Chapter 61: Choosing a Diet that Works and ‘Suffer Little Children’
Abstract: for 3,000 million years we evolved to take advantage of a natural diet, but 10,000 years ago we used our mind to alter the food supply for our benefit and we made mistakes by not fully understanding the relationship of the concepts that we used. Two successful diets of the past are examined and they show that the key elements can, through travel/transport, produce a modern diet that we evolved to eat and so reduce the incidence of the modern ‘diseases’ that inflict us increasingly in the developed world. This realization is brought out in examining the fundamental differences between the concepts of the hunter/gatherer and the farmer and shows that parents are not teaching/preparing their children properly to face the modern world because of a lack of understanding of the concepts behind modern living.
It is well known that it is difficult to get satisfactory results from dieting, so why not use the Mathematics of the Mind to look at the question of dieting to see if we can resolve the problems. Our choices are: pick a diet at random, pick a diet that appeals to us, combine all the diets, which is the mathematical idea of combining sets or, as I shall do, use first principles to see what a diet should be. This derivation of concepts might look complicated, but it is necessary to base it solidly on first principles and ‘flesh out’ the new ideas and present it as a simple explanation. The concepts are not difficult and it will be seen that the derivation will ‘align’ with other examples that have been presented in this book.
Under Survival of the Fittest, iteration powers life and ‘thought’ is an adjunct to opportunity as food supply availability determines the life-forms that are most successful and have proliferated. Thought/consciousness/creativity can be part of iteration and the increase in size of organisms led to the lensed eye that led to consciousness and an abrupt change in reality, and this, I believe occurred in the Cambrian. This iteration has been the state of our world’s life-forms for 3,000 million years and continued until about 10,000 years ago when Man used his mind/brain to change the environment to suit his own ends.
It is usually considered that 10.000 years is too short a time for our genetic make-up to have changed significantly, but I believe that the concept of hunter/gather is too distinct to the concept of the farming of 10,000 years ago and we are missing pieces of the puzzle. I believe that a different form of farming has been carried on for (say) 65 million years, especially in the primates and that did allow for a significant change to our genes, and that change is crucial to understanding our body’s nutrient requirements. I believe that the hunter/gather/farmer situation was heritable and led to a very wide-ranging diet that provided a ‘luxuriant’ supply of chemicals over a long period of time that enabled our bodies to provide increased health and that the current misapplication of concepts of diet has lead to the degenerative ‘diseases’ of today. We will return to this later.
At that point in time, 10,000 years ago, for Man, Survival of the Fittest (iteration) gave way to Survival of the Best (mind/brain, mathematics) and mathematics was developed to aid the farmer/trader that needed to record the exact quantities of produce. Concepts have been somewhat neglected and have evolved in an incomplete way. Mathematics is a concept that has blossomed, and all of the concepts of the fictional novels and of philosophy are fully developed, but the relationships between concepts has, in my opinion, been neglected and needs a mathematics of concepts, that I have called, for Man, the Mathematics of the Mind to ‘measure’ those relationships.
I also believe that ‘determination evolved a reality out of the probability of existence’ and have mentioned it many times, and CEM (mathematics of concepts/entanglement/measurement) is supported by a probability space because one of the properties of that space is that the sum of ‘something’ at every point in the space is equal to 1, and whatever CEM is, it seems, I believe, to show the three ‘faces’, above. The summation to 1, requires that measurement be necessary at each point and also between all the points (entanglement), and we are able to compare two measurement/concepts. Simply put, for a probability space of 2 points a+b=1 and that means that there are no ‘absolute’ solutions only ‘relative’ solutions.
