The Food Bondage: Making a Case for the Human Diet

By: Gregory Stypko

Narrated by: Jason Belvill

The idea of "good nutrition" is imparted to us from early childhood and reinforced through governmental dietary advice throughout our lifetime. This way of thinking about nutrition has, almost quite literally, been shoved down our throats for hundreds of years, but is it better for us than our natural diet?

The starting point of the argument presented in The Food Bondage is this: “We don't eat the way we've evolved to eat.” This statement is pretty much uncontroversial because nobody claims that we eat according to our evolutionary past. Our species evolved with a nomadic diet, but for the last few thousand years, we have been eating according to a farmer’s diet. The phrase often used when referring to our dietary recommendations is evidence-based nutrition. This means that our nutritional guidelines are the best guidelines (based on evidence) for eating, according to our modern dietary model.

The crux of the problem is that our modern diet is not our natural diet. It is an artificial regimen, and even its best version cannot compete with the diet with which we evolved. Instead of an evidence-based, traditional diet, we should move to our (preferably evidence-based) natural human diet.

The author postulates that neither our traditional regimen nor popular alternative diets meet the criteria for optimal nutrition. After all, these eating recommendations are arbitrary. The starting points of our officially recommended diet are our crops and eating traditions. For alternative diets, it is simply guessing what foods are best suited for us. Consequently, these regimes propose fixed macro-nutrient ratios or the exclusions of particular food groups. Moreover, they focus only on what we should eat, forgetting about the importance of our eating schedule.
The author further argues that, in spite of the claims that our original way of eating cannot be recreated, we can, in fact, determine the structure of the pre-agriculture human diet.

This can be done by looking closely at their living circumstances because they enforced a particular menu and eating pattern.

According to the author, our native diet was fluid and nonrestrictive as to what we had been eating. Furthermore, how our ancestors were eating could be even more important than what they were eating. For example, without food stocks, they couldn’t have eaten according to our modern thee daily meals schedule.

The resulting broadly defined food-consumption model has many advantages over today’s diets. Notably, it makes us better able to tolerate a wide spectrum of foods. Therefore, we do not need to exactly recreate our nomadic menu. In fact, we can enjoy most of the benefits of our natural diet while consuming reasonably processed modern foods.

©2018 Gregory Stypko (P)2019 Gregory Stypko