have always been intertwined. The vital role that our microbiome is playing in shaping our health and overall immune system is, thankfully, becoming widely appreciated. As the environmental differences between the African and European children eloquently demonstrate, diet plays a dominant role in protecting children from pathogens and potential gastrointestinal diseases.

The idea that natural selection has left us dependant on the symbiotic relationship between microbe is not only likely, but unavoidable. If we continue to deplete our microbiome by effectively starving it through a reduction in diversity and quantity of nutrients such as dietary fiber, society will pay a heavy price. The down-stream effects may be manifesting themselves is some terrifying places ranging from the microbial role in heart disease, some cancers, insulin resistance and even autism.

The depletion of our microbial diversity via our modern diet and lifestyle does not suppose a single cause for modern disease. Indeed, evidence is incontrovertible that many diseases are connected with genetic and other factors, as well as environmental “triggers”, which initiate pathogenisis. The reduction in microbiome diversity does, however, suggest that changes in the microbiome may be responsible for the epidemic nature (ie., increase incidence) of the disease. Failure to distinguish the difference is far reaching.

It’s important to continue to remind ourselves that our immune system and nutritional needs did not evolve in isolation from our microbiome. Though it’s difficult to sort out the potential downside to our reduced diversity in gut bugs, it’s surprisingly simple to restore the balance of nature and nutrients for those of us suffering from any depletion. The idea of intentionally introducing microorganisms into the human body may seem, at first glance, repulsive. But this is already being done on a daily basis via probiotics (live microorganisms) in a dizzying array of products such as yogurts, breads, cheeses – and even pizza! Further strategies should include a diverse diet of nutrients that also deliver a quantity of dietary fiber to our waiting microbiome.

We cannot escape the biology imposed by our evolution. We ate our way into this problem, we can eat our way out. livNAKED friends and think before you bite – a lot of organisms are counting on it.

Project Agave from NakedPizza on Vimeo.

The average American consumes about 15 grams a day of dietary fiber, which is approximately half of what the government and nutrition experts recommend. The reasons for the shortfall are many but most point to the obvious: as a society we have all but removed whole plants from our diet and thus dietary fiber in the process. The solution: eat more plants and by default the fiber in your diet will increase as well. Sounds simple enough.

While we could fill page after page on this blog about why Americans eat fewer and fewer plants, very little has been mentioned about the reduced fiber content of the plants that dominate the American food supply over those that punctuated the nutritional landscape upon which our current genome and dietary needs were selected.

Below is an interesting glimpse into what may be a significant contributor to our chronic low intake of dietary fiber. The graph presents the grams of fiber per 100 grams (approx 3 ounces: dry weight) of the dominant vegetables and fruits eaten by Americans, modern day Australian Aborigines, Hadza Foragers of Tanzania, and prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos region of west Texas and Northern Mexico. In other words, if you take the top 20 plants eaten by Americans (see list below), the fiber in 100 grams of edible material accounts for 10.7% by weight. As you see from the lists below, Americans consume a limited diversity of plants (note the are >300,000 edible plants in the world). By contrast, Australian Aborigines consume 100’s of different species of plant in a given year. Strikingly, the fiber content of the top consumed plants among aborigines is nearly twice as high (20.95%) as those consumed by Americans. This number is even higher among popular plants consumed among modern-day foragers in Tanzania, and almost equally as high from archaeological evidence from prehistoric populations in the Lower Pecos region of west Texas and northern Mexico.

Though we are all trying to consume more fiber, our most popular plants offer very little natural fiber making it more difficult to achieve optimal intake to maintain good health and well-being. If government programs and nutritional advice supported the consumption of plants with higher fiber content — such as legumes and beans, for example — we might reach more optimal intakes. We’re just sayin. LivNAKED friendos.

Top 10 Veggies Eaten by Americans: Potatoes, Tomatoes, Head lettuce, Romaine & leaf lettuce, Onions, Carrots, Cabbage, Sweet corn, Celery, Snap beans (Note these 10 account for 82% of all vegetables eaten in America. Note USDA data used for this article classifies tomato as a veggie even though it’s a fruit)

Top Fruits Eaten by Americans: Apples, Bananas, Grapes, Strawberries, Oranges, Watermelon, Pears, Peaches, Cantaloup, Pineapple (*Note these 10 fruits account for 60% of all fruits eaten in America) .