This is, in my opinion, the definition of ‘relativity’ because, as we saw previously, in this ‘simple’ probability space, all measurement is between one point and the observer and a transformation may be necessary when we consider measurements between observers, and an example is the Lorentz transformation between two observers when the speed of light is involved. In other words, the ‘simple’ act of measuring something by an observer is ‘allowed’, and when two observers moving, or accelerating with respect to each other measure the same thing they must get the same result because there is no absolute reference point. This was shown to be true for the speed of light in a vacuum in the Michelson-Morely experiment, discussed earlier. It is only a paradox if we try to complicate matters because a+b=a+c=1 and the measurement b=c is always true, as was discussed previously for measurements made by observers b and c of the speed of light a. Notice that b and c are both measurements and observers because they are the same thing, but, if we compare b with c, we need a Lorentz transformation, as above, as in Special Relativity.
So, going back to ‘measuring relationships’, Mathematics of the Mind (mathematics of concepts) is necessary to compare two or more concepts using iteration and/or the mind/brain because there are no ‘absolutes’. We have to ‘identify’ a diet to ‘us’ and that is the hard part. It is easier to define the diet of a lion, kangaroo or Palaeolithic Man because they are part of an ‘iteration space’ where everything fits together under ‘iteration’ or Survival of the Fittest. When we changed the world 10,000 years ago, we used Survival of the Best (mind/brain, mathematics) that is incomplete because mathematics is a special case of the Mathematics of the Mind, and things are liable to go wrong if you use a special case thinking that it is the general case. The Survival of the Best (mind/brain, Mathematics of the Mind) should have been used, as we shall see.
At this point, it might simplify matters if we say that the problem is to know what diet we should eat and our genes and body have evolved to use the Palaeolithic diet, which is: small sized fruit grown naturally, a very wide variety of small sized vegetables, unprocessed small sized grains and seeds that means a high density of phytochemicals, ‘natural’ animals, both flesh and offal and no animal milk products. I used the term ‘small sized’ because development has increased the flesh of the fruit and vegetables, which decreases the density of antioxidants etc. that are mainly found in the skin to deter insects, moulds etc. from attacking the fruit and plant. The term ‘natural’ refers to the negation of the practice of feeding inappropriate diets to animals to increase fat in the meat at marketing.
I would also like to restate that fruit is produced by the tree or bush to disperse its seed in the ‘cheapest’ way possible for the plant, whereas, vegetables are that part of the plant that the plant doesn’t want eaten. In other words, fruit could be considered a second-class food. This is shown by the following, ‘servings of food that contain 100 calories each … apples 200g, bananas 120g, cherries 180g, kiwi fruit 200g, oranges 200g, pineapple 200g, strawberries 300g, tomatoes 500g, watermelon 400g. … asparagus 1500g, bell peppers 500g, broccoli 400g, carrots 400g, cauliflower 400g, corn 90g, cucumbers 800g, aubergines 500g, green beans 300g, lettuce 1000g, chinese cabbage 1000g, peas 150g.’ (The Joy of Laziness, Dr Peter Axt and Dr Michaela Axt-Gadermann, p 56)
This list shows that fruit are roughly twice as carbohydrate dense as vegetables in line with the statement above that vegetables are a better source of food, bearing in mind that both fruits and vegetables have been ‘developed’ in size etc, since the Palaeolithic. A single example that throws grains into a modern perspective is corn 90g, whereas, 5,000 years ago it was a small undeveloped seed, but now has a huge concentration of calories. Why so many calories? Because we bred it that way!
‘Corn is a wonderful example of how careful selective breeding produced characteristics that are a far cry from those of corn’s likely wild ancestor. Teosinte looks completely different from today’s cultivated corn …. Three genes, known as teosinte branched 1 (tb1), pro-lamin box binding factor (pbf), and sugary 1 (su1), are key to creating certain traits that distinguish corn from teosinte…. (tb1, for example, determines how the cobs are arranged on the corn plant, while su1 determines the mix of sugars found in the corn kernel), all seem to have been under strong selection as early as 4,400 years ago, according to a recent analysis of these genes in ancient corn remains.’ (Pandora’s Seed – The Unforseen Cost of Civilization, Spencer Wells, p 51)
Whilst on this subject of ‘developed’ grains, ‘bread 50g, cornflakes 30g, pasta 30g (uncooked), potatoes 150g, rice 30g (uncooked), rolled oats 30g (The Joy of Laziness, Dr Peter Axt and Dr Michaela Axt-Gadermann, p 57) show the problems associated with modern developed grains with their extreme nutrient density, bearing in mind that the grains in the Palaeolithic were consumed with the bran, germ and other coverings intact that added to the fibre consumed. I should repeat that we have evolved to use the chemicals that bacteria produce from the fibre that our small intestine can’t use. The importance of the colon and the use of bacteria on food fibre is apparent when the colon’s size is considered (3 to 4 foot long and the diameter of a fist).
