7 — Progessive Decline of Modern Civilisation | Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral Podcast number 7.  "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society". –Jiddu Krisnamurti. If you were born in the latter half of the 20th century, or the beginning of the 21st, you have grown up in a world where chronic disease and ill-health is a very normal and well accepted part of life. Growing up in this environment has skewed our perspective of what health even means, or might look like. We are surrounded by people suffering from various conditions. Obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, neurological diseases, autoimmune diseases, gastrointestinal diseases, kidney disease, liver disease... At this point, the list is effectively endless, and I could literally go on for hours. Most of us try not to pay much attention to this kind of thing. That there's nothing to really be done about it. And that at the end of the day, it's someone else's problem anyway. But this is our reality. And we seem to be struggling to find good solutions. Despite the fact that we have cutting edge medical technologies, and powerful pharmaceuticals, specialists for every disease and each part of the human body. We are studying diseases harder than ever, throwing money at the problem, thinking eventually that will fix it. Apparently, we even think it's okay to guilt people into into donating money to charities. Because one day, the posters say, you're going to need us. The language we use is akin to warfare. For cancer, for example, we say we are 'fighting' against it. And that one day, we will eliminate it for good. We will 'conquer' cancer. I'm not so sure about that. Unless our strategy changes, it seems like most of our efforts will be in vain, like they are today. My uncle died from cancer. Our last minute therapies didn't do shit. Except maybe just to give the family a false sense of hope. It was too late. That's the thing. Despite our technological prowess, the majority of us will suffer from at least one of these debilitating conditions in our lifetime. And many of us will die from the complications that arise from dealing with multiple conditions at the same time, what's called comorbidities. Our family and friends will be forced to watch all of this. And one day, it'll be their turn, unless we do something about it. I don't mean to sound so negative. I'm actually quite optimistic about the future. But for now, this is our reality. It's life in the modern world. There is no point trying to sugarcoat it. And it serves nobody to stick our heads in the sand, or stuff our fingers in our ears. If we can't talk about these things, we'll never identify the problem. And if we don't manage to define the problem, we'll never come up with solutions.  From my perspective, the questions very few people seem to be asking, firstly, should we accept this disease-filled reality as normal? And secondly, has it always been this way for human beings? These might seem like odd questions. Surely the people at the top of the medical establishments are on top of things, and have asked these questions. Surely we're doing much better than at early human ancestors, right? A common thing to do is the point at our life expectancy. And to say we're living older than any humans in recorded history, which is true. Our advancements in Western medicine have also saved countless generations of people from nasty infectious diseases. Many others have benefited from life-saving, emergency-room operations. And I think these are quite good points for the most part. We've certainly come a long way from the days of the Black Plague. And our surgical expertise is certainly not to be scoffed at. But here's where our successes kind of end, and things begin to unravel. See, modern humans do certainly enjoy a long life expectancy, relative to other humans who lived in the past couple thousand years of recorded history. And our antibiotics are extremely effective at murdering microorganisms, which in the short term protects us from some kinds of diseases. In doing so, we've fostered antibiotic resistance and created superbugs, which is rather terrifying, but perhaps another topic for another day. The main thing I wanted to point out here is that while we do lead long lives, many of our later years will be interrupted. We will need doctors, hospital visits, we'll feel the crude side effects from the litany of prescription meds that we're going to need to maintain our function. And we'll have a front-row seat to our own debilitating physical and cognitive decline. Our friends and family will be burdened by the psychological trauma that goes along with watching all of that. And at some point, we'll probably need full time caregivers. So the suffering and the responsibility isn't even restricted to the individual in question. And I wonder if that is a life well lived? Is that normal? Well, if that's what our perception of normal is, then I guess so. But should we consider all of that to be normal? I hope I'm making some sense here. Look, put it this way. Let's say you live to 80. Congratulations, you were lucky not to die earlier, like most people in recorded history. But while you might have lived to 80, and maybe even outlived most of your peers, that doesn't mean you lived well, or were healthy. Again, regular doctor visits, prescription meds, joint replacements, losing all your muscle mass and bone mineral density, and going senile, really don't seem like good outcomes to me. And contrary to what most people believe, this is not a guaranteed fate for humans. This is not what has to happen when you get old. And in another context, 80 might not even qualify as that old. Living well implies functioning well. And being free from suffering comes along with