Our diet history
“Diets have changed dramatically during human evolution, often causing our bodies to change in response. Dating these changes is challenging. Cooking may have originated 300,000 or 1.8 million years ago, depending on how experts interpret archaeological and genetic evidence. Despite this, scientist are building a picture of how our dietary history has affected us.
Our anatomy and physiology have evolved as our diet has changed over many thousands of years. Some of these pivotal events, such as meat eating or cooking, happened so long ago that our bodies have already evolved accordingly. Whether we are suited to more recent changes is still to be seen. What had become clear is that some aspects of the modern diet, with the abundance of energy-dense foods, can be very detrimental to our health. Looking back in time may even help us to eat healthier.”
When our ancestors began to eat meat more than 2 million years ago, the extra calories meat provided, and the reduction in energy needed for its digestion, may have allowed their brains to become bigger and more energy-hungry, as the gut became smaller. There are those that state that our brains grew from eating various mushrooms. However, meat was rare for most ancient humans, so they would still have relied heavily on plants and mushrooms and then eventually some grains.
Reference from the book “How Food Works” by DK, Penguin Random House, 2017.
One of the outcomes seen with people who consume the various medicinal mushroom products from Myshroom® is that they see an increase in comprehension and cognitive ability. The gut brain connection is real and when have a happy gut, you can feel and see the difference. It has been determined that Myshroom® products have beneficial pro biotics, natural antibiotic molecules, antiparasitic molecules, antiviral molecules, and an abundance of nutrition and protein for the body that far surpasses what any other food on earth has.
Based on our observations of all the people on various diets and the reading of many scientific articles, everybody’s chemistry is different. We read the reviews and developments by Nathan Pritikin, Dr. Max Gerson, Dr. Michael Gregor, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. William Davis, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Dean Ornish and others. Some say to avoid consuming grains, dairy, meats and fish including processed oils and fats.
Raw food diets are great but we found that when steaming broccoli and kale you get a few more specific beneficial chemistry, so some vegetables may be better if cooked. You need to do your own research. For those patients who went on a 90% raw food diet with no grains, dairy or meat saw health improvements. A review of Dr. Carolyn Mein’s research is that you can determining what food is good and when to consume it for your body type. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr0_ks34HHE
We do agree on the elimination of grass grains such as wheat, barley, rye and non gluten oats. Please read all and make your own decisions.
History and review of diets by other leading researchers and physicians.
Boiling increases antioxidant levels in vegetables more than frying, according to a study published in "The International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition" in 2009. This is to general, let’s look at all the work other scientists and nutritionists have done to show that many raw vegetables are best juiced. Boiling decreases the number of water-soluble vitamins and minerals by up to 20 percent, making steaming better options for maximizing nutrients in some vegetables.
More than 100 studies in top medical journals have found that people who adopt the Pritikin Program achieve dramatic results in just a few weeks, with more benefits long- term. The World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services have determined that the healthiest, most effective diet for fighting the obesity epidemic and building long-term health is a diet that closely mirrors the Pritikin Program.
“ALL I’M TRYING TO DO IS WIPE OUT HEART DISEASE, DIABETES, HYPERTENSION, AND OBESITY.”
Starting in the 1970s, the statement above was Nathan Pritikin’s mission. He wasn’t always involved in medicine, however. As a young man in the 1940s and 1950s, his occupation was that of an inventor. He held over two dozen U.S. patents in fields as diverse as engineering, photography, and aeronautics. But since World War II, he had probed into the origins of heart disease. He had seen classified documents showing that European deaths from heart disease and diabetes had dropped dramatically during the war. How peculiar, he thought. He had always been taught that atherosclerosis-related conditions like heart disease were caused by stress. What could produce more stress than war, with its food rationing, fire bombings, and anarchy?
Intrigued, Nathan Pritikin started following the work of Dr. Lester Morrison in California, a cardiologist who in the early 1950s had placed 50 of his seriously ill heart attack patients on a diet mimicking the low-cholesterol, low-fat wartime food rationing diet that many Europeans survived on. Another 50 cardiac patients, also very ill, continued eating the typical American high-fat diet. The latter was the study’s control group.