Notice that monkeys eat a large proportion of their diet as leaves that are difficult to digest and need a large colon, but also, leaves are available at all times, whereas fruit is not, and that fact is hunter/gatherer/farming, not hunter/gatherer/animal as in grazing herds. If the leaves are over-grazed, the trees are killed, the monkeys have to move to another occupied area and that is not a heritable trait, so hunter/gatherer/farming has been with us from the first primates, some 65 million years ago (The Humans Who Went Extinct, Clive Finlayson, p 5). As soon as a fixed location of a cave, shelter, house, sleeping-tree etc enters the picture the difference between hunter/gatherer/farmer and hunter/gatherer/animal becomes apparent because it pays to keep/farm food supplies near to strategic assets.
Things have gone wrong in our civilization because we have global warming, over-population etc. as well as the modern ‘diseases’ of the heart, cancer, Alzhimer’s disease, obesity epidemic etc. and these are all linked, in my opinion. Using a ‘fundamental’ operator usually produces wide-ranging effects because that operator underlies many derivations and using a special case instead of the general case is a ‘fundamental’ error that we will see produces or contributes to the above problems.
So, using the Mathematics of (our) Mind, our little space in the galaxy produces the three Laws of Life that are in both O and P worlds, and this derivation of diets uses the second Law of Life, mainly, bearing in mind that the three laws are interrelated. The second law is our relation to our environment and can be summed up as state of mind/exercise/nutrition (MEN) and we can relate this to CEM where entanglement suggests that everything is related and MEN is similarly related. Applying this to diets, it is immediately apparent that any diet that concentrates on less than all or the total of MEN is suspect as to it usefulness and worthiness.
This restriction cuts out the vast number of diets that have been publicised over the years because they concentrate on nutrition, or they concentrate on exercise, but then there are those, like Yoga that concentrate, to some extent, on all three of MEM, but still are not ‘complete’, so let’s see what we need to do by going back to the theory of the Mathematics of the Mind.
The operator Truth can be true, false, true some of the time and false the rest of the time, and both true and false at the same time. It is in this last term (chaos) where something can be both true and false at the same time and a couple of simple examples are that water is necessary for life, but too much will kill you, similarly, a little arsenic stimulates and is used in animal feed, a little more will kill. We have to take care that the concepts that we use are, and only are, uniquely defined as many of the concepts that we use are chaotic and, at the moment, we don’t separate some concepts sufficiently and a prime case is shown below. So, we are looking within the realm of chaos for the answer to the best diet and the second Law of life is (principally): state of mind …… exercise …… nutrition (MEN).
The MEN are the major attractors (or concepts) and in Chaos Theory these attractors are ‘areas’ that cannot be reached, and indeed, they have no relevance on their own (because a+b=1) and the Mathematics of the Mind relates these concepts to the other concepts, bearing in mind that everything is related (entanglement). From CEM, every point in the probability space is linked to every other and any solution, such as above, MEN, can only be known when every ‘point’ has been considered and, of course, only an all-knowing god could do this. For mortals, as we are, the more attractors that we consider, the more accurate or relevant the answer will (probably) be. In other words, because everything is linked (CEM), every point in the universe may or may not add to the solution but must be considered for an exact answer. Effectively there is no exact answer possible to what diet we should follow and to measure a diet we are forced to the only point that we know that works as a certainty and that is the Palaeolithic diet because that was the diet we evolved with, provided that the foods, that we use, are at the same state of development.
