Introduction

In part one of this series, I stated that our health is directly correlated with our knowledge of good nutrition and good lifestyle choices. There is a very simple and very powerful relationship: the better one’s knowledge of health, the healthier one can be.

In this article, which is part two of a three part series, I will discuss what it would take to enjoy robust health without acquiring any specific nutritional knowledge.

In part three, I will give my view on how the sophisticated knowledge of today’s food producers (even producers of natural and organic foods) demands that we elevate our game – and if we fail to do so, we could pay the price with our health.

Healthy Cultures

Do you have a traditional, cultural pattern of eating and living that has kept your ancestors healthy into old age and that has proven itself generation after generation? If so, this tradition gives you a great opportunity to stay healthy and enjoy problem-free longevity without you having to acquire specific nutritional knowledge. In a sense, the knowledge is already incorporated into your genes, your instincts and your “common sense” by the circumstances of your family and your environment.

However, most of us have lost touch with our cultural traditions. Even if we retain a large part of such a tradition, the subtle missing elements affect our health. Those elements may be lifestyle elements or specific foods that are not available in modern society, or even habits such as the environment in which meals are eaten and the time of day they are eaten. The traditions that are successful at sustaining health are complex and subtle. When a few aspects are altered or lost, one cannot be sure how that will impact one’s future health because the proven track record is no longer valid. The answer is never as simple as isolating one element, such as red wine or olive oil. The whole package is what produces a given result. It may be good to honor as many elements of one’s culture as possible, but when we live in the modern world, we cannot (and may not want to) adhere exactly to traditional ways.

Others of us were never effectively a part of a tradition that embodied time-tested nutrition and lifestyle elements. At most, if we are lucky, we may have had a healthy grandparent or two.

A worthy tradition requires many generations to prove itself capable of creating and maintaining excellent health over a long lifetime. If one has healthy grandparents, it might not be enough to simply emulate what one thinks those grandparents did in order to stay healthy. The traditions worth emulating are usually those found in established older cultures. Not all traditions or cultures enjoyed robust health and longevity. And some of claims about extreme longevity in certain cultures have not withstood subsequent investigations.

And even those traditions that previously did enjoy such advantages might have a hard time maintaining status quo as the world moves forward.

Whether or not we have relatives who benefited from a healthy traditional lifestyle, it is likely that we ourselves have now become disconnected with that tradition. With the rapid development of society, traditional diets and eating habits are followed less and less -- even in third world countries. In rapidly developing societies, we are even more disconnected from the things that might have kept our ancestors healthy. That disconnection impacts the level of knowledge we must have today about nutrition.

In the past, if one was lucky enough to be part of a culture whose traditional nutrition and lifestyle allowed the members to enjoy good health and problem-free longevity, one did not have to personally be knowledgeable about nutrition. One could simply eat the way everyone else ate. In fact, there may have been no choice.

Today, we have a wide selection of foods and an equally unlimited choice of preparation methods. We often have the freedom to live where ever we wish, within reason. We can live in one place and eat foods that are only grown in another far away place. This choice can be fun. However, to choose, we have to think – at least a little bit. And to choose well, we have to think well. And when there isn’t a tradition that limits our choices, the whole process of making nutrition decisions can be more complex. It can become so complex that we require a government agency to provide dietary guidelines and recommendations for us. Previously, the tradition played that role of advisor.

The knowledge embodied in that tradition now has to be actively replaced by an intellectual understanding of what we can eat in order to maintain optimum health and longevity.

We could say that knowledge of nutrition and longevity was previously embodied in a combination of the tradition and the genes the people belonging to the culture. It may have taken many generations for one tradition to learn how to adapt to their environment and to thrive. Today, we can learn a lot faster, but we do have to work at it. (Work isn’t the right word actually, because learning about nutrition is a fun and very rewarding endeavor.) In a rapidly changing world, we really don’t have any choice but to be knowledgeable about nutrition if we want to avoid the chronic diseases of civilization and enjoy problem-free longevity.

Continued in part three here.