What he said.Village life for men and women alike was busy, strenuous, unrelenting, much of it lived outdoors, with an element of danger that especially threatened children. Diet was poor, dress simple, housing primitive, sanitary arrangements derisory.Before modern industrial capitalism, life for ordinary men and women and children – to use the technical term – sucked, everywhere and always.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
QoTD Doubling Down
Boudreaux finds a QoTD:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
Have you read Weston Price's two chapters on the last Euro enclaves on traditional diets in the early 1930s? He was around doing dental research at the time when the transition to modern foods was nearly complete yet he tracked down two areas (Scottish isles and Swiss mountain valleys) that were eating old diets.
The chapters are fascinating because he compares villages that have a road and modern foods with those that don't while looking at dental cavities and bone structure. It is probably the most interesting thing I've read in the last couple of months.
I wouldn't say the old diets were poor. Diet became poor when people switched to wheat flour and jam.
If you are interested, chapters 3 and 4 are here: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html#ch3
Wobbly,
Thanks.
That parallels my general awareness:
Hunter-gatherer diets were good. 50+% of calories from wheat or rice was bad. Since most agriculture became all-wheat diets...so bad for most.
I never saw the stuff on 1930s transitioning, but I've seen a bunch of references to the paleolithic-neolithic transition, and differences in bones & teeth.
These populations weren’t hunter-gatherers; that’s what is interesting. The differences are illuminating. They were farmers and fishermen.
The Swiss ate rye bread and dairy with some meat. The meat was all ruminant (cow and sheep). The diet had no wheat but also had lots of grass-fed stuff with its ⍵-3 and K2 MK-4. They had fantastic teeth, yet they never brushed them.
The Scots are oily fish and oats. Again, great ⍵-3 but I’m not sure about the K2 in oily fish. Two populations with nothing in common in their diet but fine health. Humans can deal with a diverse range of foods.
He went village to village and island to island and saw huge differences where 20thC food had come in. One downside of reading this is you end up looking at people’s faces to wonder what they ate growing up. It is disquieting.
I have a few thoughts from this.
1) It isn’t carbs per se that are the issue with bones and teeth.
2) Either the presence of something in 1930s wheat or the absence of ⍵-3 and/or K2 that is causing the bone development problems.
3) Rye and oats don’t harm as much as wheat, at least not enough to stop the protective influence of the dairy, fish and meat.
4) The bone development is key – bad teeth can be blamed on jam sticking to teeth but bone development can’t be.
5) Grassfed rocks (incidentally the current farm name candidate is grasspunk).
Finally, there’s something that sticks in my head like the curious case of the dog in the night time. These town folk had awful teeth and bones and were susceptible to tuberculosis. They had terrible diets. But the dog didn’t bark. Weston Price never said how obese they were. You have folks eating a totally carb-heavy crappy diet with all its health issues and they weren’t fat. This makes me think there was some other change late in the century that leads to the rise of obesity. Obvious candidates include industrial cooking oils and Borlaug’s mutant dwarf wheat but who knows, I’m sure there are more.
We’ve been eating home baked rye, spelt and einkorn bread the last few weeks as an experiment, and while being surprisingly tasty they aren’t as addictive for the kids as regular modern wheat bread. It is hard to eat a lot of it. Turns out there’s a farm that grows all those grains about 2km from our place. They also sell blé ancien, which is basically the wheat before Borlaug (taller with a smaller seed head). It might be an interesting experiment to inflict on the kids to see their reaction to 1930s wheat vs 2012 wheat. We already know the response from 5000BC wheat.
Post a Comment