One more thing about adaptation to dietaries. Pre-industrial humans
could only be extraordinarily healthy on the dietary they were
adapted to if and only if that dietary also was extraordinarily high
in nutrients. Few places on earth have naturally rich soil. Food
grown on poor soil is poor in nutrition; that grown on rich soil is
high in nutrition. People do not realize that the charts and tables
in the backs of health books like Adelle Davis's Lets Cook It Right,
are not really true. They are statistics. It is vital to keep in
mind the old saying, "there are lies, there are damned lies, and
then there are statistics. The best way to lie is with statistics."
Statistical tables of the nutrient content of foods were developed
by averaging numerous samples of food from various soils and
regions. These tables basically lie because they do not show the
range of possibility between the different samples. A chart may
state authoritatively that 100 grams of broccoli contains so many
milligrams of calcium. What it does not say is that some broccoli
samples contain only half that amount or even less, while other
broccoli contains two or three times that amount. Since calcium is a
vital nutrient hard to come by in digestible form, the high calcium
broccoli is far better food than the low calcium sample.
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