A mass of stardust came together in a ball, that we call earth, and then it began reacting with itself and the universe around it, over billions of years, and then life began, and life evolved.
If we trace our beginnings as a planet, and as a life form, and then as homo sapiens, I believe we will be better equipped with knowledge that will help better our health today.
Also, if we acknowledge the veil of perception that we live by in the present day, and strip away the convenient beliefs we hold, we will see how modern a world we really live in and how it affects our relationship with our evolutionary history.
Our perception is flawed. We choose to see only what we can test and we focus on that. We always have and always will. And we can’t currently test for that much in terms of mineral and vitamin deficiencies or toxicities at a cellular level. The basic essence of life, what evolved from, the earth, the minerals, can not easily be tested for in humans reliably, and even further confusing the situation is how they are all linked, so if a test does show low levels, it could be caused by another factor that we can’t test for..
Through all the research I’ve done on how the body works to produce energy, and how to be healthy (meaning free of dis-ease), it is obvious that humans do not have an inherited flaw with their relationship with the planet earth, or with the food available to us over the course of our evolution.
In fact it is the food we ate during our evolution that is one of the keys we can use to find our way back to health.
If we take the most recent example of our evolution, that is the oldest culture still in existence on our planet – the roughly 60, 000 year old culture of indigenous australians. First Australians came to this continent,and survived, therefore without becoming extinct, and are the oldest living culture on our planet.
What is a culture – the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.
So yes, we all evolved from a similar place over 200,000 year ago as homosapiens, but it is the culture here in Australia, of the First Australians, that has been around the longest through to now.
And yes, it would be remiss of me to not point out that since colonisation in 1788 by the british, there has been, and still is, treatment and discrimination of these indigenous peoples that many australians, including myself, are not proud of, and at any opportunity I have I do what I can to support the awareness, rights, love and respect for first australians, their culture, & the history of their land, the land that has become Australia.
Roughly 60.00 years ago, there were mega fauna, huge animals much bigger than we have today.
Debatable, but likely, – first australians possibly drove mega fauna to extinction in pursuit of food for survival.
Throughout homosapiens evolution there is evidence that we drove many animals to extinction so we could survive and evolve, and so you can be here today, listening to my voice. Just think about that. We killed, ate, and made extinct, countless animals so we could be here today, no longer living in trees, no longer our very distant relatives and closets relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos.
The very reason we are here today, living in this magical abundant world with these amazing brains, is because we ate a lot of animals, but not more than we needed, overeating is a relatively new common occurrence, and so are the other factors that contribute to hormonal issues that contribute to weight gain, and resistance of burning stored calories.
And yet, some people today are trying to reverse our entire process of evolution, by saying that the death of an animal should not be on their conscience. I don’t want to get political here. I freely accept everyone has their beliefs for what is best for them, best for the animals, best for the planet, I am simply approaching this from a philosophical point of view, that if we did evolve because of nutrients we sourced from animal consumption, (and you’d be hard pressed to find proof we did not), and now some people believe we should stop eating these essential nutrients, it is a strange reversal of who we are as a species.
Well, after 200,000 years of evolution, some people have built a culture that believes eating animals is not a good thing. And this belief is affecting people’s emotions, happiness, and potentially their health, depending on how they approach their basic needs for essential fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals. The evolution of our culture has created a situation where people can choose to not eat meat and still survive, and therefore be able to create emotions attached to eating meat which did not, and could not, have ever existed until recent times, because not eating what limited food was available from all sources (animal and plant) would have meant starvation.
The culture of humans is no longer based on survival of the fittest and healthiest as it has been for 200,000 years, but on beliefs, from many different sources, that prioritise morality and a herd mentality. Whether it be peer pressure to eat what your peers believe is the healthiest food, or the cool food to eat after a workout as a treat, or the convenience of packaged food that marketing has us believing is healthy and nutritious, 1st world societies in particular are making decisions based on beliefs, not on knowledge and experiences.
