Four Lessons From Our Ancestors for Better Nutrition

“How” you eat matters as much as “what” you eat

Photo from Dudarev Mihael on Shutterstock

Introduction

When I was young, my Mom did everything she could to make sure my family ate healthy food. Because I was a child of the 90’s — a generation raised on pop tarts and Oreos — it was often an uphill battle. It was a time when sugary cereals were certified “heart healthy” foods, school lunches included pizza and mozzarella sticks, and terms like “gluten-free” and “chronic inflammation” weren’t in anyone’s vocabulary.

For reasons the I couldn’t understand as a child, Mom insisted on bringing home organic produce, “grass-fed” milk, and whole wheat pasta, which my brothers viewed with suspicion because it was grainy and oddly dark compared to “normal pasta.”

Nutrition and public health have come a long way since then. As an adult, nutrition is a huge part of how I manage my health and I’m grateful to my Mom for showing me that the quality of what I eat matters.

In fact, I’ve recently made a switch from focusing on not just what I eat, but how. Questions of how to select food (or decide what counts as food), how to create a meal, and how to find food that fits the place and season are all fascinating to me. That’s what this article is about: exploring a few of the ways how you eat can make a huge difference for your health. And many of the answers lie in our roots and traditions.

When It Comes to Food Varieties, Go Wild!

The fruits and vegetables we eat today barely resemble their wild counterparts.

After hundreds of years of selective breeding, our apples are much larger and sweeter and our bananas are softer, sweeter, and even peelable. In fact, most of the foods we eat today barely resemble their wild ancestors.

Unfortunately, in the process of breeding for traits like sweetness, large size, durability (to survive the trip from fields to supermarket), and high yields, we’ve bred many of the nutrients out of our foods.

In his book “Eat Like a Human,” Dr. Bill Schindler shares:

“In Eating on the Wild Side, Jo Robinson notes that kernels of modern corn’s ancestor, called teosinte, were 30% protein and 2 sugar. Compare this to contemporary varieties that are as high as 40% sugar. When Robinson compared six wild varieties of apples to six modern varieties, she found that the wild varieties had 475 times more phytonutrients.”

Wild plants left unmolested frequently have greater nutritional value than their domesticated mono crop counterparts…Wild dandelion has seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a ‘superfood.’ Mallow, a common ‘weed,’ has more calcium than milk and eight times as much iron as spinach by volume.”

The good news is, there are many ways to maximize the nutrients in your food. If you’re the adventurous type, a quick foraging course or field guide can help you find the nutrient-dense weeds growing in your own neighborhood. Common plants like dandelion, nettle, and mallow are packed with nutrients — often many times the number in grocery store spinach or kale.

Or if pulling and cooking weeds from your backyard sounds a little too wild, Jo Robinson shares advice on selecting the most nutrient-dense varieties of fruits and vegetables in her book “Eating on the Wild Side.” Even for produce like apples or blueberries, there’s a huge amount of nutritional variability and Robinson gives tips on selecting the best nutrient-dense varieties.

Eat the Entire Animal

In America today, we eat approximately 50% of every cow by weight. Most of the offal — a term for the skin, organs, blood, and bones — either goes to waste or is turned into products such as gelatin and fertilizer.

Interestingly, the parts we now avoid eating were once the most valued. Up until about 150 years ago, Americans prized the organs from animals as much as, if not more so, than the meat.

According to Dr. Schindler, one of the factors that likely caused this major cultural shift in eating was the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. This breakthrough allowed Americans to ship animals across the country for eventual slaughter. As time passed however, it became clear that it was too expensive and time-consuming to ship live animals, but newly developed refrigeration techniques allowed Americans to butcher animals locally and only ship the meat. As Schindler shares, “This arrangement took organ meats and other offal, which required more consistent, colder refrigeration than meat, off the table.”

And nutritionally, the losses were major. Compare the nutritional profile of liver with the same quantity of beef:

“A 100-gram serving of raw beef liver delivers 4.9 mg of iron, 313 mg of potassium, 9.8 mg of copper, 59 mg of Vitamin B12, and a topper 16,899 IU of vitamin A. The same portion of ground beef contains 2 mg of iron, 175 mg of potassium, .1 g of copper, and zero vitamin A…They both deliver about the same amount of protein, while the liver is lower in calories and fat.”

It’s no wonder that traditional cultures across the world prize animal offal and waste nothing. With every animal we butcher for meat and then discard, we lose precious bones and organs that were once a staple part of the Western diet.

Use Tried and Tested Food Pairings

American media has a bad habit of treating public health the same way it treats fashion: as a series of glorified passing trends. Over the past few years, foods like avocados, chia seeds, açaí, and turmeric have all been elevated to the status of “superfoods”- foods that we suddenly need more of because they offer every benefit.

What we often miss in the focus on single superfoods is how they best fit into a meal. For example, in the traditional Indian diet, turmeric is almost always paired with black pepper, which is not just beneficial in terms of flavor, but also for nutritional reasons. According to Healthline:

“The curcumin in turmeric is poorly absorbed into the bloodstream…However, adding black pepper can help. Research supports that combining the piperine in black pepper with the curcumin in turmeric enhances curcumin absorption by up to 2,000%.”

Traditional diets across the world use food pairings that make sense both in terms of flavor and nutrition: Italians combine tomatoes and olive oil, which improves absorption of tomatoes’ antioxidants, and South Americans often eat rice and beans together, which provides a complete source of protein.

So if you’re considering incorporating a new food into your diet, don’t simply focus on it in isolation- study where it comes from and how it’s traditionally prepared to get clues for how to maximize its benefits.

Eat Seasonally — Or Go Frozen

When I asked my Dad how he remembers meals from his childhood in the 1950’s, he shared:

“Nowadays, you can find anything at any time of year in the grocery store. When we were young, a lot of the canned or preserved food was terrible. But there was always apple season, tomato season, corn season. And when they were in season and you could go pick them, they were so much better.”

Today though we have the gift of choice — grocery stores provide a fairly constant selection of fruits, vegetables, and meats year round — we’ve lost a huge amount when it comes to the flavor and nutritional value of what we’re eating.

Since most food in our grocery stores now has to travel a long way and stay fresh longer in order to survive on shelves, it’s often picked prematurely, and then artificially ripened or left for long periods in warehouses.

As Greek chef Akis Petretzikis shares on his blog:

“It is a fact that fresh produce loses some of its nutrients after harvest. What does this mean? That the longer the journey to the market and the longer the products stay on the shelf, the greater the loss of their nutrients will be. Take spinach for example. According to research, this vegetable can lose up to 47% of its folic acid content after 6 days of storage and 80% of its vitamin C content after 3 days of storage.”

So what can you do to enjoy the benefit of food at its peak? Consider buying frozen fruits and vegetables because — counter-intuitively — those frozen when they were in season often contain more nutrients that those that travel miles to reach your plate “fresh.” And whenever possible, find food that’s local and in season. Check out local farmer’s markets, which generally sell fresh produce in-season and at the height of its flavor.

Conclusion

We’ve come a long way when it comes to healthy eating. There are a growing number of options for clean food and an awareness that what you put into your body directly impacts your health (shocking!).

What remains relatively unexplored is how we eat, and how we can bridge the gap between traditional eating practices that supported health and modern needs and lifestyles. Though we can’t go back in time — nor should we — there’s a lot we can learn from how our parents, grandparents, and ancestors ate.

There’s a great deal more to learn and experiment with. I hope you’ve enjoyed — and if you have any personal advice on how you eat to maximize nutrition and health, please share in the comments!