However, in Chapter 60: Measurement of Time Dependent Concepts, Extrapolation, Variety in Food and the Nutrition Orgene it was shown that the Mid-Victorian diet, by a number of fortuitous circumstances, produced superior health that (may have) led to the formation of the British Empire. It was suggested that this diet was vastly superior to the modern diet and was attainable, whereas the Palaeolithic was difficult to emulate. Difficulties still exist with the mid-Victorian diet because more parts of animals were eaten, including offal, than are eaten today, also, modern animals are ‘feed-lotted’ to increase the fat content of the meat and change it from the healthier omega-3 of the ‘grass-fed’ to the omega-6 of the ‘corn-fed’ and modern diets contain far too much of the latter fatty acid compared to the former.
There are other attractors that are commonly considered as important to our wellbeing and with the addition of each one to our consideration, the relationships become clearer. For example: state of mind can be from pessimistic to optimistic and experiments have found that optimists live seven years longer, on average, than pessimists. State of Mind is important in combating Alzheimer’s disease because attending university, exercising the mind with puzzles etc. reduces the likelihood of getting the ‘disease’. State of mind is determined, in part by mental determination, and, as we have seen above, relates in importance with reality and existence and is crucial to keeping up exercise and nutrition regimes.
For exercise, it is often forgotten to exercise the mind/brain, from above, exercising the mind with puzzles etc. reduces the likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s disease and depression etc. Physical exercise has many ‘faces’, and I have mentioned balance exercises on one leg with eyes closed, also strength exercises with push-up as well as aerobic exercises such as walking. Remember that exercise was forced on us in the Palaeolithic and mid-Victorian times, but today, state of mind (determination) must be used. Nutrition is very important because food has changed so much that we don’t realize that our body, and in particular, our digestive system is locked into the Palaeolithic and is having difficulty coping with ‘modern’ foods. Many of the components in the body are in trouble with heart ‘disease’, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and so on, because, in my opinion, the components in our body are being given food that is outside of their capabilities to use effectively.
Some of the concepts mentioned above could be classed as second level attractors and we could go further with vitamin D from sunlight is a combination of exercise (being in the sun) and a necessity in nutrition and state of mind because we need to supplement it in many of the colder areas and particularly for those people with darker skin colour, or, consciously consider our time in the sun, its strength as an ultra-violet source, time of year etc. Mushrooms are also a significant source when they are field (in the sun) grown, and this surprising fact possibly relates to the fact that we evolved from fungi!
‘Further studies showed that even sunbathing can slightly lower your blood pressure. This effect is much more noticeable in people with high blood pressure. In an experiment, sunbathing lowered their blood pressure by more than twice as much as it did in people with normal blood pressure. The effect lasted for almost a week. The blood-pressure-lowering effect is probably due to the mild warmth of the sun; blood vessels expand and pressure drops. The influence of the sun may also be a factor in the production of as-yet undetected blood-pressure lowering agents.’ (p 117)
These two previous paragraphs contrast the approach of two different types of diet and lifestyle suggestions that differ in the importance of what could be called the ‘less relevant’ attractors. The book, The Vitamin D Cure by James Dowd and Dianne Stafford claims that many of the modern ‘diseases’ can be attributed to low levels of vitamin D in the body brought about by modern lifestyles. ‘The big advantage of the Vitamin D Cure eating plan is that it takes the DASH and Mediterranean diets one step farther …. Why not eliminate dairy and grains from the DASH and Mediterranean diets and replace them with vitamin D, more lean meat (especially dark-meat fish), and more green produce? (The Vitamin D Cure by James Dowd and Dianne Stafford, p127)
