Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
“Growing older is a dynamic cognitive, biological and cultural coauthoring of health rather than a hopeless unfolding of progressive pathology.” Mario Martinez Psy.Ed (Clinical psychologist)
There is a tribe who drink, smoke and take drugs yet grow into their old age with vigour and endurance.
They run double marathons several times a week and have no diabetes, heart disease or cancer.
They break most of modern science’s dietary rules but continue to flummox researchers who travel to their remote, forbidding region to study their traditional ways.
In 1993 a group of them competed in the insane, gruelling Leadville 100, a race run over rough trails in the Rocky Mountains and designed to test the very limits of human endurance. Competitors run for many hours well into the night to complete the 100-mile distance if possible. They must carry torches to light their way and many do not make it to the finish line. Members of this mysterious tribe placed first, second and fifth. The winner was 55 years old.
They are known to the outside world as the Tarahumara. They call themselves the “Raramuri”, or the Running People.
They have lived for over 600 years in Copper Canyon, an isolated and rugged part of the Sierra Madre range in Mexico’s Chihuahua region. Their way of life has remained unchanged since they retreated here to escape the Spanish Conquistadors.
Why do they run so much? Men and women from early adolescence to old age run because, well because they run. It defines them as a people. Mass races over two days for more than 150 miles while kicking a wooden ball serve to cement social ties and are a reminder of the uniquely human practice of persistence hunting.
For early humans chasing prey for many miles until it keeled over was an essential part of our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the Tarahumara are still at it. Herbivores’ respiration is tied to their gait but humans can breathe out of step. We also sweat to cool ourselves and if you are prepared to run at a moderate pace for many miles you are likely to exhaust your prey who prefers to sprint and rest, sprint and rest. Australian Aborigines of the 19th Century were observed to chase kangaroo for up to 80 miles before they collapsed into stock fences, too exhausted to bound over to freedom.
Now don’t panic. I’m not advocating ultra running as a path to healthy longevity. In fact distance running, while good for fitness does not seem to lead to a longer life. The “Flying Finn”, Paavo Nurmi who won 9 gold medals and two silvers over three Olympic Games: 1920, 1924 and 1928 lived to a creditable but modest 76. Emil Zatopek, the great Czech who won three golds at the Helsinki Games of 1952, including the marathon - which he entered on a whim after winning the 5000 and 10,000 metres events and had never run before - lived to 78. Vladimir Kuts, the Russian strong man who won the 5000 metres at the 1956 Melbourne Games was felled by a heart attack at age 48.
Perhaps if Kuts had followed the Tarahumara diet he might have lived as long as Nurmi and Zatopek…or longer. There seems to be something protective about the diet of these traditional Indians that repairs the damage of their long runs and allows them mind-boggling stamina.
What do they eat? Like most pre-Conquest Indians of meso America they rely on the triumvirate of corn, beans and squash, and so much more. Most traditional peoples depend on key staples that combine to provide protein and all nutritional requirements despite being humble “uncivilized” foods. On its own corn is not enough to sustain health. The slave trade and large swathes of African populations found this out when they were forced to eat cornmeal and little else. Protein deficiency and the “disease of the mealies” or pellagra (B Vitamin deficiency) caused the malnutrition death of countless thousands.
But combine corn with its traditional partners squash and beans and you have a power-packed diet. The Tarahumara go so much further and eat a huge variety of mostly plant foods gathered from their region. These include chili peppers, wild greens and chia seeds. Remember your Chia pet? The Tarahumara carry a gourd of chia slurpee they regard as their energy drink that allows them to scamper up cliffs and outrun rabbits.
Most of their corn is consumed as pinole - ground toasted corn mixed with water that thickens to a gruel, prevents hunger and provides slow- release energy. Elsewhere on the Tarahumara shopping list are pine nuts, juniper berries, pecans, acorns, wild grapes and strawberries and yucca seed. Wild mint, agave hearts, prickly pear and mesquite pods ground to meal or infused in tea round out their diet. Fish, goat and mice are hunted to supplement this largely vegetarian fare.
Is it possible to reprise this way of eating in our modern society? Research by Dr Daphne Miller in her book “The Jungle Effect” focuses on traditional diets around the world. She analyses the conundrum that Tarahumara blood sugar levels are low despite a high carbohydrate diet. Corn is a medium to high GI food and the levels eaten by the Tarahumara should trigger an insulin response according to the mantra of this food classification system which, if you’d read my earlier posts, I think is bunk for non-diabetics. She emphasizes that their corn is minimally processed and fibre-rich, so if you are choosing corn products to add to your diet, don’t think corn chips, think coarse cornmeal. Whole beans added to salads and other dishes such as omelletes will also Tarahumara-ize your diet.
