The Natural Wonder of Healthy Foods
Let’s talk about monkeys for a moment. Monkeys are in the stage of their evolution, or God-given development, or however you choose to think about it, when they are discovering tools. I’m sure you’ve seen the documentary films where they show monkeys poking a stick in a termite hole. The termites crawl onto the stick and the monkey takes the stick out of the hole and eats the termites off of it. Until the first monkey figured out how to do this, termites probably weren’t part of the monkey diet.
That first monkey effectively threw a wrench into the development of his species, and caused evolution to bend in a new direction.
However, that first monkey probably came along a thousand years ago, or maybe five-thousand years ago. Still, the monkey hasn’t evolved past the use of basic, readily available tools like sticks and rocks. Evolution is a very slow process. The monkey digestive system, and the entire monkey organism, has had and will have eons to adjust to the new source of protein.
Similar things are happening to humans, today, right this minute. Someone is discovering a new food, or a new medicine, or a new tool to help us grow a new food. Only we don’t count on evolution to help us adjust to a new food anymore. We’ve reached the point where we just create new foods by genetically altering the ones we already have or processing existing foods. And, since our primary goal is to make money, not provide nutrition to our fellow humans, we don’t really pay much attention to what nutrients our new foods have, except of course, if one of the nutrients will help us or someone else make more money (like the appetite enhancer in GMO wheat gluten). It’s as fast as wham-bam-thank-you-maam, shut up and eat it.
Let’s go back to the monkey, or, even better, let’s think about bears this time. Bears are truly amazing animals. They don’t even know it, but they have a green paw. Have you ever seen bear poop in the fall. It’s cram-packed full of berry seeds. It also contains lots of plant fiber, which has trapped some of the nutrients from the foods they’ve eaten, including the berries, and kept them from being absorbed by the bear’s blood. So, the bear eats the berries, a little grass, a few bugs,
and maybe even what’s left of an elk that died of old age and began to rot. Then the bear poops on his way to his cave to hibernate. Winter comes. Rain and snow, and bacteria, dissolve the poop, releasing the berry seeds so they can sink into the soft, wet ground. The nutrients that were trapped in the poop also soak into the ground to feed the new berry plants until they develop strong root systems.
The bear and the berries have, over the millennia, developed a co-dependant relationship. The bear helps the berries procreate, and the berries provide nutrients to keep the bear healthy. The grass and dead elk the bear ate also have a role. They provide nutrients for the bear. The grass also shades the soil to keep moisture in the ground for the berries. It also provides previous years of dead grass for bacteria to turn back into nutrients, and to soften the soil so worms can crawl around and oxegenate the soil. Now the berry bushes have water and rich soil in which to grow. And on… and on…
But let’s get back to the bear and the berries. Plants aren’t like animals. They don’t have a central area where their organs are located. Their organs are everywhere. So, their immune systems aren’t centrally located either. Their immune systems are the nutrients they have in their cells. In many plants, like garlic and green vegetables, their immune systems kick in when two or more chemicals mix, so, when a bacteria eats through the skin of a leaf into the pulp inside, the chemicals in the skin and the chemicals in the pulp run out of the cells the bacteria has damaged, mix and create a new chemical that kills the bacteria. Wa-la. Immune system. Many scientists go even farther and suggest it is the synergy between the chemicals in all of the foods you eat that fight disease.
Here’s the cool part. Bears and berries have evolved together, over thousands of years, and the chemicals in the berries and the bear’s body have become compatible, so the plant’s immune system doesn’t attack the healthy cells that make up the bear. But, give them some mutated cells, or a virus or bacteria, or any other unhealthy element, and they attack it, just as they would if they were still in the berry. When the bear eats the berries he doesn’t just get the nutrients that feed his cells, he actually inherits the berry’s immune system.
And guess what. Our bodies think we are still part of the same co-dependant relationship. We evolved with the berries and many other plants. When we eat those plants, we get to inherit their immune systems, just like that nasty old bear. Our bodies and Mother Nature still think we are going to eat the berries, some greens, maybe a few bugs, and poop on the way back to our caves. Neat, huh.
But, we didn’t evolve with processed foods. They’ve been around for less than one-hundred years. We also didn’t evolve with big pharma’s drugs, GMO’s or even plants modified by cross breeding. All of those things are brand new in the time scale used by evolution. The time they have been around isn’t even a drop in the bucket. It’s more like a spit on the sidewalk, and the next guy to come along walks on it and spreads it out for a few steps, so it evaporates and doesn’t even exist anymore. Our bodies haven’t had time to learn how to get along with pesticides and nitrates and phosphates and proponates and mononitrates and butyl bisphenol A… Those chemicals aren’t part of the co-dependant cycle. They aren’t our natural foods, and they do attack our healthy cells. They are killing us.