Natural Eating
Before beginning a natural diet, please carefully read the Introduction section of the HumanaNatura natural health program and be sure to consult with your health care provider.
After our extended exploration of natural health and our natural human past in the previous two sections of the program, this next section will be much more modest in scope and much more practical in focus.
But this section of the program is no less important than the previous two, in terms of helping you to understand your potential for improved natural health and laying the essential foundation for progressive well-being and natural harmony in your life. In fact, in many ways, the section is more important – since it involves a critical first validation of HumanaNatura’s new theory of our natural health in practice.
To begin to rediscover our natural health, and to physically and personally cross the threshold into new conditions of more natural and vital modes of life in modern times, we must first, simply and however humbly, begin to eat naturally and optimally. As you will learn and observe directly as you begin Natural Eating, this modest but essential science-based step toward our natural health brings changes to our life can be far-reaching and even life-changing.
The idea that our diet is critically important to our health is of course not new. Other than breathing, our daily patterns of eating are perhaps our most direct and important physical connection to the natural world around us. When we eat, we bring specific compounds from the world into our bodies, physical compounds that can either enhance or diminish our health.
Because the relationship between what we eat and our realized levels of health is so significant, gaining control of and then optimizing our diet is viewed by HumanaNatura as a crucial first step, both to restoring our personal health and engendering a more natural and health-based approach to life overall. Since the importance of our diet to our health is often an intuitive notion for us, perhaps this proposition is not a surprise. In practice, however, most of us greatly under-appreciate just how strong this link is – with even modest departures from our natural diet bringing significant health and fitness impacts.
What is new and different in the HumanaNatura program is our approach to Natural Eating. This approach is based on the ideas from our preceding discussions of human living conditions, during and after our life in wild nature, and the new scientific understanding of our natural health needs emerging in our time.
In the HumanaNatura system, the technique of Natural Eating involves both using science to restore our ancient hunter-gatherer diet and then to take new steps to optimize this natural and essential general way of human eating. This dual use of science, as we have suggested before, underlies all of HumanaNatura’s natural health techniques.
Learning to eat naturally
In this section of the program, we will summarize the key features of a natural human diet, as well as important considerations from modern nutritional science to optimize this general way of eating. When you are done the section, you will be ready to begin eating more naturally and far more optimally, and you should expect to realize near immediate health benefits from this altered approach.
On this last point, we would like to underscore that Natural Eating is more than about consistency with abstract theory. This change in our daily eating patterns will quickly and quite visibly work to restore and renew our natural health and fitness, even as it begins to validate the scientific ideas and points discussed in the earlier sections of the program. Importantly, we would add that the HumanaNatura diet is intended as a lifelong approach to eating for people of all ages – except infants, of course, whose natural diet is human breast milk – and that it enhances our health only as long and to the degree we maintain it.
As we begin to explain our natural and optimal diet, you may well immediately call to mind our earlier discussion of the way we are frequently bombarded with various prescriptions for our health and lifestyle today, seemingly from an increasing number and ever greater variety of sources. These often forceful and compelling sources of dietary guidance are widespread and may have influenced you in the past. They range from governmental and health organizations to commercial enterprises, and from media personalities to religious institutions.
What almost all of these sources of nutritional information have in common is a basic misunderstanding or under-appreciation of natural health, including the essential natural origins of human health. These many sources therefore tend to begin to task of improved nutrition imprecisely or hamstrung, and thus often simply perpetuate unsupported ideas or outdated stereotypes about what it means for us to eat naturally and optimally as human beings.
Each of us could spend a lifetime experimenting with the many diet programs and nutritional supplements available to us today in the developed world. Some people of course do just this, at great personal expense and often without ever achieving an optimal diet or reaching new and truly breakthrough levels of personal health. The subject of correct eating thus can be a frustrating and confusing topic and, as a result, many people simply give up trying to eat optimally, as essential as we know this is to our natural health.
In giving up hope of achieving an optimal diet, however, we consciously or unconsciously resign ourselves to much lower levels of personal health and well-being, throughout our lives, and equally allow an unhealthy sense of defeat or cynicism to become part of our cognitive patterns and personal identity. In the HumanaNatura system, optimal eating is viewed as critical to our health and its natural promotion, serving both to validate the emerging health principles of modern science and to move us physiologically and emotionally toward the vitality and progressivity that is the natural hallmark of healthy human life.
Ironically, and sadly for those of us who give up on our quest healthy eating, an optimal human diet is quite simply and easily achieved, and enjoyably practiced throughout our lives, once we understand and can begin from the new scientific ideas we have introduced regarding human life in nature.
A delicious and fact-based diet
HumanaNatura’s method for breaking through the confusion that so many people experience about the specifics of a natural and optimal diet is to step back and begin by reframing the question of a healthy diet in a new and more fact-based way.
After all, what is the source of our health? As we have discussed at length already, it is nature and natural evolution. Health is a natural state of readiness or adaptiveness, an organic harmony resulting from the long process of evolving life in specific niches in wild nature. Health is created through natural selection and the evolutionary mechanisms we have discussed. Human beings, and all other living organisms, are shaped by natural forces over vast periods of time to be healthy within our natural niche.