On the initial point, Cannon is correct. The average life span of our ancestors was short, compared to that of modern humans in developed countries where one can expect to live into their 60s, 70s and possibly early 80s, on “average.” Conversely, a Neanderthal living in ancient Europe was lucky to live past her teens, and if you lived to your mid-thirties you might have been considered old in Ancient Egypt. More recently, the average life expectancy in the United States in 1900 was 47.3 years. By 1935, that age had risen to 64 years and today that number hovers in the 70s for both women and men (though women can expect to live a few years longer, on average).

The first problem with this line of thinking is that the “average life span” math is misleading and tells us very little about the health and longevity of an individual, but rather gives us an average age of death for a given group or population. For example, a couple that lived to the ages of 76 and 71, but had one child that died at birth and another at age two ([76+ 71 + 0 + 2] / 4), would produce an average life span of 37.25. Using this methodology it is easy to see how one would come to the conclusion that this group was not very healthy.

However, the precept that diet played a significant role in the abbreviated average life span of our ancestors is simply not true. There are few among us that believe our so-called “westernized diet” of highly processed grains and added sugars and fats are an optimal diet for anyone – past or present. Our soaring rates of obesity and an ever-growing list of acute and chronic diseases – occurring in alarming frequency among younger sections of the population – speak to the discordance.

It is useful to point out that our species reached our current anatomical and physiological standing nearly 200,000 years ago. That is, while components of what we discern as hallmarks of behaviorally modern human beings, such as language, art, trade networks, and advanced weapons, have only occurred within the last 50,000 years, the hardware has been in place for 150,000 years. While we may drive around in hybrid cars today, we do so in very ancient bodies and with a genome that was selected, for the most part, on a nutritional landscape very different than the one on which we find ourselves today.

Before the advent and widespread adoption of agriculture, which depending on where you lived occurred between 1,000 and 9,000 years ago, humans organized in highly mobile groups of dozens or a few hundred individuals. Archaeological data and analysis of burial populations reveal that life was harsh and dominated by warfare, strife, destruction, human trophy taking, and the all-to-often practice of infanticide. All of these facts of ancient life, in conjunction with the lack of simple antibiotics and modern surgical practices, resulted in shorter average life spans than many of us enjoy today. As agriculture took hold around the globe and groups settled down and built more permanent communities and ultimately socio-politically complex civilizations, the more homogenous and centralized food and water supply was easily contaminated by human waste. While war and even larger massacres continued throughout the agricultural revolution, tiny microbial killers took their share of victims, especially among the young and undernourished, further reducing the cyclical nature of the average life span. As European ships set sail just a few centuries ago, new ills and evils further reduced the average life span of populations they encountered – albeit punctuated.

As war, contaminated water, killer microbes, and illness pulsed through humanity over time, our basic underlying physiological and nutritional parameters have changed little in the last few hundred thousand years. Our modern genome is in fact an ancient one and natural and cultural selection has built it to last. Under optimal nutritional conditions, such as those our genome evolved on, us modern hunter-gatherers can live healthy and long lives. We need only look to the modern Hunza of northern Pakistan or the southernmost Japanese state of Okinawa to witness the longevity that our ancient genome is selected for. With the threat of war and violence greatly reduced, and upon a sound footing of a safe food supply, our ancient bodies can be healthy well beyond “our best-before date” Cannon writes about. Based on a low-calorie, high-fiber plant-based diet, a significant portion of the population enjoy healthy and active lives into their 80s, 90s, and often beyond 100. Incredibly, the aged portions of these populations have lower rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, cancer, and other chronic diseases compared to western populations.

The modern world owes much to antibiotics and advanced surgical procedures of the last half-century, resulting in dramatic increases in average life span for much of the developed and developing world. Though horrific events in Darfur and other African regions remind us how significant gains in average life span can easily be erased. In Iraq, a male or female could expect to live to an average age of 66.5 in 1990, but today following years of foreign occupation and endless violence, life expectancy has dropped to a mere 59 for both sexes – and slightly younger for males. The self-confidence that comforts us today as we review the average life span of our ancestors is misguided and tenuous when viewed through the captivating haze of modern medicine that literally props most of us up into our golden years. I doubt our ancestors would call this living. While we may live longer than our ancestors, we are in fact dying slower. So rather than rest on our perceived cultural and medical success as it pertains to our longevity, we should challenge ourselves and our genomes to maximize our health for optimal longevity. For those not trusting of the past and the nutritional landscape upon which we evolved, our genetic cousins, the Hunza and Okinawans, have shown us a way forward.