Throughout our evolution, homo sapiens had developed knowledge of the foods we ate and how they affected those in our tribe, and other tribes, and in their offspring, and elderly. The foods they chose to eat at certain times had purpose, such as making a warrior strong, helping a woman recover from childbirth, or healing a person from illness. Food had a purpose, and the beliefs came from knowledge passed down over thousands of years.
are people who believe that the way to reduce human suffering is through eating meat, but in modern society that is not necessarily correct either. Many unethical, unsustainable practices in some farms are leading to suffering of animals, degradation of soils, and to the future suffering of humans due to these practices of poor nutrition for these animals – a high stress levels of these animals, hormonal changes, antibiotics, pesticides, all leading to an end product that is nutritionally not what is has been throughout evolution.
But the same can be said on both sides for those eating vegan diets. The plants they believe are good for them may not be. The plants too have lived stressed lives, propped up by pesticides, genetic modification, and nutrient depleted soils, leading to plants that are not healthy for humans to consume, and especially not healthy once altered to produce processed products that are even further again from a healthy natural source of macro or micro-nutrients.
First Australians have lived off their land by consuming animals, and some native plants, for 60,000 years. This culture saw animals that no other living culture on earth will ever see. And they ate them, possibly to extinction, as many other cultures have also done throughout history.
The key from history that we can use for our health resolution, is that eating free roaming animals that lived on replensished soils, allowed this culture to survive without the health problems of modern society. Only once they no longer ate from the land, and began to eat processed food, have they seen huge problems develop in their general health. This is a combination of metabolic changes from processed foods high in carbohydrates, as well as nutrient deficiencies.
Consuming too many calories, too often throughout the day and night, and not consuming the micronutrients from a free roaming animal source of nutrition, is all we need to know about the problems facing all current cultures, in every corner of the planet (except for a few cultures that still keep their traditional lifestyles in tact).
Going back in time to the evolution of the earth and the early organisms, that became plants and animals. Everything that has evolved, has done so from the materials available here on earth. The stardust that compacted together 5 billion years ago is all they had. It’s all we have ever had.
How we used these elements, the same ones that make up the rocks, the air, the water, and everything that existed on earth, up until the point of human intervention creating new chemicals, is defined by the form that it comes in, and how we interact with that element.
Now, we rely on food grown in mass crops., and that food we eat, needs nutrients exactly as we do to grow. And exactly the same as us, most plants and animals will grow to a regular size if given SOME of the nutrients they need to be optimal.
And like humans, it’s not easy to test for what nutrients are in plants or animals, so we tend to use long standing results, that were a snapshot in time of the nutrient profiles of those sources of human food.
For example. It can be said that Brazil Nuts are high in Selenium. And it is a widely held belief. However, it is not a requirement of the soil to contain selenium for the growth of a brazil nuts. Therefore, many brazil nuts could now be very low in selenium, having been grown in the same soil for decades, and with no need for the soil or the nut to be tested, because as long as the nuts keeps growing, the profits keep coming.
And like humans, the brazil nuts may have found that they grow pretty well just using the standard NPK fertiliser that was developed decades ago. Nitrogen , phosphorus, and potassium, in their special ‘ratios’ help plants to grow, but they don’t give plants all the nutrition we expect, or NEED, as humans consuming these for food, and for selenium.
The same can be said for cattle. Even grass fed cattle, free roaming on pasture could end up nutrient deficient in some minerals we expect to consume at certain levels when we eat their meat. The chances are better of getting more nutrients from grass fed animal than a grain fed feedlot animal, and even better from real free range like a kangaroo who eats a wide variety of plants across a larger area of land. Or if you can find it, like i did recently in rockhampton, find a farmer who is practicing holistic farming methods of testing the soil, giving the animals mineral licks so they fill in the blanks from their grass consumption of nutrients, and also avoids using man made chemicals for pest reduction such as flies and ticks.
So if this farmer can do it for his cattle, why aren’t humans doing it for our health, longevity, productivity, and performance?
Well this is my big theory. When someone develops a reliable, and simple test, to accurately show the cellular levels of vitamins and minerals, the health of the world will drastically improve.
Why can’t we test now?
It’s too inaccurate, and even then, too many different tests are required to get even an estimate of levels. And who would go through many 24 hr urine collections to see the response to changing their vitamin or mineral intake, and only for an estimated change too?
