FOOD-GENE MISMATCH.
Posted by bmhegde on 1
We have been hunter-gatherers for millions of years before we settled down as groups (society today) on the fertile banks of rivers. Using the water way as the mode of transport to collect more food for members in the last ten thousand odd years, we have grown into larger societies and nations today. During our very long sojourn as forest dwellers we were depending on the hunted animals and the roots and fruits that we get for food. Naturally the food supply was not only erratic but uncertain. Mankind used to live long and the causes of death were predominantly predation and old age. Occasional deaths due to starvation must have been there.
This kind of life made the human body’s intelligence to mutate our genes over a period of millions of years into those that could live and survive on very little food during the lean seasons. We have, therefore, inherited those genes that give us the ability to live on very little food indeed, the thrifty genes. Even now we hear of saints and Jain monks who live on very, very little food, indeed. I am told, I have yet to confirm scientifically though, that many of them live on just one handful of food given by the devotees for the whole day and, that too, if there is any defect in the food or its contamination with human hair or so, they would reject that and eat nothing for the next twenty-four hours!
Be that as it may, now we have planted ourselves, in a relatively short span of ten thousand odd years, in a new environment of plenty of food available at all times and places, and most of it completely transformed into cooked and preserved food, far removed from the original natural state. Still there are the poor amongst us that have to subsist on very little food and that too of the poor quality. Minority of the rich and the powerful have access to plenty of food and most of them “enjoy” eating rich food, almost completely spoiled by cooking and processing. Consequently, while the majority suffers from malnutrition and sub-nutrition, the rich suffer from over eating and eating the wrong type of food. Instead of looking at this problem of food-plenty in its entirety, modern medical nutrition of the western type wastes its time in studying the micro-nutrients. Their findings now and then make headlines in the media making life miserable for everyone who is literate.
Western medicine has also created a new myth by inventing some chemicals in the food that we have to eat naturally naming them as vital amines to make money by selling them. The world accepted them as the panacea for all ills and in the west, as also in the westernized India, every home has these multi-vitamins on the dining table. Modern man gets deluded to think that if he ate these vitamins regularly he need not bother to eat fresh natural food to get those good things in them. The following two examples will show the futility of this exercise. If one ate 500 mg of vitamin C daily for well over five years he/she has a good chance of increasing the kidney cancer risk three fold. On the contrary, if one ate a fresh tomato daily lifelong, (may be slightly steamed) his/ her chance of getting any cancer is reduced significantly. While tomato also contains the same 500 mg. of vitamin C, it contains many other chemical anti-oxidants that we do not know, that assist the vitamin C to do good and prevent it from doing any harm. This is the difference between the reductionist science that western medicine follows and the holistic science that the human body understands.
A similar study of fifty thousand post-menopausal women in Canada showed that the one matched half of those women who were given three extra helpings of fresh fruit and vegetables compared to the other half given Vitamin combinations of A, C, and E remarkable difference in the incidence of cancer and heart attacks in the groups. Whereas the fruit eating group had three times less cancer and four times less heart attacks the vitamin eating group had both diseases in abundance. Many more studies and examples could be given but the above two are good enough to drive home the point that micronutrients are only chemicals partially effective but still have the capacity to harm in the long run. This does not mean that vitamins are bad for short term replacements when one is ill or has vitamin deficiency because of poor diet or poor absorption from the gut. Eating vitamins when you are healthy and have good balanced diet could be dangerous in the long run.
There is another side to this problem. Most of us who have come from the lower income groups have had mothers who were not fed well during pregnancy. Even some of the rich mothers could not eat well due to a disease in early pregnancy, hyper-emesis gravidarum, a long Latin tongue twister used by us to make the patient get awe-struck! It simply means extra vomiting in early pregnancy. In either case the organs of the foetus in the womb of such mothers, which are all formed between the 12-14 weeks of pregnancy, suffer for want of good nutrition. Consequently, they are made much smaller than normal and the whole foetus itself is too small to survive in the womb. Nature still struggles to keep the foetus viable by making the mother’s placenta too big so that it could supply extra blood. Many of these children are born small, if they survive in the first place. This vital combination of a small baby with a large placenta is the cause of many of our troubles in later life.
To give you one telling example let us take the usual adult onset diabetes. Those adults that were small babies at birth, if they get themselves transplanted into a food –plenty environment ( man going to Dubai to earn Dinars) and end up eating lots of calories in the rich junk food there, the small made pancreas will find it very difficult to cope with the sugar levels in blood. The pancreas quickly gets exhausted and the result is the precocious development of Type II diabetes. We could change this by changing our life style in future. This applies to many other chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes etc.
This diabetes incidence at an early age is misused to frighten the public through various means by drug companies for their benefit. Doctors also fall into this drug company trap! The whole problem is that of gene-food mismatch and not that Indians in the west and in Gulf have any new disease. Yes, when someone is ill we have to drug him/her, but the long term solution is in telling people the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth for them to change their mode of living. If all such people who are born small have a frugal diet and work very hard to burn calories they will not be diabetics at an early age at all. Health promotion through diet is our future hope.
At the end of it all the poor suffer all diseases because of their poverty in the first place. The poor pay for their poverty with their lives. Their main problem is not knowing where their next meal comes from. Even when they get a meal there is no guarantee that it is not contaminated by human and/or animal excreta. When the last man gets his three clean meals a day this world would be a happy place for all of us to live on. Let us contribute our bit to see that this becomes a reality.