Another aspect is shown by The Plant-Powered Diet by Sharon Palmer with more emphasis on the phytochemicals that are missing from modern diets caused by breeding larger fruits and vegetables and the lack of variety in modern diets. ‘The ground squirrels would clip down the tender shoots of my vegetable plants like a lawn mower, but they left one section of my garden completely untouched: the herb garden. …. My herbs were destined for survival. And when humans eat these herbs, it looks like we can gain protective benefits of our own. At the heart of the Indian diet is a veritable medicine chest of colorful, powerful herbs and spices, many of which have proven health benefits, including aniseed, bay leaf, black pepper, cardamom, chillies, cinnamon, clove, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, fenugreek, garlic, ginger, mango powder, mint, mustard, nutmeg, onion seeds, parsley, poppy seeds, saffron, sesame seeds, tamarind, and turmeric. (The Plant-Powered Diet, Sharon Palmer, p 185)
‘Herbs and spices are not just about antioxidants; they contain other health properties, including anti-inflammatory compounds that can protect against the development of chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer. Some spices and herbs provide similar effects as anti-inflammatory drugs, without any side effects…. What’s even more fascinating is that the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects of herbs and spices act synergistically; the benefits are magnified with the more varieties you throw into the mix.’ (p 186) This sentence is in line with the Palaeolithic ‘farming’ methods described later.
The Mathematics of the Mind has shown that the second Law of Life requires the relationship of state of mind, exercise and nutrition (MEN), but also, that everything is interrelated which leads to the requirement to consider other secondary, tertiary etc. relationships. Even complete books, as shown above, are valuable, but they still accentuate different aspects of the total picture and, I think that we have to admit that it may be too much for the mind/brain to control and we should eat and behave as they did in the Palaeolithic times. However, this is impossible in a modern society, so, perhaps the mid-Victorian exercise and nutrition would suffice, or is there a better way using the same basis?
I said at the beginning of the chapter that I would use the Mathematics of the Mind, so the most recent time that humans operated under iteration is Survival of the Fittest in the Palaeolithic Era. Animals graze, but the seventh, eighth and ninth senses, that I have mentioned previously move the animals to somewhat vary their diet in line with their requirements, but they don’t conserve or ‘farm’ their environment, they just move on. When humans lived in caves, shelters etc. in the Palaeolithic, the hunter/gatherers would have ‘farmed’ their environment in a synergistic manner to obtain the largest production from an area and the plants benefited from being farmed. Monkeys have family territory that they defend and naturally any part that they don’t utilize is taken over by offspring or others. The basic concept is ‘use it or lose it’ and denuding the closest food sources is not logical because the food sources closest to your cave, shelter etc. are your fallback supplies if rivals reduce your territory.
Gatherers broke off excess growth from clumps of vegetables to give the remainder room to grow, and those trimmings became the gatherers’ food and, as has been mentioned earlier, it behoved them to eat the widest possible diet to maintain stocks of plants for the future. This variety of vegetables in the diet links back to the synergy of the herbs and spices mentioned above, and our bodies were ‘invited’ by this method of farming to develop uses for this plethora of chemicals for our internal defences and wellbeing.
At this point, I have to emphasise two attractors that are of ‘key’ importance, or pivotal to the derivation. Firstly, a major cause of the mid-Victorian diet was the rise in rapid transport by the growth of railways and secondly, the ‘farming’ by the gatherers preceded, but was different to the ‘farming’ by the Neolithic Natufian people. This is an attractor (farming) that should be separated into two completely different contexts that have had radically different effects on our bodies and not realizing the distinction is where we went wrong. To belabour the point, the Obesity Epidemic hinges on the modern interpretations of ‘farming’, as stressed above, and is completely different to the Palaeolithic farming. The very fact of modern obesity and over-weightedness shows that a problem exists.