that. Functioning well relies on you maintaining your health throughout your lifespan. If you maintain function, thus health, you won't suffer as much disease and ill health. I don't think these are controversial statements. So to get to the point here, while we modern humans do certainly enjoy a long lifespan, thanks to our life extending technologies, we have a we have a rather short health span. This distinction is not a trivial one. People conflate health with longevity all the time. Obviously, they are interrelated in some way, but they're not the same thing. That's why we have different words to describe them. Our healthspan is typically shorter, in our case much shorter, than our lifespan. The end of our health span, meaning the beginning of our decline in health and function, which effectively signals the end of our usefulness as a member of society, and the start of us becoming more of a burden, is not usually a quick process. Thanks to our life extension tools, were able to cling on to consciousness for many years. Throughout that time, were likely to put up with all sorts of chronic issues until we finally die, often in pain, or high on painkillers, and always with our family and friends watching, powerless to stop it. My grandma lived until she was well into her 90s she had a pretty good innings as they say where I grew up. But towards the end, she had to endure many years of her life with debilitating diseases like arthritis. Since I can remember, she could barely use her hands they were so twisted. Her feet were no better off. She walked around very carefully, never for very long or far. Eventually I would push her around in a wheelchair. At the same time, she also had type-2 diabetes. And each day, she would need to prick her fingers to check her blood sugar's because her body was no longer doing that so well. I remember watching her inject insulin into her belly, where she had bruises from all of the needles. Towards the end, she even had a gangrenous big toe amputated. It's all a bit morbid isn't it? But this was my reality. And I have to be grateful. and realise that things are probably a lot worse for someone else's grandma. At least it was just a big toe and not a leg.  So, getting back to this health span concept, we're now seeing infants with the shortest health-spans in recorded history. Humans now being born into a life of disease, with their health already severely compromised from the start. Gestational diabetes is just one example here. And it's now extremely commonplace. In the UK, one of the most advanced, developed countries in the world, roughly one in every eight pregnant women will develop gestational diabetes. In Australia, my home country, it's closer to one in six women. This is obviously not a good start to life for the little one. And it's not good for the mother either. Imagine, before you even come out of the womb, you are compromised. And that's to put it mildly. So while you might try and say that what happened to my grandma is to be expected, something that happens to most people's grandmas, that all of it is just a part of the ageing process, would you call diabetes in infants 'normal'? By the way, I don't believe chronic diseases like arthritis and debilitating physical and cognitive decline are hard-wired features of the ageing process in humans either. Going back to the quote that I read out at the beginning of this episode, the only reason we think this is all normal, is because we are so well-adjusted to it. We've become desensitised to it. We think that's just how life goes. And why wouldn't we? We don't have any better examples around us of what another world might look like. For every three adults you meet in Australia, two of them will be overweight or obese. And in children, it's one in four. Being fat is not some aesthetic quality. It's a red flag–the beginnings of serious malfunction and disease. This is referred to as metabolic syndrome in the literature. The mainstream media, meanwhile, is using euphemisms to make people feel better, and encouraging them to be plus size, seemingly oblivious to the consequences. So being overweight or obese has now been normalised. Getting headaches is apparently normal too. Seasonal allergies–which means being allergic to Nature–are now normal. Fertility issues in men and women are now normal. Mental illness, now extremely commonplace. And chronic disease, which is the umbrella term for the endless list of diseases that plagues our modern world is the most insidious of these normalcies. Because it doesn't appear overnight. It's the slow creep of disease that builds up over a lifetime, while we pretend that everything's 'normal'. But is this all really normal for humans? Is this what has to happen? I don't buy it. And I wonder how much longer we're going to keep blaming our genetic inheritance or putting it down to 'bad luck'. Ignorance is bliss until it smacks you in the face later in life. I really don't like the stick-your- head-in-the-sand-and-pretend-everything-is-okay approach. I'd rather die like Steve Irwin did.  