Does the human body really need such healthy food?

[miniwh]

As in, 5+ a day veg/some fruits etc

For thousands of years humans weren't able to access that type of varied and balanced diet

You could say we need to move with the times but other mammals are in good health by eating what's always been available to them and nothing else

So surely our bodies are designed for fairly restricted and limited diets?

Brick dust and plaster dust too.

20 portions of fruit and veg a day?

ain't no one got time for that nonsense.

🤣👍

Hi @luckyrabbits I think you probably need to start a new thread for advice .

But that's not what the human body evolved to eat. Evolution takes much longer than that. We're still adapted to eat a hunter gatherer diet.

I tried this for a couple of weeks once. It gave me diarrhoea.

Maybe if I’d persisted I’d have felt great eventually, but it was as though my body was yelling ‘NO!’, so I stopped.

I believe the evidence suggests we should have 10 portions of fruit and veg a day but health campaigners thought this would be overwhelming and would likely result in people not bothering at all so they reduced it to 5 so its more achievable. I think food is really important, just think when you take a medicine that tiny pill can really affect your body in so many ways, so what is food doing?! It's fascinating

Yes you're right (although I thought it was 7)

There was similar amounts quoted in a podcast I listened to about Tudor diets (Not Just the Tudors - the Tudors and food). Was really interesting the range and types of foods mentioned too.

@optimistic40 What app do you use?

It’s interesting to consider what people are in Victorian times, the Middle Ages etc, but it doesn’t tell us what we evolved to eat, just what was available then and cultural norms etc. As in: it’s not long ago enough in evolutionary terms to affect what we can eat and stay healthy.

I barely eat 5 portions of fruit or veg a month, let alone a day.
31 years old and the only issue I'm aware of is low iron, for which I take supplements.

Are you sure about that? Really? Because as far as I researched for my Masters in Medieval History, ordinary villagers mostly ate pottage and if caught hunting, were liable to get their hands cut off. There were land laws, not even a stick for the fire could be used without permission from the Lord of the Manor.

Only the rich had the diet you describe here.

I don’t think we need fashionable super foods. An apple is a superfood, so are oats. My DGM lived to 90 on meat and two veg, apple pie or crumble, butter, bread and tea!

The human body evolved to eat whatever the fuck it could find. And progressed rapidly expanding ever wider afield once methods of processing food were developed.

Years ago, I read a research report looking at the health and fitness of navvies that built the railways. The researchers had become fascinated by just how so many working class men could have had the physicality to build the railways considering what was believed about health in the mid 19th century.

What they discovered was that working class people had a very good diet prior to the mass urbanisation that came with the advent of the railways. Everything was organic and local. Nothing was processed. People ate organ meats. And they suspected the nutritional load of foods was far higher than even today.

Things changed dramatically with urbanisation post 1870. All of a sudden, you had to transport food en masses into cities and rely on greater numbers of middle men. Food stuffs became more adulterated, more susceptible to mold and infestation. Certain foods were harder to get because they spoiled in transit. And it's that that led to the horrific levels of malnutrition by 1910/5 that so astonished army doctors at the outset of WWI.

They concluded the people were far healthier and more nourished in 1810 than 1910 by quite some way, that a young lad at the turn of the twentieth century simply couldn't have done the type of physical job his great grandfather had done 100 years before. He simply didn't have the muscle mass.

I wish I could find it again. It was a fascinating piece of research.

I was thinking about this today. I was looking at the daily recommended levels of calcium and it looks like most days I don’t get enough. But Im guessing plenty of people regularly don’t get enough of a lot of vitamins. It made me think of that show ‘Freaky Eaters’. It was full of were people who are nothing but chips. And most of the time they seemed in surprisingly good shape.

Most women nowadays are deficient in calcium, iron, vitamin D and Iodine.

Taking supplements isn't a panacea.

There's nothing wrong with potage. It's just a stew of what I gave examples of!

But there's a big gap between medieval times and the 18th and 19th centuries when farming and fishing families were eating the diet I quoted.

You think there was no poaching just because it was a crime? There was no CCTV then either!

I don't think you need a huge variety of food to be healthy. A plate of meat and two veg is very healthy and could be really high in nutrients.
Fruit and Veg is promoted as they contain vitamins that are essential, like vitamin c. It keeps our immune system functioning and we need a constant supply of it.
We can get that from many fruit and veg including potatoes.

I barely eat 5 portions of fruit or veg a month, let alone a day.
31 years old and the only issue I'm aware of is low iron, for which I take supplements.
😬
Keep up the bowel cancer screening, would be my advice.

I don't think people were scared of fat in it's unadulterated sense.

People nowadays scare away from lard etc but eat super processed ready meals.

Whereas la small portion of meat and onion pie, mash and cabbage would have seen you through from lunchtime till supper

People ate unfashionable vegetables : carrots, turnips, cabbage, spuds and onions. Apples and pears, plums.

Now it's all kale and blueberries. But cabbage will basically do the same thing

They say too there is a lot of important micro nutrients in the soil reside from veg - which we often lose due to mass processing and importation

I always wonder if hay fever would be reduced if we ate more locally produced fruit and veg. Lots of people swear by local honey but that must be because the bees are using local pollen.

mtld nutracheck!

cosycover it's generally curries and soups made from just veg and potatoes with less healthy snacks. Will try to attach some pics (I don't track daily, just try to get a general idea after batch cooking for the week).

cosycover trying again to attach. How the hell do you do it?!

Men do kill each other quite a lot though.