so I this is a very impromptu thing for me I was not expecting to be speaking here today but I'm very grateful for the opportunity and I'm passionate about many of the objectives that that brings you all together here menu you many of you may have heard of Helen and John they I just met them for the first time a couple of days ago but we have a mutual friend in Australia who is working with an indigenous group of a community of people there in a remote area of the outback on North Queensland and and that mutual friend of ours sort of put us together and I know what their what are the odds but I'm actually leaving day after tomorrow to go to Australia and during my time there will be visiting our mutual friend and in this remote area and you know in the in this remote area that that I'm referring to and you might be a little patient with man I'm operating without my PowerPoint today so I'm feeling a little naked up here not even a loincloth anyway then I say that out loud yeah so there's a group of people there that you know mainstream Australians have the highest rate of obesity in the world right now in the industrialized world right now I guess you know that beer is like Mother's Milk to them I guess yet among Aboriginal Australians they have 80% more metabolic diseases than the average mainstream European Australians 3 out of 4 Aboriginal Australians are dead by the time they're 45 years old and for close to a hundred thousand years on that continent they lived as hunter-gatherers peoples and have only really begun to adopt the Western diet in the last well actually the last traditional Aboriginal Australians came off the land in about 1985 so we're not even talking about a hundred years yet of a you know westernized westernized diet and these people are dying in droves the obesity is U is completely rampant and they literally have no defense against a diet that is based in grains and sugar and processed foods and whatever have you and I would submit that you know they are you know the the Canaries in the coal mines so to speak I think that the that the fait accompli of manifest destiny per se among indigenous groups throughout the world hasn't been accomplished with guns it's been accomplished with food and we're next we're not immune from this just simply because we have eased our way into the modern Western diet as opposed to as opposed to these other cultures now you know 2.6 million years ago at the advent of the quaternary ice age the ice age we're still living in today by the way that's been followed by you know regular intervals of glacial advance and glacial retreat ever since usually roughly 11500 years apart we began evolving as a hominid species around 2 million years ago it's been recently verified through anthropologic and paleo anthropologic research we adopted a primarily hunting economy which means that we got our primary nourishment from animal source foods of all different types not just meat but you know fish and eggs and insects and all kinds of things and it wasn't until you know for a hundred thousand generations we existed and thrived and lived sustainably as hunter-gatherers until about ten thousand years ago when the strangest thing happened you know the Ice Age came to a very abrupt end the megafauna that we relied upon throughout the entirety of the Pleistocene period during the entirety of that quaternary Ice Age suddenly ceased to exist and we stumbled upon the idea that we could cultivate something called grains as a way of creating you know something that might be a little easier and we went from a nutrient dense diet that was roughly 90% animal source foods and fats and whatever supplemented with plant materials as available or as climatically you know allowable to suddenly a diet that was relying upon grains instead and you know a lot of people like to comment on the idea that somehow we you know yeah we only lived 30 or 40 years in those days so we didn't live long enough to develop the diseases of modern civilization well the fact is is that the primary cause of death in hunter-gatherer populations was really accident and infection and if we managed to outlive those things these average ages of mortality really took into account also infant mortality and as well which was also high and if you manage to circumvent all those things you got a chance to live as long as we do today but without the metabolic diseases identified in our modern society 10,000 years ago roughly and ancient Sumeria we adopted this thing called agriculture and immediately our life expectancy was cut in half we began developing metabolic diseases for the first time in our evolutionary history we began developing deficiency diseases we began we went from from a work day of maybe three hours you know you hunt together and you're done to eight hours of back-breaking labor in the fields and this also opened the door not just to to more modern-day diseases but to this little convenient thing called ruling class hierarchies it allowed for the concentration of large populations of people and rather than living you know in this sort of more cooperative environment of a tribal setting or hunter-gatherer family group or whatever suddenly we're living in the large societies where there's more class division and overtime you know this really we've only been using agriculture as a dominant food source now for less than five hundred generations or so more than 99.9% of all our genetic material was formed before the development of Agriculture and we are paying a price for that and now of course with the advent of the industrialization you know less than thirteen generations ago then we've taken and industrialized our food supply further but it's very very clear that they even the early in adoption of Agriculture cost us dearly in terms of our health in terms of you know diseases of of deficiency and skeletal abnormalities and dental occlusions and all kinds of things any paleoanthropologist can look at a skeleton and tell you whether that was a pre or post agricultural human based on the health of that skeleton that's just the way it is so and you know fast forward to where we are now and I'd say the great myth of the globalized you know multinational Corps world is that agriculture is going to somehow save us and I can tell you that that human populations didn't start exploding and the plant planet did not begin to deteriorate until we adopted agriculture and it's not moving in a better direction with you know with increased agricultural production of course monoculture agriculture is the major culprit for this and also the way in which monoculture agriculture is co-opted now the way we raise animals for food in a way that is completely corrupt and broken and isn't even natural for those animals you know the number one source of deforestation right now is in the Amazon is the clearing of land for the planting of soybean crops and of course with the advent of GMOs we're really rapidly careening toward the island of dr. Moreau here but what I can tell you is that as human beings we are designed to make use very well of animal sports foods as our primary source of