The ‘gatherer’ farming invited our bodies to use a huge range of phytochemicals because the anti-death orgene was to ‘store’, in the ground, future supplies of vegetables by growing the natural ‘stands’, and that requirement produced an extremely wide variety of foods. To expand this important concept, if it was edible, eat it, by ‘farming’ to keep it growing strongly because it was ‘native’ to that micro-climate and if the climate changed, that plant might be necessary to future tribal survival. It has been mentioned previously, that (some of) the ‘edge dwellers’ of an environment become dominant when the environment changed and acting as an ‘edge dweller’ is heritable (with a little luck). Modern farming methods tend to reduce the number of varieties to the extreme of ‘monoculture’.
‘The Natufians at Abu Hureyra consumed around 150 different plants, gathered (along with wheat) from the rich hills of the northern Fertile Crescent, but by the time domestication was complete, a few thousand years later, their diet had dropped to only eight species, and wheat was by far the most important dietary component. Today, the Big Three cereals account for around 90 percent of grain species under cultivation’. (Pandora’s Seed, Spencer Wells, p 51) This second half of the quotation defines the ‘farmer’ farming and the seeking of the ‘efficiencies’ of monoculture and shows the pivotal concept change that sent us along the wrong path. In other words, an extremely wide variety of foods was forced on us by the living conditions of the time versus the ‘convenience’ foods selected by our minds for reasons of convenience to us (iteration versus the mind/brain).
This is still the problem today and is responsible for the obesity problem and the modern ‘diseases, in my opinion. This concept of laziness/convenience/death orgene (LCD) is, as has been mentioned previously, necessary for evolution (of long-lived species) to be successful and requires that the old die in preference to the young. I maintain that older members, with the correct frame of mind, are far more able to survive than the younger members, but birth defects limit the usefulness of older females, and they must be removed, as they are, with the death orgene.
We say it all the time, ‘there has to be an easier way to do this’ and LCD has fuelled technology! In other words, the requirement of the death orgene through evolution is the power-house that is ‘pushing’ technology! This is a startling thought that technology has come about, not only by its usefulness, but through one of the most fundamental non-logical drivers of the success of our evolution!
Farming is considered a ‘breakthrough’ that allowed greater population growth by increasing the population density by growing foods that led to a second class diet and the average height fell by about 4 inches during the Natufian people’s transition. Other important attractors have followed us out of the hunter/gatherer times that are genetic and have contributed to the problem. Our diet is constrained by modern times and there seems to be a desire for more cereals, salt and meat in the diet. This is hardly surprising because carbohydrates, fat and salt are in short supply in the wild and tend to become (almost) an addiction if they are available. Small wonder that packaged ‘snacks’ are built around this formula and include all the potato ‘crisps’, cakes, biscuits, pre-packaged meals, take-aways etc.
This leads us to having to grasp the concept of the modern diet versus a traditional diet by ‘acid excess simply means you’re not getting enough potassium and magnesium in the form of fruits and vegetables, you’re consuming far too many acid-producing foods, or both. Make some moves to fix this problem because it’s important to stop what’s pulling potassium, magnesium, and calcium from your muscles and bones, to balance your body chemistry.’ (The Vitamin D Cure, James Dowd and Dianne Stafford, p 60) This quotation bears re-reading because it suggests that we are changing our basic body chemistry by our diet! This is a serious state of affairs and is way outside the (design) parameters of the components of the body! Is it any wonder that we are ‘haunted’ by modern degenerative illnesses?
It appears that fruit and vegetables have a value of 3 per serving and are alkaline, whilst seeds (cereals 8, bread 2, pasta 7, beans 4, nuts 7), meat/fish 9, and cheese 20 are all acid. (p 61) It appears that one should endeavour to keep ones diet alkaline to retain the chemicals, above, and in Palaeolithic times this would be easier as there were less cereals and no bread, pasta and cheese. Of course it was easier because we evolved to eat the foods that were available! Further, if salt (sodium chloride) or saturated fat is consumed, subtract 3 points from the alkaline total for each. Additionally, in Palaeolithic times, food was cooked in skins heated by adding hot rocks from the fire that carried wood ash into the meal and this process increased the consumption of the minerals potassium, magnesium and calcium. Fire presented a lot of benefits to humans, as mentioned earlier, and has been used for something like 400,000 years and has led to genetic changes, such as teeth/jaw size reduction.
