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Paleo Cuisine
| Article
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14852 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
2,302 Words |
| Author
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Ashley Montagu
Ashley Montagu is the author of The Nature of Human Aggression
(1976) and editor of Man and Aggression (1973), Learning Non-
Aggression (1978), Sociobiology Examined (1980), Science and
Creationism (1985), and many other books. |
THE PALEOLITHIC PRESCRIPTION
A Program of Diet and Exercise
and a Design for Living
S. Boyd Eaton, Marjorie Shostak, and Melvin Konner
New York: Harper & Row, 1988
306 pp., $17.95
CHOLESTEROL & CHILDREN
A Parent's Guide to Giving
Children a Future Free of Heart Disease
Robert E. Kowalski
New York: Harper & Row, 1988
302 pp., $ 16.95
It is a remarkable fact that urbanized man, since the second industrial revolution (the first was the discovery of fire), namely the invention of agriculture and the domestication of plant and animal foods some eleven thousand years ago, has been doing everything in his power to kill himself. He eats the wrong foods, lives in the wrong kinds of dwellings--containing the temple in which he performs his ritual ablutions by washing away those healthy secretions from his magnificently endowed skin--and carries out in a most unphysiological manner those eliminations that he dares not name (he should be squatting instead of sitting on a horizontal toilet seat). He eats the wrong food in the wrong proportions and quantities, all too often prepared in a manner that reduces its value as food and contributes to his ill health in the form of diseases and disorder that were unknown to his prehistoric ancestors. His life is for the most part sedentary, and his exercise ludicrous when it is not damaging. And yet, in spite of this seeming perversity, and much else along similar lines, he manages to live, on average, appreciably longer than his ancestors. In fact, the average life expectancy of prehistoric man--indeed, of man up to about 1861, was 33 1/3 years. Today (in the United States) it is about seventy years for males and seventy-eight for females.
How has this remarkable increase in longevity come about? Medicine usually takes the credit for it, but would it were so! A number of recent independent reviews of the evidence (for the most recent see Leonard A. Sagan's admirable book The Health of Nations, New York, Basic Books, 1988) indicate that the medical care system did not materially contribute to the historical decline in death rates and even today may not be a significant factor in the explanation of modern life
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