By 1955, the cholesterol levels of the experimental low-fat, low-cholesterol group had dropped from an average of 312 to 220. The control group’s cholesterol levels had remained the same. Nearly 60% of the men in the experimental group were still alive compared to 24% of the control group. By 1960, all of the patients in the control group had died; 38% of the low-fat, low-cholesterol group were still alive.
Out of curiosity, Nathan Pritikin visited Dr. Morrison in 1956 and had his own cholesterol checked. It was over 300. But Nathan did not want to give up his three eggs every morning, his pint of ice cream after dinner, his butter, and his bowls of whipped cream. Not until, that is, Dr. Morrison gave him a stress electrocardiogram, which showed coronary insufficiency. A second cardiologist and second testing confirmed that Nathan’s arteries were indeed clogging up. He was diagnosed with substantial coronary heart disease. He was 42 years old.
A prestigious team of cardiologists gave him the standard prescription of the day: Stop all exercise, stop climbing stairs, take it easy, and take naps in the afternoon. Once again, Nathan asked questions. His readings of population studies had convinced him that dangerous arterial plaque would form at any cholesterol level over 160. If he could just get his cholesterol level down with dietary measures, he figured, he might have a chance of surviving.
Once again, he met resistance. UCLA Medical School cardiologists admonished him, saying, “You CAN’T control your cholesterol. Ridiculous!” So, Nathan decided to make dietary changes on his own. He was frightened, but obstinate. By April 1958, he had become a vegetarian. He had also started running three to four miles daily. By May, his cholesterol had fallen to 162. By January 1960, his cholesterol had plummeted to 120, and a new electrocardiogram showed that his coronary insufficiency had disappeared. His test results: normal.
Emboldened by his new life – and the results of his diet and exercise program – Nathan Pritikin launched several research projects over the next 25 years that, study after study, validated the efficacy of his program. These studies on heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and nutrition, now numbering more than 100, have been published in key medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Archives of Internal Medicine, Diabetes Care, and Circulation.
Nathan Pritikin also wrote several books for the general public on nutrition, exercise, and health that were international bestsellers, including Live Longer Now, The Pritikin Program For Diet and Exercise, The Pritikin Weight Loss Manual, and Diet For Runners. To date, 10 books have been published on the Pritikin Program. The most recent are The Pritikin Edge: 10 Essential Ingredients For a Long and Delicious Life (paperback version released in 2010) and Understanding Common Diseases and the Value of the Pritikin Eating and Exercise Program (published in 2013).”
As Dr. Joel Fuhrman states, the key to optimizing your health and achieving an ideal body weight is to eat food with a relatively high proportion of nutrients to calories.
Consuming the Myshroom® products alone give the most nutrition to calories than any other food on earth. You get all of the essential amino acids, so no protein needs to be added to the diet.
Disease can be caused by too much inflammation and certain foods can cause inflammation.
The elimination of processed foods and harmful grains
in the diet can make a big difference in human health
and more
If big food companies would remove the unwanted, harmful ingredients and grains that most people consume, there would be a great improvement in public health. Here a few more quotes from medical doctors who have done the research and have seen the difference in the health of their patients.
A few quotes made from the book” The Grain Free Cure” by William Davis MD.
“Beaten, demoralized, discouraged, your life and health have been bankrupted by “healthy whole grains.” The worst of the bunch is modern wheat: the Judas of dietary “wisdom,” despot of the breakfast bowl, tyrant of the bakery cabinet, the semi dwarf darling of agribusiness. Your eyes were sprouting cataracts, your arteries were stiffening, your skin was wrinkling and plagued with rashes, your joints were sore and arthritic, your organs were inflamed, your belly fat was expanding, your blood sugar was climbing, and man breasts may even have been sprouting. Your mind was clouded by fog, your medication list was growing, and your schedule was fouled by mad scrambles for the nearest bathroom, all while you were being driven to consume more and more of the food that all official providers of nutritional advice advised you to consume...until you put an end to the whole mess as a result of the revelations made in the book the “Wheat Belly” (and its exclusive edition entitled Lose the “Wheat, Lose the Weight”).”
