In some Native languages, the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us”.
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
My nephew, an extreme outdoor sports enthusiast and self-hacker told me last week that he was thinking of trying a carnivore plus fruit diet for a month.
He said he’d heard that vegetables have defence mechanisms that harm herbivores.
On the other hand, fruit wants to be eaten so that its seeds are pooped out and spread widely with compost to sprout again.
Because this meat-heavy dietary pattern seems to have become a trend, I thought I’d share some thoughts.
Preamble
Nutrition science is in its infancy. We have a lot to learn.
Our ancestors instinctively figured out what to eat. Culinary practices adapted to rendering locally available foods nourishing and medicinal.
Soaking, sprouting, souring, culturing, fermenting and eventually cooking helped minimize or eradicate hard-to-break down and potentially harmful chemicals in food.
In a global world, our mobility from a place of origin necessitates that we adapt to the new terrain. Consuming locally and sustainably produced food helps us thrive.
Stress can increase resilience
Plants produce chemicals to deter predators and help adapt to other challenges like drought and wind.
The protective compounds produced by plants, when consumed by people, can be used to nudge one to acclimate to the environment and to survive and thrive. A poison can become a cure.
In 1992 scientists created the Biosphere 2 dome in Arizona, an artificial, materially enclosed ecological system meant to be the second fully self-sufficient biosphere after the Earth.
The mission of Biosphere 2 is to advance our understanding of the natural and human-made environment through unique research and experimentation, interdisciplinary science training and education, and leadership in initiatives that address the grand challenges to sustaining Earth systems and quality of life.
A discovery made by the scientists was that the wind played an important role in the life of a tree.
Inside Biosphere 2, trees grew more rapidly than outside the dome, but they fell over before reaching maturity. Researchers learned that a lack of wind caused a deficiency of stress wood.
Stress wood helps trees grow more solidly. Without stress wood, a tree cannot support itself fully. It becomes vulnerable to wear and tear and collapses.
Like the human need for exercise trees need physical stress to become more resilient and weather the upcoming storm.
The all-meat diet
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a world-famous Canadian anthropologist, explored the Arctic extensively in the early 1900s. Eating Inuit-style became an obsession for him.
He observed that people thrive on a meat-based diet if the animals supplied enough fat and were eaten nose to tail. Body organs and tissues become reservoirs for different vitamins and minerals.
Stefansson learned through experience that eating lean animals caused “rabbit starvation”. Fat is essential. But, he believed vegetables weren’t necessary for health.
In the era of John Harvey Kellogg, the influential cereal producer who did not serve meat at his health resort, Stefansson experienced wrath for promoting what some believed and still believe is a “barbaric” meat-heavy diet.
It is fascinating that in a time of aggression and war, “strength building” diets have become a preference for some young people.
Defending the plants
Letting plants produce protective compounds to become more resilient helps botany become better medicine. Following are three examples:
Some vegetables like spinach, kale, broccoli, and sweet potato generate higher amounts of Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) when exposed to environmental stress like drought or pests. A higher dose of GABA will kill insects. But in humans, it is used for pain relief, alleviating anxiety and lowering blood pressure. It is a relaxing neurotransmitter.
Foxglove plants produce digitalis to kill slugs and other prey. In medicine, digitalis is a drug used to improve circulation by strengthening contractions of the heart.
Willow bark is nature's aspirin. It has been used medicinally for centuries as a pain killer because the insect deterrent salicin gets converted into an aspirin-like pain reliever.
Planting seeds
There is no one-size-fits-all best diet.
Those whose ancestors grew up by the sea may not have the ability to convert plant-based omega-3 fats into EPA and DHA. EPA is essential for heart health, and DHA is critical for healthy brain development.
Continuing with fat as an example, if we lived in the Arctic, high polyunsaturated omega-3 rich fats from cold-water fish helped keep blood from freezing, and the brain sharp.
Saturated fats like coconut and palm oil, being more heat-stable, were best for those living in the tropics without refrigeration.
In the Mediterranean, the relatively stable and abundant monounsaturated fats like olive oil helped improve heart health and alleviate pain.
Eating a wide variety of food prepared from ingredients grown outdoors, without lab-made fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, antibiotics, and hormones helps create a diversity of healthy bacteria in our gut.
Diversity increases resilience. Healthy bacteria produce vitamins, help digest food, train the immune system, heal and seal the gut and keep the bad bugs in check.
Given the opportunity to produce innate defences, plants have an incredible ability to adapt to adversity and to help us become more resilient.
Supplementing a diet that does not provide all the nutritional building blocks is not an option for everyone. At times we have had no choice but to eat what nature provided locally.
Current world supply chain issues inspire greater self-sufficiency through local nutrient-dense food production. Regenerative agriculture offers a solution.
Our children loved Little Shop of Horrors, a movie about a giant man-eating plant, hence the picture above.
Thanks, Zack. I learned from your self-hack 😀
Protect the plants