chris
30-10-2007, 07:03 PM
Sup my Fellow Forumers. Since I was asked very nicely, I thought it was not impetuous of me to write a little piece of the ancestral diet of man.
I don’t want to change the way you eat, I just want to give you another look upon things which may help improve your own philosophy on nature and diet.
As a philosopher of nature I am always keen to see the way of nature in all things. This is not nature worship that the United Nation Neo-Pagan Luddites advocate. It is the way of nature as in the personality of time and how matter moves through it and relates to each other.
Scientists do the same thing as they do hypothesise based on the nature of related experiments. However, most scientists and philosophers of nature are different in two respects.
Firstly most scientists believe they have most the data and the philosopher believes that the crude instruments of detection they use are not the be all and end all of experiments. As many scientists fall into the ‘if I can’t detect it, it isn’t there’ methodology, and most of us know that 95% of the universe it undetected.
And secondly, the scientist will try to prove the results to a sceptical and easily coerced board to establish mainstream acceptance often resulting in OJ syndrome. While the philosopher will only need to prove something to himself so he can use his findings to change his world but perhaps not the world.
So an analogy of the two might be the Scientist would be a very slow walker that only takes a step after he has well established that the ground will still be under his feet when he does. The philosopher might be a sprinter but he is on Takeshi’s castle and there are many pitfalls awaiting him. Both have their places.
I can’t be bothered for this thread to slip into another Vegan Vs Meat debate, I’m so bored of that debate now, I want to move forward.
Anyway before I go any further I must dispel a fad going around the health industry at the moment…
The Juicing fad is one of the most popular things going…Juicing is supposed to be exactly like eating the food but instead the food is already eaten and all you need to do is gulp it down. This is obviously against the philosophy of nature as most rabbits don’t have a jack lalan in their warren.
Even some of the best colonic herbalists in the world like Dr Schulze have said things like:
Now some people think juicing is against nature well it is, it is better than nature. Juicing means you don’t need to expend the energy on extracting the juice from the fibre.
This is the theory behind juicing. That since your body consumes about 30% of its energy on digestion then naturally to digest it a little before eating it will save you a little energy. Now a lot of these health guru’s like to talk about fibre when it comes to small amounts of soluble fibres but I have not seen one of these people talk about insoluble fibres and how they possibly contain the most abundant source of energy for our bodies.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/20041223_gorilla1.jpg
When you look into nature and the mechanics of the digestive systems of our close relatives like Gorillas and Chimps you will see that they don’t eat nearly as much protein as we do yet are many times stronger than us in size to weight ratios. I also remember watching an archaeological documentary on the BBC where they excavated some human remains before the dawn of agriculture and the man said that these humans were all over 6 foot, had bones twice as strong as ours and would quite simply, kick our arse. Why is this?
One of a few reasons this could be is…
The mechanics of our guts like the guts of our fellow apes are quite alike, the food particles are absorbed in our small intestine, and the shit moves down into our large intestines where the liquids and soluble particles are extracted and then it goes down into our hindgut where the gasses are extracted. The gasses contribute to the energy of a gorilla from 40%-60% of his energy. However since the Westerner either eats meat which ferments into putrefactive acids (non beneficial) or the fibres are heated partly destroyed or not present in the first place, the Westerner gets about 2-10% of his energy from fermented fibres. Logically it is quite simple, the body extracts essences from its three states, solid, liquid and then gas. Just like an alchemist would separate the salts, sulphur and mercury only to combine them into more exalted forms the body does exactly the same.
http://isc.temple.edu/marino/embryology/parch98/ARCHI97/Img007.gif
The substances extracted from fermentation in the hindgut are shortchain amino acids. These gasses are absorbed very efficiently as 95% or so of will be absorbed by the body. These amino acids are used synergistically in every process of the body, some of them build tissue, blood, sexual fluids, produce hormones, act as electrical conduits, build brain tissue, are turn into glucose by the brain as fuel, stored by the liver, provide fuel to the body, intestines and build the intestinal walls, opens the subtle winds of the organs and strengthens the vital body, produces airy visions and not to mention the benefits of having a lot of fibre does by clearing out the fecal plaque inside the digestive tract.
In other words, Juicing this stuff away is not better if your definition of better means more health and energy.
