Paul Yeager, guest blog writer here once again.
I’d like to ask on this day of Gratitude: just how good DO we have it now as humans living in most of America–and most of anywhere in the first world for that matter–where we are, in fact capable of securing food on this day, and mostly healthy enough to chew and swallow it?
And, I’d like to ask: just how good DO we have it now as humans living in most of the first world during this particular TIME in the whole history of human civilization, regarding the fact that we are mostly guaranteeably able to access food on this day, like we were able to access some food yesterday and like we will likely access some food tomorrow?
Relatively speaking, for the first time in *all civilized human history*, for the last few decades in just a few places on earth, many of us in the “first world” have generally been able to secure two or three meals a day, every day, and every day we know that likely tomorrow we will be able to do that again. And many of us in the “first world” even know that if the economy gets a little worse than it already is, we and our loved ones will likely ourselves continue to keep eating, one way or another. Even if our forms of income are cut off, we can in many cases get at least some food via the social safety net our society has constructed for itself.
This situation we are in is a TRUE novelty of novelties amongst the vast spread of geographies and histories amidst the total spread of human life on this planet. Many of us are able to eat today! And what’s more, many of us will be able to eat tomorrow and the next day! This is a miracle! For hundreds of centuries, our evolutionary ancestors did not possess this situation of constant access to food, having to continually remain in fight-or-flight mode to attain access to meals.
But does this sudden burst of access in the last century necessarily imply a similar or higher quality of nutrient density in the food? Quite the opposite I’m afraid, according to overwhelming scientific evidence.
What our nearby evolutionary ancestors DID have, even if they did not have constant *access*–provedly amidst 14 different tribal/indigenous societies that Weston A. Price formally studied for around 10 years in the 1930’s in his magnus opus “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”–were consistently much more nutrient-dense foods consisting of highly saturated animal fats with high vitamin A and D, cartilaginous and high-elastin -containing bone stocks, raw/unpasteurized milk, truly homemade lacto-fermented foods, soaked/sprouted and naturally-leavened grains, soaked/sprouted nuts, seeds, berries, beans/legumes, and many other such foods, which had not yet been divorced from their traditional indigenous wisdom by the poison of industrialization’s influence on mainstream processed/packaged food.
Again, perhaps these isolated, untouched tribes did not always have these foods in plenty (and yes, these peoples did often get some of the diseases which modern medicine has been able to deal with such as tuberculosis, THEN AGAIN: they did not get heart disease, cancer, allergies, cavities, rampant mental disease, or difficult childbirth–all of which modern medicine and industrialization has had a hand in creating more of!), but their foods nearly always had extremely superior nutrient density vs. the processed, packaged, mass-produced food of today. One of the most common traits this created in those people was the radiant quality of their general mental quietude and “general ease and contentment with life,” according to Dr. Price’s notes.
Which leads me to: just how good DO “we” have it, “we” who know something of these “deep secrets” of traditional, nutrient dense foods (i.e. yours truly), AND who get to live in this technological world! –All thanks to the printed and electronically published works of communication-genius health luminaries such as Kathy Pirtle, Sally Fallon, Mary Enig, Kaayla Daniel, Natasha Campbell McBride, Sandor Ellix Katz, and of course Dr. Weston A. Price and his partner Dr. Francis Pottenger (and the list goes on and on)–along with numerous other food revolutionaries and visionaries who have re-unearthed the ancient, archaic, timeless knowledge of countless ancestors’ *Innate Wisdom* on “how our foods are meant to be,” then cleverly re-applying it to how we can use this timeless knowledge to actually heal our own bodies of countless diseases (such as how to heal acid reflux with diet for starters).
As for me, without these people and their work, today I would likely be dead. I am living with an HIV+ diagnosis, yet I do not require the medicines and I survived nearly dying from chronic wasting and diarrhea five years ago, thanks to them and their food help. I am truly thankful for them.
Lately I’ve been watching a BBC documentary about a year spent in Tibet, which was filmed just a few years ago. Tibet is a rather severe example of food gone wrong, or more simply no food being available to much of the population much of the time, because of the harsh oppression of the Chinese communist regime, and no doubt their influence on the food supply. Last night the episode I watched had us observing a family who does not get to eat anything but barley dough and potatoes. When asked what else they eat, they said “barley dough and potatoes.”
Barley is very native to Tibet. When the Chinese tried to replace all barley with wheat, because of the fact that they found the Tibetans dirty and uncivilized and inferior for eating barley, the Tibetans couldn’t grow wheat (perhaps because the soil and harsh climate of the Tibetan plateau wouldn’t allow it or because they didn’t understand how to cultivate the new crop, I’m not clear on that), and as a direct result much of the Tibetan population starved to death. The Chinese, fearing more uprising, and wanting to keep a decent number of Tibetans alive for their value as human commodities, gradually let them return to growing barley, thus fewer people died of starvation.
