What is a Primal Approach to Health?

We All Want to be Healthy…

We all want to be healthy, but it seems that everybody has a different idea about the “right” way to get there.  There are government guidelines about what to eat, but they seem to always be changing (food groups, food pyramid, MyPlate… what will be next?).  People rave about diets that cure all ills, while others label them as dangerous fad diets.  

The same goes for lifestyle, not just diet.  Just look at how confusing exercise can be.  Cardio is good!  No, cardio is bad!  Everyone pretty much agrees that sitting on the couch watching TV all day is bad, but what precisely should we do instead?  How much exercise do we need?  And, practically speaking, even if we all know that we need exercise, what if we are just too busy?  What about crafting a healthy lifestyle and environment?  There is so much confusion in this space as well.  Is sunlight dangerous or healthy?  Should we have fluoride in our water?  The list goes on.

Two Guiding Principles

I suggest that there are two guiding principles that allow us to cut through the confusion and find the diet and lifestyle that works for you – we could call these the two main principles of a primal approach to health.

Principle #1:  Your body is unique.  Everybody is different, so you need to experiment to find what works for you in particular, and this might not be the same as what works for everybody else.  Ultimately, you know when you feel healthy and amazing, and when you feel tired and sick.  You are the ultimate judge of whether or not an intervention helped you or harmed you – but you won’t know unless you experiment and try things!  Of course, it could be dangerous to just try experimenting on yourself without a basic idea of what is healthy for humans more generally.  Which brings us to our next principle…

Principle #2:Eat a species-appropriate diet.  If you were a zookeeper and you wanted to keep a giraffe and a lion, what would you feed them?  You would feed the giraffe plants and the lion meat, of course!  Everyone would get that question right, even a small child.

What is a Species-Appropriate Diet?

If it is so easy for us to figure out what a good diet for a lion or a giraffe is, why is it so hard for us to figure out how a healthy human diet should look?  Well, let’s step back and think.  How do we know what a good diet for a lion or a giraffe is?  There are two things we need to look at.  One is the animal’s physiology, how its body is made.  The other is its niche – where we find it in the food chain in its natural habitat.  Let’s look at these two criteria a little more closely.

• An animal’s physiology is how its body functions.  If we had a lion and a giraffe and we had never watched them in the wild, we could still figure out a lot about their diets from how their bodies are designed.  The lion’s teeth are obviously made for tearing meat, while the giraffe’s teeth are meant for grinding plant matter.  The lion has claws for catching prey, but the giraffe does not.  The giraffe has a long gut that allows it to ferment fibrous plant matter, but the lion does not.  One is clearly designed to live on meat, and the other to live on plants.
• Should we feed a lion pop tarts and chicken nuggets?  Um, no.  Why are we so confident of that?  Because lions have been on this earth for many years, and they have never had access to those foods.  Lions are meant to fill a particular niche in the food chain – they are apex predators.  If they are adapted to fill a particular role in their ecosystem, then that is what their bodies expect in order for them to be healthy.  Even a child knows this.  If you want to know what a healthy diet is for an animal in captivity, just look at what it eats in the wild!

These points should both be pretty obvious.  But do they apply to humans?  Of course they do!  If we want to be healthy, we should do what the lions and the giraffes do and eat a species-appropriate diet – a diet which corresponds to our unique physiology and our niche in the food chain.  Looking at our physiology can give us clues about what our diet should look like.  However, a much easier way to figure out what a species-appropriate human diet looks like is to look at humans in the wild.

Humans in the Wild

Wait, humans in the wild?  What does that mean?  Modern humans are not living in the same way as we have been living for most of our time on this planet.  Modern humans are living in an environment which is full of new and artificial technology, mostly eating food which is the result of modern agriculture. Agriculture has only been around for maybe 12,000 years – the blink of an eye in biological terms.  For most of our history, we were living as hunter-gatherers. 

 Like a wild animal living in a zoo, a human living in a modern, agricultural society is living in a different environment than the one which they are adapted to live in.  Just like the lion, we really haven’t had time to adapt to pop tarts or chicken nuggets, either.  Physiologically, we are very similar to our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors.  Like the lion in the zoo, our key to a healthy diet is to look at what we eat when we are in our “natural habitat”, the niche we are adapted to live in.  This niche is as hunter-gatherers.  

How do we know what our ancient hunter-gatherers ancestors ate?  We can look at those humans alive today whose lives most closely resemble ancient humans, or modern hunter-gatherers.  We can also look at ancient archeological evidence and figure out a lot about what early humans ate.

By the way, our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors, and modern hunter-gatherers, live long and healthy lives.  The idea that ancient humans got sick and died early is a myth – the average life-expectancy was lower than today because of more violent deaths and deaths from deadly infections, but many hunter gatherers lived to be old and healthy, and very few of them died of chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer.  

What Does an Ancestral Diet Look Like?

So, to be healthy, we should eat a species-appropriate human diet, eating the foods that humans evolved to eat.    What does that look like?

• Eat real, whole foods.  Most highly processed foods and food additives are very recent additions to the human diet.  If it contains artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives, contains ingredients you can’t pronounce, and comes in a cardboard box, don’t eat it!
• Prioritize meat and animal products.  Modern hunter-gatherers eat as much meat as they can get their hands on, and there is very good evidence that ancient humans relied on meat as the primary source of calories in their diet – even specializing in hunting large animals like mammoths!  Meat is a real, nutrient-dense whole food.  
• Don’t fear fat.  Humans have been eating animal fats and healthy plant-based fats (like olives and nuts) for as long as we have been human.  
• Minimize concentrated sources of carbs.  Modern super-processed foods contain sugar, corn-syrup, and flour in quantities never before encountered in human history.  As Americans followed official guidelines to minimize fat consumption and emphasize carbohydrates instead, they actually got sicker and fatter.  Between 1971 and 2011, fat dropped from 45% to 34% of total calories in the American diet, and carbs jumped from 39% to 51%.  The percentage of overweight Americans jumped from 42%-66% during that same time period. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25837220/)
• Grains and legumes were rare in the human diet until the fairly recent invention of agriculture.  Skip grains and legumes and emphasize vegetables and some fruits.
• Finally, live a primal lifestyle!  Get enough sleep, move your body, get outside and play, and stimulate your body and your mind!

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