Today we are pretty conscious to what is inside our food even the people who are way down in the understanding of how food works checks for calorie content. What interests me most though is how much we don’t know about what’s in our food. Most foods haven’t been checked for vitamins/minerals and even if we did check them all, they would be in constant fluctuation and would be very inaccurate. The Health industry likes to blind us with numbers but the fact is that we have only established a tiny portion of known nutrients and only know a very small amount of their uses. I remember talking to a naturopathic doctor and the shock that I had when he said that when a substance enters a cell, the substance changes up to 100 times and by up to, it doesn’t mean that it maximum but only the maximum science has detected, he said these books update six months or so and you’ll never keep up to date on it as they are always detecting more changes as time goes by.
When watching a mainstream television program about herbal medicine which really was a copout for the drug industry to reaffirm that herbal medicine is a faddy newage thing with only a few substances doing very little to help people (i.e. like the St Johns Wort fad). I did find it interesting that they put a substance through a series of tests and found out that even though chemically the particles were too big to enter cells and therefore to give any benefit, another chemical in it’s substance would enlarge those cells and then the main relief cell would be able to pass and help the patient…This is exactly the idea with the diet of the ancestral man. Although foods may be of little value on their own, they will work together for greater benefit.
In the book plants for a future by Ken Fern it states:
Research has shown that before the dawn of agriculture, when people were hunter gatherers, somewhere between 200 and 1,000 different species of plants would be eaten by a person in any one year. With the advent of agriculture, however, things changed rapidly…
…In a relatively short space of time variety of foods people were eating dropped dramatically, and along with the move to agriculture came the first recorded evidence of human degenerative diseases such as arthritis. Nowadays fewer than 20 species of plants supply about 90% of all our plant foods. (and most of those are cooked)…
The body is a real mystery, there is a reason for everything. Some say the venomous species of Austrialia are illogical because they are so poisonous that there is no need for it but there must be a reason for it but we haven’t found it. Some say humans are illogical because we have more brains than sense but it is because we don’t know ourselves that we don’t find our purpose. This is not natures fault, this is our relation to nature, and if we move away from it we will pay in some way or another. Wearing soles on our feet inhibits some serotonin production in our brains and can also stop the natural flow of static energy we build up in our bodies causing us stress (unless we touch the car and get a shock). Trying to cheat nature will only backfire; we can only work within natures rules.
As I said before I am not one of these treehugging neo-pagans funded by the UN to inhibit development in the third world for their own good. I am talking about nature as there are no words for nature that best describes such a thing, the native Americans had many words for nature all we have is one. If you could merge nature and understanding into one then I would use that word…
People might say money is an unnatural thing but infact it can be natural if in a natural economy. The flower will use its nectar as cash for the bee to take to the next plant to germinate it, this is a natural economy. I believe anarcho-capitalism best reflects a natural economy that places the hidden hand of nature as chief economist and head of state. In a free market, money will become a convenient vehicle of commerce rather than tokens of enslavement.
The natural thing people first use to discredit nature is to quote Darwin and the survival of the fittest philosophy…Well if you’ve ever read natural ethics would scoff at Darwin as his philosophy is at level of retard when it comes to natural philosophy. We are not purely instinctive, we can look and take a second guess, which is where we can learn but also where we can make mistakes. Reason is one of the biggest things that separates humans from all other species. Understanding deeper and deeper the way nature works and how the philosophy of liberty will enter into natural ethics which will then enter into detachment to desires which was taught by Siddhartha Gautama.
http://84000.org/img/buddha.jpg
Anyway, I have a very bad habit of digressing…
As I was saying above, the paramount importance of diversity in ones diet. This is where I shall point you towards but you really have to take the reins and learn it as each area is different.
Firstly, I live in a busy town and I have found it very easy to get a plentiful diet that outmatches anything for diversity than anything I’ve eaten before. All this food has been free and has literally taken seconds to prepare and to eat but of course that varies a little if your picking from a spiky bush. I remember ordering a herb tea for relaxation and I was surprised when it came because I could have gone out in my back garden and picked most of these herbs…It is Autumn here in England and I’m getting ready for a good winter.
Scarcity is good, this thread isn’t about the benefits of fasting but it is a natural cycle of what a person would have gone through in a year. Not that I am saying you won’t have much to eat in the winter, I’m planning on finding plenty of stuff. You’ll be able to find books in your area quite easily if you live in America, they seem to be everywhere on Amazon for people in the UK and Europe the books ‘Plants for a future’ and ‘Eating for free’ are very good books to start with. Then perhaps a book on mycology and then some herbal medicine books also a plant identifier. I actually prefer the way the herbalists talk about benefits of food as in, heating herbs, liver herbs etc, this seems to be much more accurate than listing chemical constructs (of which we know little of).