So, today Tibetans are apparently quite happy to be able to grow and eat barley. A favorite past-time of Tibetan farmers is also barley beer, to the extent that now much of the Tibetan population has a serious alcoholism problem because of how much they enjoy their barley beer.
As a person sensitive to gluten, which is plentiful in both wheat and barley, I simply cannot imagine this way of living, but it does seem as though the Tibetan gene pool may not have such a big issue with gluten. Gluten aside, there’d be the situation of eating only a grain and some starches most or all of the time if I suddenly had to subsist on a Tibetan diet in Tibet. I’m pretty sure I would die on such a diet quite quickly. I’m not sure exactly how fast my immune system would collapse, but one thing is certain: I would go insane first, because the gluten would bring back the crippling mental illness I dealt with all my life prior to realizing that gluten was one of the biggest culprits in my severely faulty brain chemistry.
And just a little irresistible side-note: where COULD I go to eat in Tibet to try and get off the gluten and starch? Just guess where. American-based fast food, that’s where! –which is apparently slowly making its way into Tibet through dealings with the Chinese government! Oh yes, I could find a homogenized, pasteurized, hormone-injected, forced-to-prey-on-its-own-kind super-industrialized yak-burger at the nearby B**ger *ing, and maybe even on a PROCESSED glutenous barley bun! If this doesn’t tell us something about the intentions of fast food mega-conglomerates, and the precise ethical integrity of their visions for the world, I don’t know what does. They seem to get a real kick out of “nourishing” the third world, don’t they? < / end_sarcasm >
It is really too bad Dr. Weston A. Price didn’t get to visit Tibet and study indigenous Tibetan diet in the 1930’s! I’m sure it would have added to his disappointments of indigenous cultures not being vegetarians (and doubly so because of their Buddhist and therefore supposedly vegetarian-leaning morality), because I have heard through the grapevine, from many actual practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, that actually Tibetan Buddhists aren’t at all natively vegetarians (why am I not surprised–almost none of the rest of Dr. Price’s indigenous tribes were vegetarians, after all).
Actually the lamas (or high Buddhist teachers) were known to consume a good deal of yak, a very high-protein/high-amino-acid source of meat with no doubt very highly saturated fat. I was happy to hear in the BBC documentary I was watching that at least the Tibetans have a somewhat constant supply of no-doubt highly saturated [and raw] yak butter from their own few yaks, to balance their high barley-n-potato intake. So my guess is that before the devastation of the communist invasion 50 years ago, they likely consumed yaks aplenty.
Perhaps they still traditionally ferment their barley beer, and it isn’t so bad after all? Hm…
Anyhow, what a Blessing to be alive in the nutrient dense here and now. Today, Thanksgiving Day, I am eating so much yummy, nutrient dense food, with a wide diversity of plants and animals, highly saturated animal fats with high vitamin A and D, highly lacto-fermented foods, foods that kill candida and keep my immune system strong, turkey gravy from bone stock, wild turkey with amino acids that will make my soul sing, and much more!
Unlike the Tibetan farmers living under Chinese communist oppression, I have access to it, I was able to buy it, and now I will be able to eat it because I am healthy enough to eat it, thank God! And with my friends/family! And the day after that I will feel like eating again, and eat!
Is 1500 words enough to express my thanks? Or 100,000 words? Or a million words? No.
But I will continue, while I continue to be able to breathe in and out, to try and get both the knowledge of these foods and access to these foods to as many human beings living on this planet as possible. Because the truth is: ALL human beings REQUIRE access to these foods FOR REAL HEALTH and the knowledge of that state of REAL HEALTH which is contained at websites like performancewithoutpain.com.
Kathy Pirtle has done a much clearer/better job at communicating this sacred knowledge than I to large numbers of people, and this site delivers two powerful vehicles of that transmission; one an extremely powerful eBook on how to permanently heal your acid reflux, and of course the classic printed book, Performance Without Pain, from which this website derives its name. Get a hold of these sources of information while you are able, for you and your loved ones, for the good of all sentient beings ASAP! You will live much longer, stand much taller, and act forever out of Gratitude for your new found life of high nutrient assimilation!
And someday–in those very same moments in which we all realize together that WE are the Masters of our own Health (and not some corporation, government, pharmaceutical company, or fast food restaurant), with all the knowledge of our ancestors boundlessly alive within us– as a result of that Immense Supernova of Gratitude-in-Action which is on its way and already happening, a FR** TIB-ET (and maybe even a fully free Ch*na, for that matter) will fully return to their traditional, nutrient dense foods as Kathy and I have. 😉