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.



----------------------------------------
Getting Primitive
A Natural Inquiry
http://www.gettingprimitive.com