A good tip is to go down your garden centre and find the plants, shrubs and tree’s you’ll recognise, write them down and check for edibility.
In old yoga books on fasting, they state that the body will continue to digest food and refine it into higher and higher qualities until the time you start to eat again. This was proved to me when I did my 27 day fast and had a kind of psychedelic trip after reintroducing food. Giving your body diversity will help your body refine substances up to much greater degrees, a bit like the A-Team being stakes out in a workshop rather than an empty warehouse. After eating very diversly I can imagine that when you come to fast your body will produce even higher substances.
http://www.great-tv-shows.com/ateam/ateam.jpg
Seeing as the new year is coming up, I’m going to try eat at least 400 different species. Also by eating their flowers, berries, leaves, roots and drinking sap. I’ll also probably buy some honey but try to eat everything in the right season.
The diversity you bring to your diet will reflect in your health and mind. I have always wondered why a herbal remedy might help me for a few weeks but then wear off, well by eating diverse, I have found the foods seem to help each other along, filling in for chemical structures where they are needed and being refined more and more.
Lastly I must say that you have to be careful, not everything is edible and some is poisonous especially fungi so you need to identify everything with their botanical name before you try it and then only take a small amount at first.
Here is a website started by Ken Fern who lists over 7,000 different edible species of plants that are in Britain…
http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/D_search.html
You can find more information on hindgut fermentation if you simply google it or a nice small article about the gorilla diet is...
http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/127/10/2000
A lot of this info is in the semi-early stages. A lot of scientists are picking up on the hindgut right now but it hasn't came into mainstream health yet. So a lot of the articles are very long but is well worth a good read but to get to the really good stuff you need to read the very long articles. It is a shame that I didn't make notes while I was reading them because then I could do some good references to more very interesting facts regarding them. Mostly, the scientific style plays it very safe and mostly talks about how it could benefit the colon and colonic cancer but this is to establish the science, if you look deeper you will see that there is so much potential.
I don’t want to change the way you eat, I just want to give you another look upon things which may help improve your own philosophy on nature and diet.
As a philosopher of nature I am always keen to see the way of nature in all things. This is not nature worship that the United Nation Neo-Pagan Luddites advocate. It is the way of nature as in the personality of time and how matter moves through it and relates to each other.
Scientists do the same thing as they do hypothesise based on the nature of related experiments. However, most scientists and philosophers of nature are different in two respects.
Firstly most scientists believe they have most the data and the philosopher believes that the crude instruments of detection they use are not the be all and end all of experiments. As many scientists fall into the ‘if I can’t detect it, it isn’t there’ methodology, and most of us know that 95% of the universe it undetected.
And secondly, the scientist will try to prove the results to a sceptical and easily coerced board to establish mainstream acceptance often resulting in OJ syndrome. While the philosopher will only need to prove something to himself so he can use his findings to change his world but perhaps not the world.
So an analogy of the two might be the Scientist would be a very slow walker that only takes a step after he has well established that the ground will still be under his feet when he does. The philosopher might be a sprinter but he is on Takeshi’s castle and there are many pitfalls awaiting him. Both have their places.
I can’t be bothered for this thread to slip into another Vegan Vs Meat debate, I’m so bored of that debate now, I want to move forward.
Anyway before I go any further I must dispel a fad going around the health industry at the moment…
The Juicing fad is one of the most popular things going…Juicing is supposed to be exactly like eating the food but instead the food is already eaten and all you need to do is gulp it down. This is obviously against the philosophy of nature as most rabbits don’t have a jack lalan in their warren.
Even some of the best colonic herbalists in the world like Dr Schulze have said things like:
Now some people think juicing is against nature well it is, it is better than nature. Juicing means you don’t need to expend the energy on extracting the juice from the fibre.
