 Some of you may remember my food powder ability video from several years ago and this is a concept I developed that helps us understand what foods humans should naturally eat. The basic principle is that foods occur in nature in certain states and humans have the ability to alter food using various ways. This basically tells us whether our modern diet is healthy or not when we relate back to that ancestral food status. Is that modern food you're eating something that would have occurred in nature? If it doesn't occur in nature is it realistic or comparable to something that does? Is the way we need to prepare that food unrealistic as well such as being unreasonably labor- intensive or requiring special machinery that didn't exist you know hundreds of thousands of years ago. This can mean climbing a 100 foot tree for one mango or processing soybeans into vegetable seed oils. Both things that would obviously not have occurred in our past. So we have to start with our taste buds and our primitive reactions to eating. This relates greatly to a baby spitting out vegetables as babies are still very much in tune with their natural instincts whereas adults are brainwashed to eat poor tasting foods that are marketed as healthy that they believe are healthy. If a food is good for you it should taste good in some capacity but that doesn't mean just because the food tastes good it's going to be good for you. So we have sweet, salty, sour, bitter, acidic, umami, aka umami and richness and all of these are taste components that can signify nutrients contributing to that flavor of the food you know we're in the specific micronutrient, macronutrient as well as chemical composition can be assumed. A certain combination of molecules for instance forms a russet potato and a similar combination forms a yellow potato. This correlates directly to every aspect of that food. The vitamin content, mineral content, fatty acids, anti-nutrients, whatever you can think of and when you crave a certain food you're craving the nutrient properties of that food even if it's as simple as protein but you might not actually be getting enough of that food or you're still missing other nutrients if the craving continues and these by no means are all of the senses that we use to perceive food but these are very basic and help us understand it at a very shallow level. So if something sweet you know it has sugars, fructose, glucose, maltose, lactose, whatever and it gives us caloric energy readily available for our brain especially. Salty signifies sodium which is a mineral requirement. Sour can indicate that the food has been fermented and that there is a probiotic benefit to the food. Bitter means that you probably shouldn't eat it but there are bitter herbs and roots that we have eaten in our past that do have antimicrobial properties and they can also stimulate gastric acid. Acidic is also from fermentation and as with sour it has a probiotic content but depending on sour versus acidic there could also be an anti-scorbutic value of vitamin C content that has developed. Umami again relates to fermentation and specific nutrients develop when we eat fermented foods. As you can tell a lot of our flavor profiles are based around the fermentation, the planned rotting of food and that tells us that our modern diets are greatly lacking you know fermented food and something I've mentioned before is that synergy and trinity of cooked, raw and fermented food that's present in every single indigenous diet that's something we certainly cannot overlook here and of course with richness you have a fat and cholesterol content to the food that signifies survival calories as well as nutrients like fat type of vitamins. Now the base powder ability of a food is its least processed edible state. An example of progression of this would be raw meat to cooked meat to seasoned meat. The meat out of a freshly slaughtered animal, the meat cooked with any method then the meat cooked as well as seasoned or accompanied by plant foods that make it tastier. This is how you can sort of tell if a food is fit for human consumption. Broccoli for instance is not consumable at that base powder ability in its raw state and generally speaking a food that is consumable raw can also be cooked and be incredibly healthy. Foods like grains and potatoes kind of draw a fine line as they can be eaten in small amounts or fermented states when raw but need to be cooked to break down the starch for human digestion and then you want to ask yourself you know can you prepare the food in a natural way like roasting the potatoes in the dirt near fire? Can you procure them in a natural way? You know eating potatoes every day you know starts becoming very unrealistic once you understand what goes into growing that crop. On the other end of the spectrum we have hyper palatable foods that achieve unrealistic hunger signals typically with the addition of carbohydrates or sugar. Take a potato chip for instance it has salt, it has carbs and it's replicating that crunch that might be from an insect which would have been very nutrient dense. The combination of sugar and fat in ice cream, bacon which has crunch, sugar, salt and smoke these foods can be made healthy with quality ingredients but generally speaking the modern versions the American public has available to them are not so healthy and the reason we actually season our food is because that's replicating the natural aromatics from the animals diet that are supposed to be in the food. So you know when you have feedlot beef and you're feeding a grain and corn and crap and the meat doesn't taste right you know the fat doesn't develop that butterscotch flavor that it would normally get from the pasture you know pork in a factory farm isn't going to taste like deep nutty acorn-fed Iberico pork. By seasoning