午夜福利1000集合

FOOD fads come and go. One minute, kale smoothies are the elixir to everything that ails you, the next it is ultra-low-carb lard and offal. But what if the real solution was far more traditional? Meet the latest trend: the 鈥渁ncestral diet鈥�.

Proponents of the diet say research shows that people have genetic adaptations 鈥� such as lactose tolerance 鈥� to what would have been their traditional diets. Therefore, a personalised diet, based on what our families ate in centuries past, could be the secret to good health.

All modern health conditions, they say, can be attributed to the mismatch between our current diets and our genes. For example, it is claimed that Asia has gone from one of the lowest rates of chronic disease to the highest in just one generation, due to increasingly Westernised diets.

So the recipe for a long and healthy life is simple: we just need to look at historical cookbooks for what our genetic ancestors ate 500 years ago. Definitions vary, but the general idea is that Europeans should eat a wheat-based diet with plenty of dairy, whereas Asians should have a rice-based diet, rich in vegetables and tiny amounts of protein like fish sauce.

As an ethnobotanist, I am fascinated by traditional diets, but I must admit I would find this advice hard to follow. Being half-Bornean and half-Welsh, my ancestral diet is rather harder to pinpoint. Following this advice would mean a diet that blends, I guess, rice and wheat as a primary energy source, with probably an awful lot of millet and sago palm.

Protein and fats would probably come from a significant dairy and beef component, but also bush meat like pangolins and bats 鈥� which my Malaysian family ate just two generations ago 鈥� and if we go back another century or two in Borneo, possibly a bit of human as well. This may sound facetious, but it can be the reality of trying to apply these principles.

Putting aside the questionable ethics of eating pangolins or people, nutritionally these diets also aren鈥檛 a great idea. Although these are extreme examples, the diets of people in 16th-century Wales probably aren鈥檛 to be envied either. My family were likely to have lived lives of abject poverty characterised by frequent periods of famine. Oh, and that advice of just looking at old cookbooks doesn鈥檛 help much when you discover they were essentially all written for the 16th-century鈥檚 super rich. It would be like basing a typical 21st-century diet on a menu found on a private jet.

鈥淧utting aside the ethics of eating pangolins or people, nutritionally these diets also aren鈥檛 a great idea鈥�

Another problematic aspect of this advice is that it is predicated on the modern assumption that the lack of obesity and diet-related degenerative diseases of the past automatically means we were once much healthier. By almost any objective measure, we weren鈥檛.

It is true there is now a higher age-adjusted mortality from cardiovascular disease in much of Asia reductions in malnutrition on Earth in the region. In 1961, East Asia had the lowest per capita calorie availability of anywhere on the planet, which has subsequently rocketed more than three-fold in a few short decades, resulting in an 80 per cent reduction in nutrient deficiencies would take a slightly higher risk of heart disease over lifelong nutrient deficiency any day.

Another problematic pillar on which this movement rests is the idea that humans have perfectly adapted to their traditional food sources. Although there is good evidence that certain populations, such as the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, have evolved the ability to better digest lactose because of the selective pressure of a long history of dairy consumption .

Research into the plaque build-up on teeth has demonstrated, for example, that the dairy-rich diet of Mongolia can be traced back at least 3000 years despite 95 per cent of Mongolians still being lactose intolerant of certain food types, far more than they do their value to human nutrition.

For me, the trickiest thing about this nutritional approach is that it requires that people can be neatly labelled in boxes and assigned an 鈥渋deal鈥� way of eating on that basis. The idea that you can generalise the 鈥渢ypical鈥� diet of a single country, let alone an entire incredibly diverse continent like Europe or Asia, to a small set of prescriptive rules inevitably means one falls back on unhelpful stereotypes.

While the research into genetic adaptations to diet is to me endlessly fascinating, translating this into a simple set of dietary rules is fraught with difficulty. Not least because, as most of us are really genetic mishmashes, like me, it seems that the exceptions might just be more common than the rules.