Lots of fruit and vegetables, some nuts and seeds and a balance of high-carbohydrate from good sources, protein garnered from grains and legumes and a low intake of fats and processed foods will do the rest. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the way many non-industrial peoples around the world eat and underscores the simple message I try to get across.
The tricky bit is to find wild plant foods in our city lifestyles. The easy bit is to avoid drinking large quantities of mescal and fruit wine which the Tarahumara are wont to do for days on end, even before a big race. Tesguino, or corn beer is low in alcohol and more like a sports drink and they consume a lot. Hallucinogenic drugs like peyote accompany drinking binges and may serve to bind tribal members or just provide an emotional outlet not provided by their reticent, non-confrontational mindset. Descriptions of runners at the start of a race sharing a cigarette of dark, homegrown tobacco jar with our concept of super-athletes as well.
I guess the moral of the Tarahumara story is that natural foods go a long way to combating the strains of living and growing older. They do not enjoy a long lifespan. The average life expectancy is only 45 but that figure is likely to be diminished by a high infant mortality rate and the poverty that marginalizes them. We enjoy access to good medical care as a rule in modern societies and if we can harness the power of a traditional diet like that of the Tarahumara and enjoy at least moderate levels of exercise we can achieve a more dynamic older age than we can imagine
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Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
I was in the health food store the other day. I only ever go there to buy petroleum-free shampoo. I used to buy this great home-made olive oil soap there made by an old Greek lady in the neighbourhood in a copper boiler in her back yard but they don’t stock it any more.
I never buy any edible products or supplements or any of the myriad wacky cures they sell because I gave all that up years ago. It’s very liberating - and easier on the wallet - not to walk around in a state of angst that disease and decay might be developing as I neglect to consume the latest potion our billion-dollar alternative health industry decrees I should.
One young guy in the queue ahead of me was not so angst-free. As he wrestled a gigantic plastic tub of protein powder onto the counter he asked furtively: “Got anything for detox?”
The shop owner’s eyes brightened as she realised she had a bite on the line. “Oh yes, you can have a herbal detox or buy a complete kit.”
I looked the guy over and wondered why he felt he needed detoxing. He clearly worked out at the gym and looked great: modishly dressed in sporty casual clothes, and fashionably tattooed on his dumbbell-pumped biceps. Maybe he just stayed up too late on the internet at night reading about the toxins that riddled his liver. Or maybe he just partied too hard with his friends on the weekends and drank too much and hadn’t eaten properly since he left home.
It did occur to me that maybe his kidneys were struggling to excrete the overload of protein he was putting into himself. We have gone protein-mad as a society and seem to think that pumping extra into ourselves will give us better muscles and less bodyfat but don’t let me get started on that.
The very nice and earnest lady behind the counter was listing the herbs and their effects on organ function - how this or that bark or berry extract would help the liver expel toxins, and so on. Was I in a fluro-lit, air-conditioned modern shop in a shopping centre or in some back-alley bazaar in medieval Baghdad? I almost expected her to drag a live snake out from under the counter and slit its throat or drain its gall bladder into a goblet for him to drink.
By the recitation of the magical properties of the fifth ingredient the young guy’s eyes were glazing over and I was getting a bit antsy.
He finally cut the snake-oil pitch short with: “How much is the kit?” In other words, I don’t really want the spiel, I’m already converted, I just need to know how much.
“149 dollars.”
“Oh. Well I’ll just take this and maybe I’ll get the other later.”
He handed over a couple of 50-dollar bills and I didn’t see him get much change for his huge keg of milk powder.
Part of me wanted to argue with the lady about why he needed to spend so much money to detoxify his body when a bit more water, sleep and less night-clubbing would probably work just as well. Another part of me saw a nice person who really believed in the benefit of what she sold and had no compunction about parroting the sales pitch on the product without ever verifying its truth.
I’ve been wandering around ever since, thinking about our fear of our toxic bodies and talking to people about their experiences with cleaning them up with fasting, or this or that product.
We just love the idea that our digestive tract, major organs and blood are accumulating toxic waste products faster than our beleagured kidneys and liver can get rid of them, or that environmental pollutants are slowly building up in us from the food we eat, the air we breathe, or the water we drink.