It is not difficult, in light of the above to see the movement from potassium and magnesium to sodium (salt) as transport made it cheaply available, cereals, meat and cheese replaced vegetables, the infectious diseases were replaced by the degenerative ‘diseases’, the components of the body are increasingly unable to cope with the foods that we eat, heights drastically fell with the advent of farming and the mid-Victorian transport and milling of grain so that the minimum height for the British army was reduced to 5 foot, vegetables and fruit have been ‘developed’ to contain less phytochemical density and insecticides etc. also reduced the plant’s production of these chemicals as well (because there were no insect attacks) and the loss of variety of produce is restricting the body’s ability to function. Is it any wonder that the majority of the developed world is over-weight and obese and medical procedures are costing more?
It is for the reader to use their mind/brain to decide on the major attractors of MEN, and then the secondary, tertiary etc. attractors because everything is related and we can’t go back (Rule of Life), but with a little thought, we can go close to the Palaeolithic diet. This has been mentioned before, as has the spur that the death orgene can be reset to allow us to live longer. Logically, the determination to pursue the Best is the replacement of determination to survive.
Travel/transport appears to present a ‘core’ or ‘pointer’ that might best explain a complicated situation, and the Mathematics of the Mind allows comparisons and our mind/brain offers a solution. The hunter/gatherers travelled regularly over a large area tending the natural plants and culling excess plants and animals, and that necessitated using a wide-ranging diet (150 varieties, above) and getting exercise. That wide diet is the food/fuel/maintenance that our genes used to keep the body healthy and shows that food is for both fuel and maintenance, and so important is this concept, yet it tends to be ignored, that I will call food as food/fuel/maintenance (FFM) as I have done with other multi-faceted concepts.
The Natufian farmer settled and accepted a poorer diet and the average height decreased by 4 inches. The mid-Victorian era used the new trains to transport FFM from the country farms to the towns and the health and well-being of people became so high that it (may have) spurred the creation of the British Empire. Travel/transport (from around the world) brought processed and sweetened food from the colonies in other countries and within thirty years the minimum height for the British army had to be reduced by 6 inches.
The answer to the best diet for us today has been given earlier in this book, but theories have to be able to withstand scrutiny and the best way is to show that the answer is arrived at by different methods in different derivations. That is the core of the Mathematics of the Mind that no one, except a god, can know the ‘correct’ answer, but as everything is linked together (CEM), we should be able to get a ‘reasonable’ answer by coming through different derivations.
To this end, I would like to re-visit the acid/alkaline diet, above, and ‘”What can I eat?” …. The two simple rules are:
- Eat mostly from two food groups: lean meat and fresh produce.
- Consume three times as much fresh produce as lean meat by weight.’ (The Vitamin D Cure, James E. Dowd and Dianne Stafford, p 62)
The problem that I have with these rules is that they are too simple and skewed to an animalistic livelihood of gathering without the humanistic ‘farming’ of storing dried mushrooms, seeds, dried fruits, dried meat and fish, nuts etc.
‘A typical modern diet might be ‘breakfast: cereal and toast with coffee … lunch: sandwich (two slices of bread, lunch meat, cheese) and a diet drink … dinner: lasagna (meat, cheese, pasta), salad, and bread with a diet drink’ (p 61) and that gave a total acid excess of 59, which is a long way from <0. When I considered my usual diet, and taking vegetable servings as fresh and uncooked (‘the veggie group encompasses all kinds of fresh or frozen vegetables (p 58)), the score became:
Nuts and seeds (1), mixed cereals (2), noodle snack and chocolate (2), cheese (5) and legumes such as peas and beans (2), giving an acid total of 12. The total for fruit and vegetables was also 12, alkaline and that meant that there was balance and the diet is, I believe, healthier with nuts, seeds and legumes replacing meat. Notice some ‘slack’ for ‘treats’.