As the doctor points out about removing grains, we have also seen that for those who removed food and only consumed the Myshroom® mushrooms saw an improvement. Those who consumed the immune health blend of Myshroom® mushrooms (which has by far better nutrition than any other food on the planet) with just ionized water with a full mineral blend and vitamins D and Bs had very positive health outcomes. Many lost a pound a day on average after two weeks. They also did not need to consume any other foods during this period other than drinking the ionized water or beverage with the mushroom blend throughout the day. They had energy, no appetite and saw improvements to their health, including mental health and reduction in pain.
As the doctor states: “For those who boldly removed food that enjoy the blessings of the agencies in the business of dispensing dietary advice. You are defying the USDA and its MyPlate and MyPyramid. You are scoffing at the urgings of the Surgeon Generals. You are thumbing your nose at the advice of the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Your sniggering at the antics of the wheat lobby and wheat trade groups as they desperately launched wave after wave of damage control. By you removing the grains like the festering abscess it is which prevents healing, you then discover that health and vigor began to reappear.”
“The doctor states that: “I’ve experienced this personally. When I removed all the “healthy Whole grains’ from my life, it reversed my diabetes until I became confidently nondiabetic, I was freed from mind fog that persisted no matter how many cups of coffee I drank, and I found relief from the annoying symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. My triglycerides level dropped from 350 to 42 mg/dL, my HDL increased from 27 to 97 mg/dL, and the dark thoughts and moods that I had struggled with for many years were simply erased. I did the opposite of widely accepted health advice and experienced a transformation in health.”
The grains are wheat, barley, rye, and oats, this is regardless of gluten intolerance, there are many other harmful proteins to mammalian chemistry that were studied as far back as the 1950s through the 1970s that showed the proof and ignored by agribusiness, the FDA, USDA, CDC and the EPA. All the other seeded grains to avoid are amaranth, rice, spelt, sorghum, quinoa, millet, teff, triticale and any other seeded grains should be avoided because of blood sugar balancing, your gut and metabolism.
“Coming to the realization that conventional nutritional advice has as much value as old bubble gum stuck on the sidewalk can’t help but make you skeptical about whether most sources of health advice are objective, unbiased, and based on science in the first place. At best, dietary advice was driven by incomplete or misinterpreted data, and an army of dietitians and “experts” unwittingly doing the dirty work of distributing the information. At worst, it was advice that served the ambitions of agribusiness, big pharma and other powerful interests, all working to commoditize the human diet—yes, commoditized, or derive maximal financial gain by persuading us that the human diet should be dependent on foods that are inexpensive, indifferent to quality, blind to source, traded and arbitraged on a massive scale, and hungrily desired by the masses. Yes, you were grained.” This caused health challenges and disease.
“When we peel back the veneer of marketing, trumped-up science, the appeal of convenience, and the yank of addiction, we find that, as a civilization, we made an enormous dietary blunder about 10,000 years ago; We mistook the seeds of grasses – first consumed in desperation – as food. We then allowed this mistake to balloon, not only perceiving this mistake as the discovery of a dietary staple, but as a food ideal for human consumption. Recognizing the ills of modern what was the first step, but now we can take another major step and eliminate all grains. Once that is accomplished, we proceed even further along the past toward total health by identifying and undoing all the harmful effects we’ve accumulated during our grain-consuming years and that can persist even in the aftermath of grain removal.”