This is the theory behind juicing. That since your body consumes about 30% of its energy on digestion then naturally to digest it a little before eating it will save you a little energy. Now a lot of these health guru’s like to talk about fibre when it comes to small amounts of soluble fibres but I have not seen one of these people talk about insoluble fibres and how they possibly contain the most abundant source of energy for our bodies.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2004/20041223_gorilla1.jpg
When you look into nature and the mechanics of the digestive systems of our close relatives like Gorillas and Chimps you will see that they don’t eat nearly as much protein as we do yet are many times stronger than us in size to weight ratios. I also remember watching an archaeological documentary on the BBC where they excavated some human remains before the dawn of agriculture and the man said that these humans were all over 6 foot, had bones twice as strong as ours and would quite simply, kick our arse. Why is this?
One of a few reasons this could be is…
The mechanics of our guts like the guts of our fellow apes are quite alike, the food particles are absorbed in our small intestine, and the shit moves down into our large intestines where the liquids and soluble particles are extracted and then it goes down into our hindgut where the gasses are extracted. The gasses contribute to the energy of a gorilla from 40%-60% of his energy. However since the Westerner either eats meat which ferments into putrefactive acids (non beneficial) or the fibres are heated partly destroyed or not present in the first place, the Westerner gets about 2-10% of his energy from fermented fibres. Logically it is quite simple, the body extracts essences from its three states, solid, liquid and then gas. Just like an alchemist would separate the salts, sulphur and mercury only to combine them into more exalted forms the body does exactly the same.
http://isc.temple.edu/marino/embryology/parch98/ARCHI97/Img007.gif
The substances extracted from fermentation in the hindgut are shortchain amino acids. These gasses are absorbed very efficiently as 95% or so of will be absorbed by the body. These amino acids are used synergistically in every process of the body, some of them build tissue, blood, sexual fluids, produce hormones, act as electrical conduits, build brain tissue, are turn into glucose by the brain as fuel, stored by the liver, provide fuel to the body, intestines and build the intestinal walls, opens the subtle winds of the organs and strengthens the vital body, produces airy visions and not to mention the benefits of having a lot of fibre does by clearing out the fecal plaque inside the digestive tract.
In other words, Juicing this stuff away is not better if your definition of better means more health and energy.
Today we are pretty conscious to what is inside our food even the people who are way down in the understanding of how food works checks for calorie content. What interests me most though is how much we don’t know about what’s in our food. Most foods haven’t been checked for vitamins/minerals and even if we did check them all, they would be in constant fluctuation and would be very inaccurate. The Health industry likes to blind us with numbers but the fact is that we have only established a tiny portion of known nutrients and only know a very small amount of their uses. I remember talking to a naturopathic doctor and the shock that I had when he said that when a substance enters a cell, the substance changes up to 100 times and by up to, it doesn’t mean that it maximum but only the maximum science has detected, he said these books update six months or so and you’ll never keep up to date on it as they are always detecting more changes as time goes by.
When watching a mainstream television program about herbal medicine which really was a copout for the drug industry to reaffirm that herbal medicine is a faddy newage thing with only a few substances doing very little to help people (i.e. like the St Johns Wort fad). I did find it interesting that they put a substance through a series of tests and found out that even though chemically the particles were too big to enter cells and therefore to give any benefit, another chemical in it’s substance would enlarge those cells and then the main relief cell would be able to pass and help the patient…This is exactly the idea with the diet of the ancestral man. Although foods may be of little value on their own, they will work together for greater benefit.
In the book plants for a future by Ken Fern it states:
Research has shown that before the dawn of agriculture, when people were hunter gatherers, somewhere between 200 and 1,000 different species of plants would be eaten by a person in any one year. With the advent of agriculture, however, things changed rapidly…
…In a relatively short space of time variety of foods people were eating dropped dramatically, and along with the move to agriculture came the first recorded evidence of human degenerative diseases such as arthritis. Nowadays fewer than 20 species of plants supply about 90% of all our plant foods. (and most of those are cooked)…
The body is a real mystery, there is a reason for everything. Some say the venomous species of Austrialia are illogical because they are so poisonous that there is no need for it but there must be a reason for it but we haven’t found it. Some say humans are illogical because we have more brains than sense but it is because we don’t know ourselves that we don’t find our purpose. This is not natures fault, this is our relation to nature, and if we move away from it we will pay in some way or another. Wearing soles on our feet inhibits some serotonin production in our brains and can also stop the natural flow of static energy we build up in our bodies causing us stress (unless we touch the car and get a shock). Trying to cheat nature will only backfire; we can only work within natures rules.