So, to summarise a little bit here, and to turn the corner on this episode, chronic degenerative diseases run rampant in the modern, civilised world. And those of us who are alive today have never known a time where that was not the case. And that is what makes this book that we're covering so important and insightful. The author, Weston A Price, lived in a time where chronic disease was much less prevalent than it is today. Gestational diabetes, for example, wasn't a thing back in the early 1900s. Being obese, wasn't normal either until well into the latter half of the century. However, Mr. Price and his peers recognised that the chronic disease situation was just beginning to get going. In chapter two of his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Price references some statistics from the Department of Public Health in New York City, stating that between 1907 and 1936, heart disease increased by 60%, and cancer increased by 90%. Just to point out these are relative increases in incidence. But the point is, things weren't heading in the right direction. He considered this 'a cause for great alarm', particularly since it was taking place in spite of the advance that was being made in modern science along many other lines of investigation. And he wasn't the only one. Price quotes another doctor, a man called Alexis Carrel, and he gives us a good sense of what it was like to live back in the early 1900s, and what these people, who were paying attention, were thinking about. He said, "Medicine is far from having decreased human sufferings as much as it endeavours to make us believe. Indeed, the number of deaths from infectious diseases has greatly diminished. But we still must die in a much larger proportion from degenerative diseases. In spite of the triumphs of medical science, the problem of disease is far from solved. Modern man is delicate. The organism seems to have become more susceptible to degenerative diseases". The organism seems to have become more susceptible to degenerative diseases... How? Why? Where did this come from? Do we absolutely need to rely on medication to maintain our health and function? Is there no other way? So our author and guide Weston A Price was a dentist. His area of expertise was oral health. And so at this point of the discussion, let's turn to his area of expertise. This is a crucial point to understand before we unpack the remaining chapters. Oral health represents a key metric, or point of comparison, that he will use over and over again throughout his book in order to compare groups of humans and to gauge the influence of their, let's call them lifestyle variables, on their health and function, and overall outcomes. So in the early 1900s tooth decay was no small matter. The following exerpt describes the situation well. "Dental caries or tooth decay is recognised as affecting more individuals throughout the so called civilised world today than any other affection In the United States, England and Europe. examinations of highly-modernised groups consisting of several million individuals, reveal the fact that from 85 to 100% of the individuals in various communities are suffering from this affection. As a contributing factor to absence from school among children, it leads all other affections. From the standpoint of injury to health. It has been estimated by many to be the most serious contributing factor through its involvement of other organs of the body." So, a couple of things here. Firstly, tooth decay is much better controlled today, but still actually a very common disease. In Australia and England, roughly one in three people will experience tooth decay. In the United States, this figure is closer to 50% of the population. And secondly, it's extremely important to note that oral health and tooth decay are not some aesthetic quality. It gives us great insight into our overall health. Form implies function. And form, meaning physical development of the head, jaw teeth, nasal passages, etc, is not so random. It is governed by the same laws of growth and development as the rest of the human body. Growth and development, and the maintenance of bodily function, is influenced by many factors in our environment, like our eating habits. We'll come back to this later. But for now, just keep it in mind. Form implies function. It's not just some aesthetic quality, without consequence or explanation. So one in three people in the UK and Australia have tooth decay. And it's closer to one and two in the United States. So is this an acceptable level of disease? And has this always been the case for human beings? You'd be forgiven for assuming that we have the best oral health out of all the humans that have ever lived. We have toothbrushes, 24 hour toothpastes, neon coloured mouth washes that come 'recommended by dentists', and even fluoridated water. How could it get any better, you might ask?  "Students of history have continually commented upon the superior teeth of the so called savages, including the human types that have preceded our modernised groups. While dental caries has been found occasionally in several animal species through the recent geologic ages, the teeth of the human species have been comparatively free from dental caries. Primitive human beings have been freer from the disease then has contemporary animal life. This absence of tooth decay among primitive races has been so striking a characteristic of humankind, that many commentators have referred to it as a strikingly modern disease." The interesting thing about teeth, is it that they are bones. And as you know, bones can be preserved for a very long time. Human skulls, from all over the world, thus offer some very interesting clues here, in terms of examining changes in physical development between ourselves and that of our ancient human ancestors. This is some of the best, clear-cut science we have access to. So it seems that contrary to popular mythology, early humans, hunter-gatherers, so called primitive, savages, did not often die from tooth decay, nor have poor oral health. Nowhere near the level of modern humans anyway. And this was known in the scientific community and the literature well over 100 years ago. So if we take all of this is true, that ancient humans did not suffer from chronic diseases like tooth decay, then this changes the game. This changes our perception of what normal means.  