“In The Grain-Free Cure book, you can explore in detail why this dietary detour has caused more human disease and suffering than all the wars of the world combined. They discuss why and how experts joined in on the mass hysteria, even co-opting government agencies and policies into the delusion and creating an example of collective madness larger than the Salem witch trials or the fearmongering of the Red Scare, making absurd practices such as bleeding with leeches or frontal lobotomies seem quaint. He describes the journey of discovery further, discussing how, after you undo this grain induced mess, you can pick up the pieces and reconstruct diet and correct weight, hormonal status, and other facets of health you may have thought were out of reach.”
“There are aspects of life that are beyond your influence-genetics, family, and shoe size, for instances-but most of the factors that color your day-to-day existence are indeed under your control. Removing grains is the courageous first step, but there are plenty more steps to climb to fully undo the years of health abuse you’ve endured. Once you are grain-free, you may be left with the past disruptions of bowel flora and digestive function, nutritional deficiencies, and chronic conditions list osteoporosis. These will all need to be addressed. You may find that medications previously prescribed to treat a long list of grain related health conditions, inflammation and allergies are no longer necessary. Some people take their diets on other unhealthy sweeteners, and discover that, while they may not be as bad off as when they consumed grains, they’re striking compromises in health that needn’t be struck. All these issues must be addressed to find your path back to total health, ungrained.”
This doctor and many others have the mutual goal of not to titillate, nor to astound, but to inform all without the influence of agribusiness interests or the bias of flawed epidemiology. Big pharm was getting rich on the health crises caused by grains. It has been discovered that, minus grains, not only does a long list of chronic health conditions dissolve, but you are also capable of achieving new heights of health and life performance that you had only previously imagined were possible.
https://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2017/09/brief-history-wheat/
The conventional medical approach to autoimmune disease ignores disturbances of intestinal permeability, molecular mimicry, immunomodulation by vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids, composition of Bowel flora, exposure to industrial chemicals or metals, and the notion that various foods can initiate and perpetuate an immune system gone wrong.
Instead, modern health care chooses to focus only on turning off the immune responses with drugs most of the time. Some treatments are imprecise and non-specific drugs, such as steroids like prednisone, which, by shutting down the entire immune system, also make us susceptible to infection and cancers. Other treatments are more specific, such as tumor necrosis factor blockers like Enbrel and Humira. These intravenous agents only work occasionally with incomplete success, are extraordinarily expensive, and are accompanied by the potential for tuberculosis, viral and bacterial infections, liver damage or failure, and activation of viral hepatitis. They even allow other autoimmune disease to develop—an imperfect solution, to say the least.
The wonderful thing about addressing the potential contributors to autoimmune processes, such as eliminating grains, restoring vitamin D, and correcting the disruptions of bowel flora, is that they help restore health in many ways, not just by reducing inflammation or autoimmunity. Eliminate grains, for instance, and depression can lift, blood sugars drop, visceral fat is lost, and autoimmunity can recede. Raise vitamin D blood levels to 70 mg/mL and your thinking becomes clearer, bone density increases, insulin levels drop, and autoimmunity can recede. And such interventions are safe and inexpensive, costing little compared to the thousands of dollars per month you’d spend on autoimmune drugs.
Take natural steps appropriate for a non-grass consuming member of the species Homo sapiens and allow your immune system to distinguish friend from foe.
“Populations that depend on grains and legumes as staple foods consumer diets rich in phytic acid. This compound binds tightly to important mineral nutrients such as iron and zinc, forming salts that are largely excreted. This phenomenon can contribute to mineral depletion and deficiency”. Victor Raboy, US Department of Agriculture.
Increase Odds for Recovery
The intestinal devastation experienced by people with these chronic intestinal inflammatory processes can affect many facets of digestive health. Removing grains is a huge step toward recovery, but is; often insufficient, even with celiac disease, which is often viewed as nothing more than a form of intolerance to gluten. Additional steps are nearly always necessary to correct persistent disturbances.
