The Herbivore's Enigma...

By K. Stiles Bingham

Many years ago I was a fairly strict vegetarian. At one point I even stopped wearing leather. This had a rebound effect when I went to go hiking in Yosemite with a pair of boots made out of canvas and rubber, no leather and I had to turn back after about an hour because my feet hurt so much from the thin soles.

But I felt good about not killing, studied Buddhism and found that they are veggie too, so there you are! I was spiritual, too. A bit self-righteous about it, too. I was so against protein that at one point, when I was living in India, I ate virtually no protein, just heavily sugared chai, bread and Indian curried veggies. The Indian veggie diet didn't work well for me. I got a virus that only ten in a million get. I tried every natural healing walla I could find, got four operations and went home to America. Still a committed vegetarian, I cheated a bit once in a while.

Forty or so years later I learned about other people on the planet who didn't get heart disease and had never heard of cancer, strokes or diabetes. A retired dentist, Weston A. Price, traveled the world for ten years and found people who still who ate as their ancestors did. Every human group had developed a way to survive on the foods near them. It was at that time that industrial foods has started to reach every corner of the world. "Foods" like white flour, white sugar, refined vegetable oils and canned goods. The people who started eating these foods declined in health rapidly.

Are all the foods the same? Not at all. The Inuits in Northern Alaska eat enormous amounts of seal blubber, fish, caribou, hardly any vegetables and stay healthy, unless they start eating civilized foods. Where do they get their vitamin C? They eat the adrenal organs of the caribou. The Masai tribe, south of Kenya, eat primarily beef, milk, some veggies and every month they drain some blood out of their steers with skill and knowledge and use it in their cooking. They not only don't get the civilized diseases but they are incredibly strong on average and grow to more that six or seven feet in height. Is this where our star basketball hero's come from? These two groups eat huge amounts of saturated fats and red meats and don't get sick like we do. Could we have been lied to?

What does this all mean? THERE IS NO PERFECT DIET FOR EVERY HUMAN!

We assume that all bodies are the same. Native Americans, I am a member of the Shawnee tribe, cannot process alcohol properly since ancestrally they didn't need to develop the enzyme in their history. Northern Europeans, like the English, Scottish, Irish and Germans, of which I am also descended from, developed the enzyme to survive. Beer was once an important nutrient in the diet of these people. Not so with the Native Americans. The effect of alcohol is very different on The Irish versus the Shawnee.

DNA research has recently found that we humans are 99.9% the same as our ancestors were more that 10,000 years ago. Much great results have been observed when people go on a so called Cavemans's diet, the Paleolithic Diet, before agriculture people did not eat grains.

What can we do? Go into your history. What tribe are you from? Every part of the earth has had a different climate and different foods were available. But we survived. You are here, I am here.

Here's an example of what I'm saying. We all need Omega 3 oils. If your ancestral family was from a region where there was flax seed growing and it was used in your ancient families food, you will be able to convert and absorb it. If your ancestors were from a fishing community, most likely you need fish oil, flax oil will just go through you. The good news, there are ways to test for this.

Related Articles:

In Search Of the Perfect Diet
No Perfect Diet by Joel Lopez, MD
Lifelong Vegetarian - Interview With Dixie Mahy
Using Hypnosis to Recover Healthy Eating by Jessica Levine
5 Causes of Overeating—Finding SOULutions... by Joan Hitlin
The Soul Of Eating... A Path to True Nourishment by Premsiri Lewin
The Roadmap to Your Perfect Diet by Nan Faass

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