At 04:33 PM 5/7/06 -0500, Robert Kesterson wrote:
>Do you ever get the feeling that *everything* is harmful on some level?
There's an old cartoon from the pages of Punch:
A scientist is looking depressedly at a big stack of paper, and annouces to
his colleague: "Well, the results are in: EVERYTHING causes cancer."
Yes, everything is dangerous on some level, or at least if taken in some
quantity. This has probably always been true. And yet (IMHO) the reason
primitive man made it out of the trees is that his immune system was a
thing of marvelous adaptability and complexity, enabling him to survive the
occasional bout with an unknown toxin (usually). Once his nervous system
got the message it fired off a signal to the brain which forevermore
commanded the mouth and stomach: "Don't EVER eat that stuff again!"
Everyone probably has one example of a food that has done this to them, and
it may be difficult or impossible to eat that food even after years have
gone by, or even after you learn that the food wasn't the actual cause of
the symptom. It has become *associated* with the symptom, which is all
your gut needs to know. Ancient Romans believed the soul resided in the
stomach: They knew that the gut speaks with authority. The phrase "What is
your gut telling you?" is the semantic legacy of this belief.
Unfortunately (for us), we don't live in the same environment as primitive
man, encountering the occasional toxin. We live in a frikkin cesspool,
comparatively speaking. Our immune systems are working 24-7 to try and
keep up. The blood of a typical newborn, taken from the umbilical cord,
shows trace elements of 200 manmade substances. We are bombarded every
night and day (and many of us contribute directly to this bombardment) with
stressors primitive man could never imagine: household toxins, industrial
pollutants, particulate metals, food coloring, additives & preservatives,
super-viruses, mutated bacteria, pesticides, antibiotics, trans fats,
genetically-modified crops, refined sugar, pharmaceutical and recreational
drugs, electromagnetic radiation, petroleum and diesel exhaust in the form
of smog, aluminum and barium in chemtrails, PFOA in teflon, dioxin in
industrial burnoff, flouride in the water, and who knows what else...
Oh yeah. Wheat.
This is the flip-side of the coin I whip out when discussing the benefits
of the Paleo Diet in the first place. Don't get me wrong: I'm about as
Paleo as you can get. But I recognize that there are aspects of the
primitive environment that we cannot possibly replicate. Likewise, given
20 or 40 years, today's environment probably would killed any primitive man
- same as it's killing us as we speak.
- S.
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Getting Primitive
A Natural Inquiry
http://www.gettingprimitive.com
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