This situation is similar to the experience of many people without celiac disease or inflammatory bowel diseases who fail to retain full health despite the removal of grains. Partial or failed recovery represents many of the same issues seen in nonceliac people, just to a greater degree. For instance, deficiencies of iron, zinc, and vitamin B12 can develop even more commonly. Severe disruption of bowel flora, or dysbiosis, also occurs, but worse. All because of long term malabsorption of nutrition. It is therefore of equal or greater importance that you remove all grains, gluten-containing and otherwise: remove all prolamin protein grains (wheat, rye, barley, triticale, bulgur, and corn); remove all wheat germ agglutinin-containing grains (the same grains plus rice); and remove all phytate- containing grains. In short, remove all grains. Teff and amaranth exert these effects the least of all grains, but they still pose blood sugar and unhealthy bowl flora implications, so either go very lightly or exclude them entirely.
The “flours”–non-wheat, non-grain and without gluten-free junk carbohydrates–are truly safe and provide reasonable baking characteristics? Here’s a list for making food recipes:
Almond meal–Also called just “ground almonds,” the meal ground from whole almonds is versatile and yields a great texture, though heavier than wheat-based flour. Shop around, as prices vary widely. I am in Milwaukee; Wisconsin and I can pay anywhere from $3 to $18.99 per pound from local grocery stores.
Almond flour–Though the terminology is a bit confusing, almond flour usually refers to flour ground from blanched almonds that may or may not have had the excess oil pressed from it. This yields a fine flour but minus much of the fiber and perhaps the oil. It is also more costly. I therefore reserve the use of almond flour for when a lighter texture is required, e.g., layer cake.
Ground pecans–A coarser flour than that from almonds, ground pecans can be used in place of almond meal or flour. However, I find it best for pie crusts. Anyone allergic to almonds may find ground pecans useful.
Ground walnuts–Similar to ground pecans, ground walnuts are coarser and best used as pie crust or in recipes in which a coarse texture is desired. As with ground pecans, ground walnuts may be useful for almond-allergic individuals.
Coconut flour–The flour ground from coconut meat has a wonderful taste and scent (surprisingly not coconutty, for those of you who do not like coconut). However, it yields an exceptionally dense and hygroscopic (water-absorbing) product. It is so water- absorbent that it can even become lodged in the throat if used as the sole flour. I therefore prefer to use it–for both texture and safety–as a secondary flour to modify the taste and texture of a primary flour, such as almond meal. Typically, I use 8-12 parts almond meal to 1 part coconut flour, e.g., 2 1/2 cups almond meal + 1/4 cup coconut flour.
Ground golden flaxseed–It’s the golden flaxseed you want, not the more common brown, when you desire a flour replacement. The golden yields a finer texture. Used by itself, the ground golden flaxseed tends to be too crumbly, so it is best used as a secondary flour along with almond meal or another nut meal.
Pumpkin seed meal–Easy to grind, pumpkin seed meal is dense. I’ve not played around with it enough to know just how well it performs, but I’ll bet it yields a great brownie, perhaps combined 50:50 with almond meal.
Sesame seed meal–Sesame seeds yield a surprisingly light flour. I’ve been making sesame seed crackers with ground sesame meal, whole sesame seeds, mustard powder, onion powder, garlic powder, and cayenne pepper to dip in hummus–wonderful!
Sunflower seed meal–Like pumpkin seed meal, sunflower seed meal is something I have not yet had much opportunity to experiment with. But I suspect it will yield another oil-rich and dense flour replacement.
Garbanzo bean flour–This almost didn’t make the list due to higher carbohydrate content. However, this is among the lowest of the various bean flours available. Yeah, sure, there’s the phytate anti-nutrient issue with garbanzo beans, but if consumed occasionally as a flour I don’t believe there is a real issue. Like coconut flour, I find garbanzo bean flour useful as a “lightening” flour to make nut flours a bit lighter and less dense.
Chia seed meal–I made brownies with chia seed meal the other night, cut 50:50 with almond meal, but it yielded too heavy a texture. It also soaked up the stevia sweetener, increasing need 3-fold. It may prove useful in future recipes, but so far, I’ve not quite figured out how to use this linolenic acid-rich flour.