SUNDAY PALEO / April 15, 2011

Review: In Search of the Perfect Human Diet

On Memorial day 1978, I dropped dead.

Thus starts the new documentary, In Search of the Perfect Human Diet, by producer CJ Hunt. At 24 years of age, Hunt had suffered a heart attack while running track. On discharge following a 10-day hospitalization, he was given the following advice: “Don’t walk up stairs. Don’t go anywhere without someone that knows CPR. You have over a 50% chance of dying in the next two years.”

Deeply shaken, CJ began a “personal quest for optimal health.” Over the subsequent years, in pursuit of the best possible health, he “experimented with a wide variety of eating methods, cleansing fasts, and dietary philosophies.” A cardiac defibrillator, implanted at the age of 46 to restart his heart should it stop working, became a constant reminder of his mortality and triggered “a 10 years journey to find the perfect human diet.”

At the beginning of his quest, Hunt recalled his parent’s advice (advice we could all use at various times in life):

1. “Do your homework.”
2. “Be willing to look past conventional wisdom.”
3. “Don’t be afraid to go back and start at the beginning and see where it leads you.”

With bags packed, Hunt set out to interview nutritional experts throughout the world, many who are “flying below the radar of conventional dietary thinking.”

In an interview of Professor Karen Oday, Hunt learns of a small, yet classic, study with 10 Australian aborigines who, as young adults, had moved into towns and eventually developed type 2 diabetes. Each was asked each if they would consider living in the bush for 7 weeks and forage for their own food. All agreed. After just 7 weeks, their insulin and glucose metabolism returned to normal! Furthermore, an assessment of their activity level, surprisingly, was found to have been somewhat less in the bush. (This finding supports the concept that hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than people in modern cultures.)

Jay Wortman, MD discusses the nutritional insights gained while helping the First Nations people of Canada reclaim their health by returning to their traditional diet. Michael R. Eades, MD emphasizes the importance of protein in the human diet.

Science journalist Garry Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat, provides a historical perspective on missteps that have led the current increase in obesity and chronic diseases. He explains how the demonization of dietary fats led to a marked increased in the consumption of refined carbohydrates, an underlying factor in many modern preventable diseases. Andrew Weil, MD, founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, reinforces this point:

Fat does not make us fat. What is driving the obesity epidemic in this country is the very high glycemic load carbohydrate foods which have been technically manipulated.

Adele Hite, MPH, MAT, Executive Director of the Healthy Nation Coalition, discusses the origin of the USDA food pyramid:

From the start, our dietary recommendations have been based as much on politics as on science.

Hunt then travels to Colorado State University to interview Professor Loren Cordain, “America’s leading expert on evolutionary nutrition.” Cordain relates how he developed an interest in Paleolithic nutrition after a reading the “classic article” by Dr. S. Boyd Eaton, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985.

Dr. Cordain then takes Hunt on the CSU football field to provide “a sense of scale” to human dietary evolution. Beginning on one end of the field (viewed as 2 million years ago), both slowly walk down the field as Cordain points out the time periods of various dietary changes and finally reaches the development of processed foods beginning around 1900 to the present.  This final period represents a miniscule portion of the entire evolutionary timeframe: “the last 1/5 of the last inch” of the hundred-yard field. Frankly, an astoundingly small period of time; so brief, it exposes the typical modern diet as an experiment, one whose outcome we are now beginning to comprehend.

This is a good place to pause the video. Get up and walk around. Get a Paleo snack and come back soon for the rest of the story.