If you weren't aware that oral health and physical form can be used as a gauge for a person's overall health, which again, implicates their environment and a long list of lifestyle related factors, you might consider these differences between early and modern humans uninteresting or irrelevant. But if you do understand that, and you are a student of history, like our author Western A Price was, and you were living at a time where 85 to 100% of people in some of the communities around you, in the most developed, technologically-advanced civilizations were suffering from rampant tooth decay, you'd probably be quite alarmed. Price quotes a prominent anthropologist, Dr. Ernest A Hooton from Harvard University, who seemed to be well aware of the scale of the problem if nothing were to change. "I firmly believe that the health of humanity is at stake. And that unless steps are taken to discover preventatives of tooth infection, and correctives of dental deformation, the course of human evolution will lead downward, to extinction. The facts that we must face are in brief, that human teeth and the human mouth have become possibly under the influence of civilization, the foci of infections that undermine the entire bodily health of the species, and that degenerative tendencies in evolution have manifested themselves in modern man to such an extent that our jaws are too small for the teeth which they are supposed to accommodate. And that, as a consequence, these teeth erupt so irregularly, that their fundamental efficiency is often entirely or nearly destroyed. Our jaws are too small for the teeth which they are supposed to accommodate. Why do our teeth no longer fit our jaws? Why would evolution suddenly do something like that? Is the best solution we have just to accept this as normal, and to resort to brute force methods like fitting young people with braces and painfully strong arm their teeth back into some kind of momentary realignment? And why are our teeth decaying at a faster rate than those of our early, toothbrush-less and toothpaste-less, savage ancestors? Weston A Price tried to figure out why, firstly, by studying disease and diseased individuals. This is what we call 'pathogenesis'. It's the dominant medical model in the West. Studying the origins of disease, the word coming from the Greek 'pathos' meaning disease, 'genesis' the origins of. It's an attempt to understand, and reverse-engineer health through the study of disease. But just like we're still struggling to understand cancer, and effective ways to treat it today, over 100 years ago, Weston Price couldn't understand how to create healthy teeth by studying diseased ones. "In my search for the cause of degeneration of the human face and the dental organs, I have been unable to find an approach to the problem through the study of affected individuals and diseased tissues. In my two volume work... I reviewed at length the researchers that I had conducted to throw light on this problem. The evidence seemed to indicate clearly that the forces that were at work were not to be found in the diseased tissues, but that the undesirable conditions were the result of the absence of something rather than of the presence of something. This strongly indicated the need for finding groups of individuals so physically perfect, that they could be used as controls. In order to discover them, I determined to search out primitive racial stocks that were free from the degenerative processes with which we are concerned, in order to note what they have that we do not have. These field investigations have taken me to many parts of the world through a series of years. The following chapters review the studies made of primitive groups, first, when still protected by their isolation, and second, when in contact with modern civilization." The forces that were at work were not to be found in the diseased tissues... the undesirable conditions were the result of the absence of something rather of the presence of something. So pathogenesis, studying the origins of disease, didn't yield any answers to Weston A Price, except maybe to confirm that that was not the best way to understand health, or to create it. Studying health, what is called in the literature salutogenesis, again from the Greek, is a fundamentally different approach. And that's what Weston tried to do next. But he couldn't even find groups of modernised humans that were suitable to study. Most of the people he was surrounded by in the United States had poor development and lacked high immunity to tooth decay. And that's when his plan, to travel the world and look for groups of isolated humans with perfect teeth and jaws, came together. If and once he found them, his intention was to use them as control groups, and to work to understand what they had that Western civilizations did not have. And if you're curious what this might have been, then you'll want to keep your eyes peeled for the next episode, where we'll pick up the trail in the heart of the Swiss Alps in Europe. Are healthy teeth, functional Jaws, and immunity to chronic diseases, simply a result of brushing harder for longer, and using the right brand of toothpaste? Dr. Hooton the Harvard anthropologist, didn't think so. I want to leave you with a bit of a teaser, the rest of his quote we touched on earlier. "Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his way of eating and be wise. Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and toothpaste any more important than shoe brushes and shoe polish. It is store food, which has given us store teeth." And on that note, this has been the Eat Ancestral Podcast. We've been talking about the Progressive Decline of Modern Civilization. My name is Ben. If you'd like to get in touch, check the show notes for a link–you can find me there. Until next time, go easy on that store food, and take care. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai