It’s no secret that the health in America is declining, rapidly. And the food we consume daily plays a huge role in determining health outcomes. So, what did our great-grandparents eat during a time when the rates of chronic disease development were 700% lower and obesity was almost nonexistent?
Let’s dive in! And explore dietary trends from vintage cookbooks which can help reduce food fear and increase food awareness so that you can make more empowered dietary decisions that align with your intuition.
Dr. Mercola Biothin Pr...
Buy New $28.87 ($0.96 / Count)
(as of 03:27 UTC - Details)
Reclaiming Our Lost Food Culture
Now, more than ever, there seems to be so much confusion as to what we should eat — what food is “good,” what food is “bad.” With such a large reliance on processed food and massive marketing dollars spent by large food companies, we’ve lost touch with food culture. In fact, we don’t have food culture.
People are truly confused as to how we should eat, and how to form meals. And with chronic diseases, obesity, and autoimmunity on the rise, one thing is clear: what we are doing now isn’t working. The chronic disease prevalence in the 1930s was 7.5%.1 Today, 60% of the population has one or more chronic disease.2
This is a 700% increase. A new 2022 study found that less than 10% of Americans have good metabolic health.3 And data from the CDC in 2018 reported that 42.4% of Americans are considered obese.4 Imagine what this number is in 2022!
And while science and technology are improving, America is the only developed nation with a *declining* healthy life expectancy and total life expectancy!5 And this data is before COVID-19.
Total life expectancy (TLE) is how long people within a population are expected to live. Healthy life expectancy (HLE) measures how long people within a population are expected to live without disease or disability. For example — someone lives disease free for 65 years, then develops heart disease at 65 and passes 10 years later. HLE = 65 and total life expectancy (TLE) = 75.
TLE measures how long we can keep sick people alive and incentivizes disease management. HLE directly relates to the number of healthy and happy years and incentivizes disease prevention.
You can analyze the following data6 from the World Health Organization by comparing the TLE or HLE from previous years in the U.S. The TLE in 2015 was 78.56 and in 2019 it decreased to 78.5. The HLE in 2010 was 66.7, which declined to 66.6 in 2015, and declined again to 66.1 in 2019. With a declining TLE and HLE and obesity on the rise, it’s time to admit we are doing something wrong.
But we didn’t always have such widespread chronic health problems …
How did we get to the point where 60% of the population has one or more chronic disease and only 12% of the population is metabolically healthy?7 Well, we are certainly a little less active, and there are a lot more environmental toxins, that’s for sure.
Herbal Roots Ginger Su...
Buy New $26.99 ($0.45 / Count)
(as of 01:12 UTC - Details)
But what we eat every single day plays a HUGE role in determining health and metabolic outcomes. So, let’s go back in time a bit to see what people were eating in a time when chronic diseases were not as widespread to gain some insight to the type of food that can support health. How can we do this? By analyzing vintage cookbooks.
Over the last few months, I have been moderately obsessed with reading old fashioned cookbooks from the 1700-1900 era. These cookbooks provide a great picture as to how families ate at the time. And how much food culture they had, that was passed down from generation to generation.
The nutritional wisdom continues to fascinate me as I learn more about cultural food preparation. So, let’s dive into 10 trends I have gathered comparing these cookbooks to how most people eat today. (and what “mainstream” claims as “healthy.”)
Trend No. 1: They Ate the Whole Animal
Meaning, nose to tail eating was just a normal part of everyday life. They didn’t just eat skeletal muscle cuts like chicken breast, ribeyes and tenderloins like so many do today. No, nothing went to waste so they ate pretty much every cut on the animal and used the bones, tendons, and other collagenous parts to make broth, soups and stews.
The result was not only just less waste, but also a wider nutrient intake, and more balanced amino acids. Example recipes from “The Southern cookbook of fine old recipes,” 1935.
Trend No. 2: They Ate Meat and Saturated Fat
Check out a few pages from the Table of Contents from “The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying the Table” from 1787. They did not exclusively eat meat, but the consumption of meat was considered a mark of a good diet, and its complete absence was rare (consuming low amounts was in the case of an extreme poverty diet).8
They did NOT fear saturated fat like mainstream still tells us to do. In fact, recent re-evaluations of the data used by Kellogg to demonize saturated fat in the 1900s are showing a different picture. Some researchers have instead demonstrated that “[s]aturated fats from animal sources [are] inversely correlated with the prevalence of NCDs [non communicable diseases].”9
As illustrated in the paper, “Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1967-73)”, published 2016,10 We are eating a lot more vegetable oils, and less animal fats relative to the early 1900s, and yet our health is declining:
“Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes.
Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid.”
Was it really the meat that caused health issues? No. High PUFA diets lower metabolic rates and hinder glucose metabolism. Our great-grandparents didn’t eat super high fat diets, but the fat they did consume was rich in saturated fat. Animal fat consumption went down, while vegetable oil and PUFA-rich fat consumption went up.11