Why has this not been developed?
There’s no money in solving the problem.
This problem needs research dollars bigtime, and yet the outcome is relatively small, and would also negatively impact many companies.
Even a company currently focusing their marketing on vitamin and mineral supplements is making their money from ‘fear based’ marketing. They suggest you won’t feel good until you take this vitamin, and this mineral, etc etc. and forever and ever.
Imagine a test is developed where you can test from one sample that takes a few minutes, your best approach for ALL supplements, and then because it is so accurate, you could test again in one month and stop taking, and buying, most of the products as you have repaired your deficiencies and now feel great and have perfect scores.
So instead of buying out of fear and constantly guessing, changing, estimating etc. you now solve all problems relating to vitamins and minerals in one month. And you get tested when you want, to keep on top of any little top ups you need, but you would also be able to track how your food effected your intake levels and use food as your supplements.
Hopefully by then also three would be an accurate up to date daily/batch nutrient profile for the real food you buy also.
So you could see on the label how much of what vitamin and mineral exactly was in that nut, vegetable, steak, or salad.
Imagine this world, where people could easily make decisions for what they ate, based on what their test showed.
People could seek out what food they required based on their micronutrient status, and the micronutrients on the food label.
Funny enough, this is what indegenous cultures have done throughout history. Following the seasons, the migrations patterns, and tracking the health of their tribe, and following traditions based on this information passed down for 10’s of thousands of years.
And just like patterns of changing nutrition through the seasonal and migratory patterns of our ancestors, taking supplements is only temporary, when we need a top up, as humans have evolved to store nutrients it needs to survive times without.
We are made of stardust, and one thing we really need to improve the health of so many people on planet earth, is to find which natural earthly elements each individual has become deficient in due to poor soil, poor diets and poor lifestyles.
With a clear target, from an as yet undeveloped test, targeted nutrition supplementation could quickly restore mitochondrial function, decrease DNA malfunctions in cell reproduction which greatly contributes to current growing cancer rates, and lower rates of all chronic disease, and all medication prescriptions.
In adjunction to supplementation, a natural food diet with accurate micronutrient labelling would be followed, further improving health through many other metabolic reactions, and ongoing nutrient intake greatly lowering the need for continual supplementation, which can be tracked by this simple future testing.
Back to the present day. What are we doing that is cursing low levels of our nutrients endogenously, that is those within us, and what is causing the lower levels of the exogenous sources, that is what we are consuming from outside us.
Endogenously we can look at our gut bacteria. Over millions of years we have built the relationship to be symbiotic, we both live longer more thriving lives because we use each other in partnership. We feed the bacteria in us, with what we eat. Think of the tube from our mouth to the exit at the other end as something separate to us, and only nutrients can seep out from this tube. The outside of this tube is the inside of us.
Bacteria help break down and create nutrients into more absorbable forms, so we can benefit more from what we are eating if we have good gut microbiome; and how to we get good microbiome? By eating healthy!
So it goes, that in evolution relying on food alone was not enough, but that we have always needed bacteria to help us get more from the food.
Medications, antibiotics, poor food and drink choices can effect the microbiome, and actually make it start working against us, negatively influencing our hormones.
Don’t think of the bacteria as something you want to manipulate, think of it as something you need to remain accountable to. 100 trillion bacteria that are your students. Feeding yourself right means feeding them right, and they will grow to be beneficial for you. Frequently eat processed foods or sugars and they will change according to the nasty environment you create.
Another endogenous reason for low nutrients is we are using them up. Stress. Exercise. Etc.
Poor sleep, running on hormones, compensating using up other nutrients. Doing an ‘unnatural’ amount of exercise, and sleeping less deeply due to blue light – just 3 to 4 decades of bright ‘blue’ light at night.
Exogenous sources. The reasons we don’t get what we need. As crops are replanted over and over in the same place, minerals levels drop.
Regenerative farming is the next big thing.
The circle of life, water, nutrients, etc.
Not to mention better for the planet, carbon neutral, more ethical, more sustainable, more nutrients in the end product.
Listen to the podcast for more information 🙂
