07/09/2024
Hello Dear Friends, Cultural Creatives & Seekers Everywhere,
FOOD… Just for the FUN of it
The Time: Winter, 3 million years ago. The scene: You and your family are sheltering in a cave.
In a cave, the family is asleep in the equivalent of a human “puppy pile,” sleeping together and sharing body heat to survive. The sun arises and you leave the cave to find food.
Prior to the evolution of agriculture, there are no supermarkets or McDonalds. Like modern-daygorillas and chimpanzees, your meals consist of leaves and fruits from trees, shrubs, and herbs. Diets of food gatherers were especially rich in tubers, seeds, nuts, and wild-grown barley. Whenever possible, the family ate small mammals such as rats and rabbits, and if by the sea, their diet also included shellfish and small fish. A half a million years later, in addition being “gatherers,” early humans became “hunters” and added meat and marrow from large animals to their diet.
If it existed at all during prehistoric times, obesity would have been exceedingly rare. Humans evolved to be able to go without food for many hours, or even several days or longer. Prehistoric humans evolved to survive, and even thrive, for long periods without eating. If by chance hunter-gatherers came across an abundant food source, such as a fruit tree loaded with ripe fruit, they would eat as much as they could because they would never know when they would find food again.
If people in today’s world were restricted to the caveman’s diet, they would feel as if they were facing starvation. The reason is that we have adapted to the development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. The availability of a surplus of food changed the way humans lived. Civilization switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming. Unfortunately, we are still endowed with caveman’s unconscious Caveman mentality in conjunction with modern agriculture has led to healthcare crisis today, including obesity and diabetes.
Why do we eat food? The digestion of food offers both a source of energy and metabolic building blocks for cellular life. In a sense, digestion is the equivalent of “burning fuel,” and the heat derived from the process keeps the body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius). Burning fuel also leads to the creation of dangerous byproducts. For example, consider the toxic exhaust emitted from the car’s tailpipe when burning petroleum fuel. When animals digest food, the “exhaust” produces “free radicals,” an unstable molecule derived from cell metabolism. Free radicals damage parts of the cells including cell membranes, proteins and DNA.
Science recognizes that a human’s life span should be 150 years of age. Why do we have trouble living to a hundred? A primary problem contributing to our short lifespan is that we eat too much food, and the free radical waste products kill our cells. In laboratory studies, researchers can essentially double the life span of rodents, dogs and even monkeys by feeding them a subsistence diet. A similar result is also suggested in influencing a human’s lifespan.
How much food-derived “energy” is required for human life? An amazing insight arose in 1991, five years after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. Scientists found that a common “black fungus” (the kind that builds up on shower curtains and around bathtubs) were thriving on the reactor’s walls. The black in the fungi is due to high levels of melanin crystals, a pigment that is also found in human skin. Melanin absorbs radiation and turns it into chemical energy, like how plants turn carbon dioxide and chlorophyll into oxygen and glucose through photosynthesis. According to a study first published in 20071, this specific process, is referred to as radiosynthesis.
Exposure of melanin to ionizing radiation, among other forms of electromagnetic radiation, changes its electronic properties. Melanized fungal cells manifested increased growth relative to non-melanized cells after exposure to ionizing radiation, raising intriguing questions about a potential role for melanin in energy capture and utilization.
Melanin is to the animal kingdom like chlorophyll to the vegetal kingdom. Melanin collects energy from lower-energy radiation sources, kicks electrons into excited states, initiating a process that would end up producing chemical energy, similar to photosynthesis in supplying energy to plants.
Scientists realized that the chemical energy released through the dissociation of water molecules by melanin represents over 90% of cell energy required by the body. These unexpected findings about the intrinsic function of melanin to transform energy through the dissociation of water molecules, a role performed supposedly only by chlorophyll in plants, seriously questions the presumed role of glucose and mitochondria as the primary source of energy and power for human cells.2
We are killing ourselves prematurely by over-eating and supersizing our meals. An important consequence of eating too much food has also led civilization to destroy the natural environment by monocropping, as well as cutting down the rainforest to make more hamburgers. We can save ourselves and the planet by simply minimalizing our dietary intake.
I hope you enjoy this month’s video by Alex and me that expands on this topic and concludes that food is more for “fun” than for our survival.
With Deepest Wishes for your Health, Happiness and Love,
Bruce
1. Ekaterina Dadachova, et al,. (2007) Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi. PLoS ONE 2(5): e457
2. Arturo S. Herrera, et al., Central Nervous System Agents in Medicinal Chemistry, 2015, 15, 32-41)