In thinking about an optimal human diet, then, we should expect those foods that are natural to our long evolutionary lineage to be the ones most apt to promote our health. On the other hand, we should anticipate that foods which were not part of our human patterns of eating in wild nature to be less likely to promote our health, and perhaps even apt to diminish our natural fitness and vitality. As a test of this idea, we should notice significant changes in our personal health as we move toward or away from this natural human eating pattern.
Looking at our diet today through the lens of our natural history is not a perfect or absolute approach to understanding optimal human eating. In fact, scientific investigation has already discovered ways of improving on or adjusting the average diet we once had in wild nature for still better health. But the general approach proves a far more powerful starting point than other strategies for achieving more optimal and health-enhancing eating patterns, and a strong foundation from which to assimilate important recommendations from modern nutritional research.
As you will quickly learn in practice, HumanaNatura’s simple, science-based technique of Natural Eating normally produces startling and even quite sudden improvements to our health, fitness, and quality of life, revealing the power and accuracy of the new science of our earlier life in nature. And it does this with a diet that is, day in and day out, delicious and naturally enjoyable.
From our discussion of earlier human life and health in wild nature, it should be clear in general terms what we mean when we talk about natural human eating. We mean a daily diet that is in harmony with the way people ate over millions of years as humans and pre-humans living directly in nature. It means eating in ways that reproduce essential natural characteristics of foraging human life before the many influences and changes that came with settled agrarian living, and the evolving human cultures and culinary traditions it enabled.
Homo sapiens have a long-established natural diet that promotes our natural health, as does every other organism in nature – each diet based on its species’ evolutionary legacy and evolved niche in the natural order. Straying significantly from this diet (as we have since our Agrarian Revolution and the onset of settled life ten thousand years ago), reduces our health. Returning to this natural pattern of eating, in turn, rapidly promotes and begins to optimize our health, and sets the stage for new, more natural, and even transformational well-being in our lives.
Natural Eating is really that simple in principle, and quite powerful and easily validated in practice.
Our natural diet
Based on our discussion of our human legacy of gathering and hunting over millions of years in wild nature, without access to significant technology, and the very short time (in evolutionary terms) we have been exposed to settled life and agriculturally-based foods, a natural human diet can be said to have five components:
- Vegetables – all plants we can eat raw, especially leafy green vegetables, fresh sprouts and shoots, and edible raw roots (but not grains, unsprouted beans, or starchy plant, that cannot be eaten raw)
- Meats – especially lean wild meats, and including fish, poultry and eggs (but not fatty farm meats or dairy products)
- Fruits – all fruits we can eat raw, especially low-sugar berries and richly-colored vegetable fruits
- Seeds and nuts – all edible raw seeds and nuts (but not including nut-like beans and legumes, such as peanuts and cashews, that require processing to make them edible)
- Water – including most natural teas and infusions
We would encourage you to take a few moments to re-read and carefully consider this proposed list of natural human foods. You will notice right away that it is a very short list, likely a much shorter list of food groups than you are accustomed to or might have expected.
But given our discussion of the science of our natural health and natural human past, a longer list simply would not be consistent with the designs and long-established patterns of our evolutionary development, with our natural human anatomy and physiology, and ultimately, with our requirements for natural and optimal levels of health today.
Our short list of foods
After a number of years helping people to understand and successfully adopt a natural diet, HumanaNatura recognizes that this list of natural foods is often surprising and even quite counterintuitive to many of us at first.
We also understand that our approach to natural nutrition runs against both mainstream and many alternative prescriptions for human eating. Common criticisms include our exclusion of grains and legumes, unless sprouted and edible raw, and our inclusion of meats, as natural human foods. But as we have outlined, our guidelines in fact represent the true and longstanding scope of our natural diet. The HumanaNatura technique of Natural Eating involves our natural human patterns of eating, both before the advent of agriculture ten thousand years ago and even before the practice of large animal hunting, which began in earnest perhaps only one hundred thousand years ago.
Another frequent criticism we receive from people who have not experimented with this way of eating is that humans may have adapted or evolved, in whole or in part, to our civilized diet over the last ten thousand years. We acknowledge the possibility of such genetic adaptation, but would point out that there is no scientific evidence to suggest this has occurred in a material way. In the end, we offer our modern levels of social health, and the rapidly transformed personal health we routinely achieve through our approach to Natural Eating, as compelling evidence of this lack of adaptation, underscoring our universal need to re-define a natural human diet in the way we have proposed.
For HumanaNatura, all foods not included on our list of natural foods should be considered inherently unnatural for humans and, absent clear science to the contrary, viewed as likely to undermine our natural health and fitness. You can of course quickly and persuasively validate this idea yourself, by adopting the HumanaNatura natural diet and avoiding all unnatural foods, even for as brief a time as thirty days. Indeed, we would encourage this approach in any case, since rapid and complete change to new behaviors is scientifically the most reliable route to sustaining these behaviors over time.
While HumanaNatura’s list of natural human foods may seem short, we would also point out that there are many, many delicious foods contained in these five natural food groups. As you will see in the natural meals list included in this section of the program, our diet allows for a rich, varied, and interesting daily diet, one full of rich and naturally enjoyable foods.