the food you're adding palatability that should be present already and by doing that you're essentially tricking your body into thinking the food is more nutritious than it actually is so you eat more of it without actually getting the nutrients because it's a low quality food that you simply seasoned. So let's do a brief overview of the major food groups. First starting with animal protein meat fish and shellfish were present in some capacity across all past tribes our ancestors they consumed raw cooked and fermented versions of animal foods but they did not have access to feedlot meat and farmed fish like we have today. They also didn't have access to ribeye steak or any steaks really they prefer the fattier more plentiful parts of the animal the belly the ribs and the fat and if a tribe only had access to fish they would supplement higher starch plant foods. If you guys saw the movie The Revenant where Leonardo DiCaprio eats the raw meat out of the bison that is an example of natural palatability. When humans are starving and hungry they will crave and eat anything especially raw meat. As you get out of that hunger phase your body will shift towards craving cooked food and other nutrients the body is prioritizing. Then when a food is plentiful and stocked up various recipes are used to increase caloric consumption and gain weight store fat for periods of less food consumption. Fruits are only present in specific regions of the world at certain times of the year. They have little to offer from a nutrition perspective vitamins minerals even calories you could have unlimited berries and you'll still starve to death plus animals will always get to fruit first a bear wandering in the woods fruit bats are far more adept at procuring fruit than man. We should also consider that the fruit we consume now has far more sugar than our past and the real purpose of fruit was likely for the high anti-scorbutic value in their vitamin C content as well as to season other foods. Most modern vegetables actually originated from one plant the mustard seed so just about everything in the produce department is something that never actually existed in nature. They're even worse than fruits from a caloric density perspective offering no significant amount of any macronutrient fat carbs or protein for survival and the forms of vitamins in vegetables can't be utilized without consuming fat which is only present in animal foods in that wild setting. Starchy roots and tubers would have had a purpose from that caloric density survival aspect you know they would likely have been soaked fermented cooked extensively offering carbohydrates for that caloric energy as well as feeding your gut bacteria keeping your flora alive. Dairy is a category that is super nutritious, palatable, tasty, approachable but very limited access as it's only something that has been done more recently in various parts of the world. Dairy can be a great food to supplement animal nutrients in people's diets but it lacks certain things found in meat and fish such as iron and omega fatty acids. Dairy whether raw cooked or fermented has had a place in many healthy indigenous tribes. Grains are a bit confusing because there have been many societies that thrived off consuming grains if prepared properly whether that means soaking, sprouting, fermenting or making sure adequate animal nutrition is present in the diet is perfectly fine to consume grains. The high calcium content of dairy for instance can offset the negative anti-nutrient aspects of certain grains like rye and the raw state of a grain does require extensive processing from the field but compared to scavenging for calories as hunter gatherers this did allow us more free time to develop culture. Once you have the infrastructure set up for farming grains it saves the society time as a whole. People cooperating together will survive easier off of grain but one person on their own is better off spending their time hunting and scavenging. Nuts and seeds are definitely unrealistic from a procurement standpoint and although grains are technically seeds, grass seeds can be grown in crops fairly easily and have a high yield whereas walnuts, almonds, macadamia nuts are specific to certain regions of the world. They require an incredible amount of water to be grown and one tree doesn't yield that many calories frequently. It's hard to justify consuming more than a handful of nuts or seeds here and there which is why I don't like going to specifics analyzing the nutrient value and the anti-nutrient content. Herbs and roots, things like tea, various staples that have been used as seasonings or have antimicrobial purposes. Each of these can be addressed on an individual basis for their purpose but for in most part were for those two things for remedies or adding flavor to dishes and then we have laboratory ingredients. Soy, vegetable oils, junk food, chemical flavors, fast food have all been made with unnatural processes from unnaturally grown foods and we aren't only dismissing foods because they are unnatural. They typically have very harmful chemical components or are incredibly inflammatory due to omega 6 fatty acids and anti-nutrients and offer nothing from a nutritional perspective outside of calories. So this is a brief overview of getting someone to understand what foods they should eat. You know, does it occur in nature? Is it something you can obtain in a reasonable fashion and how do you have to transform the food to make it consumable? So in part two of this series I will speak about the order of satiety and how through these natural hunger signals we can determine how much food to physically eat at a meal. So thank you guys for joining me today. You know how to support me through the means down in the description below. I'll see you guys for tomorrow's video.