Cave Men Didn’t Eat Junk Food

The food debate rages on. There are so many food choices and food combinations. Even eating styles are debated. Go down any supermarket aisle and you will see food in cans, prepackaged convenience foods, packaged foods, junk foods and everything in between.

Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. They ate leaves, roots, nuts and fruit, just like we do. They also ate meat when they could catch it. We don’t have to go out and rangle it. We just tootle our grocery cart down the meat aisle and there it is, along with some suspicious stuff that has a “meat” base along with a number of chemicals and food dyes that are proving dangerous to long term use.

Those cave men had a pretty healthy diet compared to ours. Our diet has so many acidic and acid forming foods in it that there is an ever increasing rise in illness and disease. We are not a healthy population. The US spends the most of any country in the world on health care and they are 27th in overall health and longevity of 193 countries in the World Health Organization. According to their statistics, the US spent $2672 USD on health care for every member of their population in 2005. It appears that our diets are killing us. Or, to be more precise, the acids in our bodies from our diets are killing us.
Everything that goes into your mouth, your body has to do something with it, whether it likes it or not. This includes all the leafy greens, fruits and vegetables, along with all the sprays, pesticides and herbicides, fertilizers, sewer sludge, manure run-offs and industrial chimney belching. If you eat packaged foods, it includes artificial fats, trans fats, preservatives, artificial colors, chemically simulated flavors, artificial sweeteners, pesticide contaminated grains (like General Mills of Cheerios fame did a few years ago) and any number of hidden ingredients including GMO’s. Of course the meat and dairy industry has their closet full of secrets, too…hormones, antibiotics, mad cow, contaminated feed, overcrowding, inhumane treatment, tumors, infections, and so on. All of these contaminants that you don’t see, don’t know about or don’t care what it does to your body, have to be dealt with somehow.

Your body is extremely resilient. It can deal with the Christmas and Thanksgiving pig outs, the Halloween sugar binges, the coffee and donuts daily, carefully storing all of the excess toxins in our body fat, or wherever else it can. But, by the time you have reached middle age, your body is wearing out and it is highly contaminated with all manner of acidic food and environmental pollutants in addition to acidic, metabolic by-products. Junk food is slowly killing us. It is making us more and more acidic. Our children are fatter than they have ever been. Type 2 diabetes is becoming more common in children. This is supposed to be an “old age” disease, not one that kids get.

Everything that goes in your mouth has a consequence. Add all those consequences to our TV and armchair quarterback lifestyle and those cave men had another one over on us. They were much more active because they had to be to survive. I think if we could take on that cave man diet and the amount of exercise they got, we’d all be much healthier. At the very least, we can eat organic, park our cars and walk, and be more mindful of what we stuff into our faces.

If the metabolic by-product of eating food and drinking all manner of beverages is acidic, basic high school chemistry should tell us that to balance that, common intelligence should tell us that we need to neutralize that acid to keep our body state neutral. One way is to eat the equivalent of five dinner salads every day, but who want to pretend they’re a rabbit every day? The other way is to juice vegetables, especially the strong tasting ones you don’t like the taste of like kale. If you juice it with carrot, celery, cucumber and tomato and reinforce it with a large scoop of a good quality greens powder, you won’t taste the kale and you have just alkalized and turbo-charged your day. If you don’t like juicing or you don’t have time, you can drink alkaline, ionized water which is much simpler and you can carry it with you everywhere you go. It comes out of a machine that hooks up to your kitchen tap. You can neutralize all those metabolic acids and we won’t have to send you back to the stone age.