Back to Eden

The interesting thing, to me, is that it is all cyclical. Prior to nutrition and germ theory (discovery of bacterial causes of disease and breakdown of foods into carbohydrates, proteins, fats, etc.) people ate "all natural" foods because that is all there was. Knowledge was all hands-on or word-of-mouth--such as, sailors on long see voyages who got no fresh fruit developed scurvy, and children who did not get fruit and vegetables developed rickets, so we knew we needed these things. ("Eat your vegetables!")

Then in the 1940s physicians, then thought of practically as "gods" began using these new toys (new science about food makeup, so-called vitamins, and the metabolism of food) to introduce the idea of Better Living Through Chemicals. Foods grew to be considered by many to be no more than the sum of their components--protein, fat, carbs, minerals, vitamins. Doctors developed, for example, infant formula with the right ingredients to grow BIGGER babies, and it worked, but the babies did not get immunogens and very important elements we now know are present in breast milk but cannot be duplicated in formula.

In the 1960s the "whole earth" movement kicked in, the "back-to-nature" trends in marketing food that was as close to its natural state as possible: whole grain breads, brown rice, etc. A lot of this had more to do with fashion than science, but on the whole it was a rejection of the imposition of the man-made on the natural and the glorification of all things "natural." I had a teacher in the 80s who poo-pooed all of this as "the Garden of Eden" complex. He swore that the body only recognizes chemical compounds. He loved to use the example of the rats fed different types of bread and nothing else. One group got 15-grain organic whole wheat, one groups got Wonder Bread. At the end of the study the healthiest rats were the Wonder Bread rats, why? Because Wonder Bread is fortified with vitamins and minerals.

But now, beginning in the 1990s really, there is new evidence that there is something about "whole foods" that may promote health and even ward off deadly diseases. Studies replicated all over suggest that for unknown reasons, a whole orange, for example, protects your health better than Vitamin C tablets. (Sometimes the reasons are known, sometimes not. The suggestion is that there are properties or compounds as yet unidentified in whole foods that cannot be replicated in the lab or in extractions such as vitamins.)

Having said all of that, I think a major factor in health is just listening to your body. It will tell you what it needs. I do think there is an intuitive factor in healthy eating and living, science be damned.