On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Jessica Pearl <jcpearl86@yahoo.com> wrote:
You might want to look at some of the archeological data about
what happened to humans when they started farming grains.
They got shorter and sicker! Fast. Also their teeth started
getting crooked and their skulls smaller and thinner. The
grain-based diet started causing cavities way before sugar was
invented.
Where did you see this info? I'm curious to read it. thanks :)
For those with a scientific bent, there are a lot of good papers on historical diet. Google "Neolithic height" for a taste.
One in particular has a table of an overview of height, health, lifespan, based on skeletal remains:
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The considerable decrease in stature at this time (roughly 4-6 inches, or 12-16 cm, shorter than in pre-agricultural times) is believed to have resulted from restricted blood calcium and/or vitamin D, plus insufficient essential amino acid levels, the latter resulting from the large fall in meat consumption at this time (as determined by strontium/calcium ratios in human bone remains).
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The Beyondveg site itself has a lot of information, much of it from researchers like Cordain. This doesn't help much if one is eating according to faith or moral issues. My own take on the moral issues is that we are stuck in a system where the snake eats it's tail: grasslands need ruminants, and ruminants need predators. You get rid of the ruminants, the grass dies. You get rid of the predators, the herds get sickly. Turning the whole world into a giant soy farm just won't *work* (and we can lose the rainforests in our attempt to do so).
Anyway, our household is mostly a biosphere: the chickens eat our garbage, and the chicken manure fertilizes the plants, and we eat the chicken eggs. We get one cow a year from a local farmer, and the cows mow the big fields. Factory farms are bad things for many reasons, but they aren't necessary. Our typical meals are based on vegies (lots of greens, onions, carrots, garlic) with some rice/potato and some protein food. The kids are growing up smart and happy and strong.
I'm all for people experimenting, it's a good thing! But I worry about the kids. It's been well-researched: kids need lots of Omega 3's and they also need iodine, for brain development. Kids in the US have been subjected to a 50-year food experiment of sorts and we are getting more and more developmental problems. What you do in that first 3 years of life can't be undone easily: so do your research!
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