Agriculture Is Bad for You

Modern agriculture is having a tough time, particularly in Europe. "Mad cow" disease, foot-and-mouth disease and fears over still-unspecified health effects from eating hormone-injected cattle or genetically engineered crops have all conspired to undermine the long accepted notion that "right off the farm" is synonymous with "good for you."

But what if the whole enterprise of agriculture, which first emerged 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, turns out to be deleterious to human health? At first the idea seems absurd. After all, when inhabitants of what is now southeastern Turkey began cultivating naturally occurring einkorn wheat — one of several theories for where and how agriculture began — they were laying the foundation for what would become the first permanent human settlements, and thus for levels of social organization unknown in hunter-gatherer societies. But at the same time, say advocates of the "Paleolithic diet," agriculture launched humankind into essentially unnatural dietary habits, for which millions of years of evolution had not prepared us.

We're not talking about that bloated feeling. According to Staffan Lindeberg, a Swedish physician and scholar of evolutionary nutrition, ailments ranging from heart disease and diabetes to atherosclerosis, osteoporosis and rickets "can probably to a large extent be prevented by diets resembling those of hunter-gatherers." In other words, we should eat more like our ancient ancestors: fruit, fish and lots of lean meat. Lindeberg contends that a typical European gets at least 70% of his or her calories from foods that were practically unavailable during human evolution: milk products, most oils, refined sugar, processed foods like margarine, and cereals. Those foods, he says, are low in minerals, vitamins and soluble fiber, but high in fat and salt. "Eating more protein would benefit many overweight Europeans," says Lindeberg.

Proselytizers of the Paleolithic believe the modern European diet relies too heavily on grain-based foods, whether wholewheat bread and handmade pasta or pretzels and beer. Loren Cordain, a professor of exercise physiology at Colorado State University, thinks the widely accepted notion that carbohydrates are the foundation of a healthy diet leaves people short of nutrients and vitamins better provided through vegetables, fruit and meat. How much meat pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers consumed no doubt varied with its availability. Cordain contends that studies of extant hunter-gatherer societies show a mean caloric intake of two-thirds animal and one-third plant.

Those who want to eat like the ancients can go onto the Web and download hundreds of "grain-free, bean-free, potato-free, dairy-free and sugar-free" recipes from PaleoFood.com. More adventurous eaters can experiment with recipes that aim to make locusts and mealworms palatable. Beyond that, California dietary guru Aajonus Vonderplanitz believes that the human body is best served by ingesting raw food — including raw meat. We took our wrong turn, it seems, with the taming of fire.

No matter how rigorously individuals may embrace the idea of eating like a cave-dweller, it is clearly not a solution that can be applied on a broad scale. "It's not like there's a mammoth behind every lamppost these days," says Johanna Dwyer, professor of medicine and nutrition at Tufts University in Boston. Indeed, the relative scarcity of game may have been one of the factors that encouraged some hunter-gatherers to take up tilling and harvesting. If the cost of that adaptation shows up in health problems, its benefits are even more apparent. Through agriculture humankind has flourished, for better or worse, by the purest measure of evolutionary success: sheer numbers.