"If a woman is fat, fair and forty, and has borne some children, she is the type most likely to be full of gallstones," reminisced Dr. Donaldson of "Strong Medicine" after a long and successful career. I believe this fact contains hints about perennial truths of modern life as well as compelling dietary advice.
If you want to keep your figure, having children is one of the worst things you can do to your body. Between Nature (flooding you with hormones and robbing your body of nutrients) and Conventional Wisdom ("chow down! you're eating for two!"), it's a rare individual who comes out the other side without laying down body fat which is progressively more difficult to get rid of after each pregnancy.
Middle age, through the niggardliness of enzyme secretion and even MORE bad hormonal signals, piles on the pounds all by itself. Women who had remained effortlessly normal-weight up to perimenopause finally get an idea of what some of us have dealt with all our lives, when with no change of diet or habit their body composition goes straight to hell.
As for those of us who were willing and able to fight fat-growth, well, we have tended to spend decades in calorie-counting and non-fat consumption, losing some pounds and gaining some back, over and over till our metabolisms are thoroughly confused about whether it can afford to let us burn body-fat or not. And we know what causes gallstones -- yes, all those low-fat-eating years when bile sat in storage in underused gallbladders.
This brings us to the "fair" portion of the introductory sentence -- women whose forebears have spent thousands of years in northern climes, where their ancestrally-dark skin, hair and eyes have been bleached by countless generations of seeking to absorb optimal quantities of sunlight. Women who are, genetically, separated by millennia from large amounts of plant foods in the diet, until agriculture finally reached the "frozen north" (which was significantly later than in places like the "Fertile Crescent"). Women who have no business eating a year-round load of concentrated carbohydrates of ANY kind, let alone the garbage that passes for food these days.
RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES we have seen what happens to this kind of people when "novel modern foodstuffs" are introduced to a gene-stock not accustomed to a high-carb diet -- Cleave wrote about it, Stefansson wrote about it, countless missionaries wrote about it.... People in North America and Pacific islands and other places that were not invaded till comparatively recently, who took to the addictive and easy-to-prepare carbs of "civilization" and twenty years later WHAM -- unprecedented diseases completely destroy their well-being!
"Fair" women should not eat industrial and agricultural foods on a regular basis. To put that in LESS archaic and exclusionary terms, women, even more than men, should eschew the neolithic agents of disease, ESPECIALLY women whose ancestors have most recently adopted an agricultural lifestyle. We have fewer hormonal buffers to protect our bodies from the damage that these things wreak. Our bodies have built-in protections for survival of ourselves and our children, but they are no match for the sheer destructiveness of modern life.
If we could find an objective and unbiased jury before whom we could present our evidence, i believe they'd come to the same conclusion i have: products of agriculture as well as the kind of society that agriculture (including pastoralism) has empowered, are SINGULARLY bad for the health and welfare of women. We've been encouraged to breed excessively while undermining our ability to do so in a healthy fashion. We've lost our individual dignity, autonomy and sense of sorority because of the "need" to compete for high-quality mates (i.e., capability of passing the best genes to the next generation). We've been indoctrinated to believe that the very things which are "killing" us are in fact good -- like paternalistic religion, libertarianism, nationalism ... and wholesomewholegrains, antioxidantfruitsandvegetables, hearthealthyvegetableoils and the low-fat diets which undeniably give us gallstones.
Wow, as a 'fair' woman, I never realized how my ancestory, in this regard, could be playing such a large role in my nutritional needs. Thanks for that info!
ReplyDeletean awful lot of people would probably argue with my hypothesis, but i think it has legs to stand on. :-) some populations are OBVIOUSLY better equipped to handle higher carb and lower fat diets, but i firmly believe we "fair" women have a better friend in animal fats!
DeleteGreat piece Tess. Is so 'Modern Living' slowly killing us? Well it certainly does us no favours. Have we come too far along the slippery slope? Unfortunately I think many may have done but slowly an awakening is happening, is it too late? Time will tell.
ReplyDeleteMy thought is that none of us are equipped to handle high carb lower fat, it's the other way round most of us can equip ourselves to a low carb high fat way of life. Note I say most but not all.
All the best Jan
Some people seem to thrive on it ... But i suspect after a certain age even they meed to .be more careful -- there are so many antinutrients and liver-damaging substances in "their" food, it has to be affecting their health!
DeleteThe sad part about the SAD to me is that children are coming into the world already damaged. :-( i think that health-care is going to bring down global economies.
My lord, living here is not 1960s Blue Hawaii with Elvis. Barge loads of rice and spam and a dependency mentality is killing the pacific islanders. Obesity is so rampant.
ReplyDelete:-( a lot of "sugar" (fruit) grows rampantly there too, but it's the refined starches and liver-wrecking seed oils that put the icing on the cake (bitter irony intended...).
DeleteDid Michener write correctly, that obesity was once cultivated by the ruling class of Hawaiians? This would imply that ordinary people found it difficult to fatten, wouldn't you say?
I have heard opinion not sure where from, early Pacific Islanders took long sea voyages all over the Polynesian Islands and only the ones that could greedily hang on to every calorie survived. I never read any of Thor's books
ReplyDeleteI am a women with dark hair and olive skin, I reasonably suspect that there were some nomads among my ancestors who lived mostly on the food obtained from their cattle. My gallbladder was removed at 39 yo, my grandma had the same surgery at 57, but not my mom. We all look the same.
ReplyDelete:-) that's why i put the word "fair" into quotes -- simple light-coloring doesn't perfectly describe a lot of people who are vulnerable this way. ...but then, it's hard to know exactly where one's ancestors came from, and when!
DeleteI agree tess with a lot of what you say here, however I would have to argue that northern europeans are usually better adapted to handle a carbohydrate based diet than a lot of other recent hunter gatherer populations. I think the biggest problem for nothern euros is autoimmune issues, secondary to less genetic variation in immune system making autoimmune reactions more likely, especially amongst females (secondary to the estrogen effect).
ReplyDeleteAlso it seems even if one population is spared obesity vulnerability (e.g. some indians, asians) they tend to have other problems, like diabetes instead.
Most of us these days do best on a lower carbohydrate diet it seems :). Like dave said, pacific islanders tend to be extremely fat now, ideally should not be eating lots of fruit anymore :D.
ah, good point about the autoimmune tendency complicating sheer carb-tolerance -- i think that's a big chunk of MY problem, and i hear lots of anecdotal evidence from others that echoes it.
Deletei find it so ironic that: 1) we know high-fat WITH high-carb promotes metabolic syndrome nowadays, but 2) other cultures, which never got on the low-fat bandwagon remained lean on diets containing both....