So, the ‘optimum’ diet is, I believe, to use travel/transport to bring fresh produce (FFM) into the towns, as in the mid-Victorian times and also to use the wide range of foods from around the world in the form of seeds, dried fruits, frozen fruits and vegetables, nuts, dried herbs, spices etc. I suggest 60 plus varieties be eaten daily including small quantities of a wide range of herbs and spices as an antioxidant mix sprinkled over the food instead of, and in the same way as salt and pepper are commonly used, though in larger quantities, to taste.
If these foods are available, on the kitchen counter, our mind/brain has the capacity to influence the mix of foods that we eat through the sixth, seventh and eighth (state of mind) senses. I use some from every container and my mind/brain determines how much of each is added to the blender depending on cost and ‘whatever’. The ‘whatever’ is your body’s choice based on the requirements of YOUR mind/body and is part of MEN. I think that this method is the closest that we can come to our personal dietary requirements.
This paragraph opens the way into the question of allergies, and as the mind/brain is plastic, and can change, it seems sensible that the body is also plastic in the immune system, and can change. Reports are coming through that allergies are being overcome by increasing (say) peanuts in the diet very gradually on a daily basis, and that is retraining the body to not react to peanuts. Possibly it is the restricted diets of today, but if tiny quantities of a wide range of the common foods are consumed every day, the body should tolerate them as in the reports that we are hearing about. This procedure aligns with the methods suggested above, that our body requires the knowledge of the variety of phytochemicals that the immune system will have to deal with and these will be presented to the body during the first years of life as FFM (food/fuel/maintenance) is gathered.
As an additional thought, animal products are a second rate food because the phytochemicals have been used to make the meat and are not available for a second round of digestion and body maintenance. Also, ‘the last Neanderthals of 28-24 thousand years ago were eating the same range of foods as their predecessors had been 100 thousand years earlier’ (The Humans Who Went Extinct, Clive Finlayson, p 152)
Finally, I believe that the above allows us to add allergies to the modern ‘diseases’ caused by a lack of MEN and it is the lack of awareness that the concepts of hunter/gather/animal, hunter/gatherer/farmer and farmer produce such different outcomes, but then, these are fundamental concepts and is another example of the lack of appreciation of the relation between concepts and is the reason why the Mathematics of the Mind is so important.
Now if we assume that our bodies expect the hunter/gather/farmer stream of FFM (food/fuel/maintenance), it is apparent that the vital missing ingredient in modern life, that has been caused by the (necessarily) inbred/inherent LCD (laziness/convenience/death orgene) that has produced the shift from the Mid-Victorian infections to the modern degenerative ‘diseases’ are (principally) caused by lifestyle. Further, it is bad enough that people are affecting and shortening their own lives, but they are affecting their children’s lives by not giving them the varieties of foods that they will encounter throughout life and so burdening them with allergies.
The third Law of Life is almost universal and it requires the formation of families to prepare children to face the world by giving them the best possible preparation for life outside the family and modern parents are not training their children’s bodies to recognise the foods that they will encounter throughout life. Small wonder that they are getting allergies and other problems! This law is fundamental to most of the higher organisms! Just as the colon is part of the Palaeolithic lifestyle that is not used as much as it should be (for consuming fibre), in the modern diet, so the body is set in the Palaeolithic and (probably) requires that children be introduced to the family’s expected fruit and vegetable foods in the first year or so.
In conclusion, LCD (laziness/convenience/death orgene) was necessary for evolution to proceed in the longer-lived species, and we know how to re-set it by using MEN (state of mind/exercise/nutrition), but unless we do re-set it, we, and our children will suffer the resulting modern degenerative ‘diseases’. There is a simple solution, as given above, and the answer is in the concepts that surround us, and in LCD, we see it as necessary (iterationally) but, with the proper mathematics of concepts, it can be turned to our advantage and we can strive for the Best.
darrylpenney 