No amount of scientific discussion about how our bodies work can allay this almost religious conviction. What we need is a really good purge and our energy, digestion, skin, and circulation will improve. If we could just rid ourselves of the undigested matter clinging to the walls of our bowel, the invisible poisons infusing our tissues, and the harmful minerals and parasites weighing us down we’d be smarter, slimmer and happier.
Wouldn’t we?
Hey, if it were true then that simple cure to so many of life’s complex and interdependent issues costing only $149 would be very good value.
Where we anti-agers get involved is with some of our declining body functions that tempt us towards a quick-fix epiphany. Sometimes digestion slows with age, but this is usually a natural part of ageing and can usually be improved with more fibre, diet and exercise. Gall stones are more common as we age but resorting to colonic enemas, herbal “flushes” and special teas are not the answer.
“Oh, but I went on a juice fast and felt great afterwards,” people say. They usually fess up that they felt like rubbish after one day and refuse to believe that their body’s famine-survival mechanisms kick in and scrounge around the body for fuel and eventually feed the brain, kidneys and red blood cells with alternate, self-cannabalistic sources.
Religious mystics and holy men fast to create light-headedness from low blood sugar and an out-of-body sensation that they attribute to connection with a higher force.
Ironically, on a fast our bodies’ superbly efficient detoxification systems - the liver and kidneys -are less able to function without adequate fuel and are more likely to let waste products accumulate. In the absence of carbohydrate, as any victim of the Atkins Diet can attest, the body converts fat to ketone bodies to fuel the brain. Carbohydrate is its only fuel under normal circumstances but it will burn these eventually toxic substitutes for a short time. Oh, and not in sufficient quantities to cause significant weight loss. Then it goes back to converting muscle to sugar to keep ketone bodies from producing acidosis which is very unpleasant and not at all good for you.
So fasting actually causes the build up of waste products you are trying to expel and robs you of lean muscle mass in the process. Nice!
By the way, this is not just me making this up. This is basic nutrition biochemistry. I wish more of us would actually find out how our bodies work and marvel at the fine-tuning of the astonishing processes that go on inside us. That would make us less vulnerable to the charlatanism of detox merchants.
But then life wouldn’t be black-and-white would it? No matter how much you bash someone around the head with scientific evidence, a creeping intuition inside them forces them to ignore it and look for a miracle cure for fatigue, pimples, or bout after bout of colds. After all, the doctor hasn’t helped, and Mary at work reckons brindleberry extract helped her lose stacks of weight and feel fabulous.
Never mind that natural chemicals in food are thousands of times more potent than many of the additives that go in them. Never mind that we live longer, healthier lives than ever before in human history and gorge at a cornucopia that has no precedent for safety, reliability and variety.
No, modern life is evil and is slowly infecting us with pernicious toxins and parasites. Our bowels are clogged with hardened faecal matter that clings to its walls and prevents absorption of nutrients. What we need is a few days off wheat and dairy to “rest” the system and a high-priced regimen of herbal tablets and potions to flush out nasties. It all sounds so good I wish it really worked like that.
Hey, you want parasites? Like the ones so many alternative therapies say we are riddled with and can only be expunged with their product? Go back to Saxon society in medieval England where communal latrines led to human infestation with giant worms that would protrude from softer body parts like the eye at the most inopportune moments before zipping back inside their host. Toxic minerals? Anyone that lived anywhere near primitive smelting operations in the Bronze Age was sure to have elevated levels of arsenic and other nasties.
As for vitamin deficiencies from sluggish, clogged digestions, forget going back in time. Just visit Guatamala or many other Third World countries where children go blind from Vitamin A deficiency because they live on a cup of white rice a day and eat no yellow vegetables. At all.
Any suspicions of problems with digestion, gall stones or organ malfunction should be properly investigated by a qualified doctor, especially as we get older. It’s tempting to believe the hype and go for a plausible-sounding herbal detox but the reality is that you are not toxic and a trip to the doctor should identify something amiss.
I know you know someone who has shelled out lots of money and plunged their feet into a detoxifying footbath with amazing results, but that rusty-looking water was not toxins leaching out but…rust. An old conjuror’s trick.
Yes that liver “flush” of vegetable oil and citrus juice did produce blobs of green and yellow blobs in the stool but that’s just bile-stained “soap”.
No autopsy or surgical procedure has ever found hardened faecal matter clinging to colon walls and the strange lumps you produce in toilet water after detox “cures” are just fibre “casts” .
Eat more fibre, drink more water and exercise more often to feel better. Your body is an amazing machine that works very well to process waste and doesn’t benefit by a tempting but illusory detoxification.
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