As I said before I am not one of these treehugging neo-pagans funded by the UN to inhibit development in the third world for their own good. I am talking about nature as there are no words for nature that best describes such a thing, the native Americans had many words for nature all we have is one. If you could merge nature and understanding into one then I would use that word…
People might say money is an unnatural thing but infact it can be natural if in a natural economy. The flower will use its nectar as cash for the bee to take to the next plant to germinate it, this is a natural economy. I believe anarcho-capitalism best reflects a natural economy that places the hidden hand of nature as chief economist and head of state. In a free market, money will become a convenient vehicle of commerce rather than tokens of enslavement.
The natural thing people first use to discredit nature is to quote Darwin and the survival of the fittest philosophy…Well if you’ve ever read natural ethics would scoff at Darwin as his philosophy is at level of retard when it comes to natural philosophy. We are not purely instinctive, we can look and take a second guess, which is where we can learn but also where we can make mistakes. Reason is one of the biggest things that separates humans from all other species. Understanding deeper and deeper the way nature works and how the philosophy of liberty will enter into natural ethics which will then enter into detachment to desires which was taught by Siddhartha Gautama.
http://84000.org/img/buddha.jpg
Anyway, I have a very bad habit of digressing…
As I was saying above, the paramount importance of diversity in ones diet. This is where I shall point you towards but you really have to take the reins and learn it as each area is different.
Firstly, I live in a busy town and I have found it very easy to get a plentiful diet that outmatches anything for diversity than anything I’ve eaten before. All this food has been free and has literally taken seconds to prepare and to eat but of course that varies a little if your picking from a spiky bush. I remember ordering a herb tea for relaxation and I was surprised when it came because I could have gone out in my back garden and picked most of these herbs…It is Autumn here in England and I’m getting ready for a good winter.
Scarcity is good, this thread isn’t about the benefits of fasting but it is a natural cycle of what a person would have gone through in a year. Not that I am saying you won’t have much to eat in the winter, I’m planning on finding plenty of stuff. You’ll be able to find books in your area quite easily if you live in America, they seem to be everywhere on Amazon for people in the UK and Europe the books ‘Plants for a future’ and ‘Eating for free’ are very good books to start with. Then perhaps a book on mycology and then some herbal medicine books also a plant identifier. I actually prefer the way the herbalists talk about benefits of food as in, heating herbs, liver herbs etc, this seems to be much more accurate than listing chemical constructs (of which we know little of).
A good tip is to go down your garden centre and find the plants, shrubs and tree’s you’ll recognise, write them down and check for edibility.
In old yoga books on fasting, they state that the body will continue to digest food and refine it into higher and higher qualities until the time you start to eat again. This was proved to me when I did my 27 day fast and had a kind of psychedelic trip after reintroducing food. Giving your body diversity will help your body refine substances up to much greater degrees, a bit like the A-Team being stakes out in a workshop rather than an empty warehouse. After eating very diversly I can imagine that when you come to fast your body will produce even higher substances.
http://www.great-tv-shows.com/ateam/ateam.jpg
Seeing as the new year is coming up, I’m going to try eat at least 400 different species. Also by eating their flowers, berries, leaves, roots and drinking sap. I’ll also probably buy some honey but try to eat everything in the right season.
The diversity you bring to your diet will reflect in your health and mind. I have always wondered why a herbal remedy might help me for a few weeks but then wear off, well by eating diverse, I have found the foods seem to help each other along, filling in for chemical structures where they are needed and being refined more and more.
Lastly I must say that you have to be careful, not everything is edible and some is poisonous especially fungi so you need to identify everything with their botanical name before you try it and then only take a small amount at first.
Here is a website started by Ken Fern who lists over 7,000 different edible species of plants that are in Britain…
http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/D_search.html
You can find more information on hindgut fermentation if you simply google it or a nice small article about the gorilla diet is...
http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/127/10/2000
A lot of this info is in the semi-early stages. A lot of scientists are picking up on the hindgut right now but it hasn't came into mainstream health yet. So a lot of the articles are very long but is well worth a good read but to get to the really good stuff you need to read the very long articles. It is a shame that I didn't make notes while I was reading them because then I could do some good references to more very interesting facts regarding them. Mostly, the scientific style plays it very safe and mostly talks about how it could benefit the colon and colonic cancer but this is to establish the science, if you look deeper you will see that there is so much potential.