nourishment now I'm not advocating the eating of slabs and slabs and slabs of meat as our ancestors may have done it turns out of course the subtitle of my book is beyond the Paleo diet for total health and a longer life because I've also taken a look at human longevity research and also taking into account the world that we live in today I think fibrous vegetables and greens are probably more important to us now than they ever used to be during our long evolutionary history because they can provide us with phytonutrients and antioxidants that can help protect us against the toxic environment we've created for ourselves but the kind of food and eating that I am talking about is really kind of going back to what our indigenous ancestors knew all along and what they understood all along and the kind of foods that they ate all along foods that were raised in their own natural environment sustainably that lived in their own natural environments sustainably and the harvesting of only what was needed off of you know off of the land for this for their own sustenance and everything at once upon a time was organic and free-range right and what I advocate for you know there we are ill-suited to a diet that is based on carbohydrates in in of the three major macronutrients proteins fats and carbohydrates the only macronutrient for which there is no established human dietary requirement in any medical textbook or textbook of human physiology anywhere is carbohydrate we can manufacture all the glucose we need from a combination of protein and fat and our diets and we can do this very very well and very very easily and we have no defense against this the tidal waves of insulin were generating with a consumption of a grain based diet and of course what is the US Department of Agriculture's admonition that we all need six to 11 servings of grains a day well good that's great for them but no human people group in the history of the human species has ever eaten a diet remotely resembling what the human what the US Department of Agriculture's you know no conflict of interest there right food pyramid suggests as optimal and we buy into this with the well-intentioned idea that well you know yes yes plant-based foods will save the world well plant-based foods have not saved the world they're they're operating in the opposite direction now mind you I think that I'm not I'm not bad-mouthing all agriculture I think what we need to be doing is exactly what our ancestors did we need to be getting our foods from from animals and plants that have been sustainably raised preferably locally eating the animals animal foods raised eating what is natural to them living out in fresh air and sunshine in humane and healthy environment and getting to know our local farmers and our ranchers and developing redeveloping that first hand knowing of where our food comes from and by minimizing the consumption of sugar and starch which are giving us the metabolic diseases we are struggling with and I can tell you two the number three cause of morbidity and mortality in the industrialized world right now is autoimmune disease right behind cancer and heart disease and we know that grains are either an initiating or exacerbating factor in all of those and by the way we're not becoming more adapted to these foods as time goes on we're becoming less adapted there's been a 400% increase in in celiac disease and just the last 50 years alone and all of this is cited I have citations for all of this and in my book but okay two minutes yikes hope somebody has a big hook so anyway that if what I'm advocating as as an approach to things which by the way is basically a form of modified caloric restriction is in a manner of speaking the minimization of the consumption of sugar and starch the moderation of our protein intake we don't need to consume more than we absolutely need and nobody needs more than six or seven ounces of complete protein a day we have a lot of rich requirements for many of the fat soluble nutrients that come in animal source foods and can only be gotten in animal source foods retinol vitamin A only comes in animal source foods beta carotene is not vitamin A vitamin k2 is only gotten in animal source foods can't get that from eating kale or whatever where vitamin k1 is found so so moderating the protein and then eating as much of natural healthy clean dietary fat as as you need to in order to satisfy and from a variety of sources so you're getting all the essential fatty acids in from as you need to in order to satisfy your appetite and this ends up actually being a moderately low caloric diet even though the majority of the calories are probably coming from from fat but this is also pretty natural to our to our makeup our brain and nervous system is made of fat we need that so you know by adopting this way of doing things from the most natural as possible sources I can tell you that the result is basically making multinational corporate interests Monsanto food industry whatever completely irrelevant and that I think is the best approach to this is rather than battling these people well we still need to battle them in courts we need to get GMO labeling for crying out loud we need to get this stuff out of our food supply completely we and we still need to fight for those ends but for our own health and well-being which none of us has the you know has the wiggle room to compromise by you know a carbohydrate based diet basically is there's barely a multinational corporation anywhere on earth that wouldn't be invested in every man woman and child everywhere in the world being dependent on a carbohydrate based diet as a primary source of food because it's incredibly cheap to produce it's highly profitable and it keeps you perpetually hungry you're living on kindling as opposed to logs on your metabolic fire and you know if you look at the animals that are designed to eat a carbohydrate based diet even though they're not getting their primary calories from carbohydrates they're getting them from fat you have to be eating pretty well constantly their faces are in the bushes they're in the trees they're in them whatever the grass and you might ask yourself who bent who benefits and profits from a whole world that's eating this way so in closing I thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to throw these ideas out there that I realize may be a little shocking to some of you I assure you I am passionate about the same objectives that many of you came here today with and hope you'll suspend disbelief long enough to take to take a closer look at what I've talked about so thank you you .
Video Description:
Nora Gedgaudas is the author of Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and A Longer Life. This is her plenary talk at the Economics of Happiness conference held in Portland, Oregon, in February 2015. The conference was organized by Local Futures, a non-profit organization that has been promoting a shift from global to local for nearly 40 years.
For more information on the conference or Local Futures' work, go to www.localfutures.org
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