In David Servan-Schreiber's book Anticancer, we learn that cancer tricks the body to feed it by using the body's response to inflammation, and that without this inflammation cancer cannot thrive.  What do sugar and refined flour have to do with inflammation?

Plenty, it turns out.  Studies of cultures without juveline acne discovered that diet played an important role in acne inflammation.  By feeding Western adolescents a diet without these two foods, their acne miraculously disappeared in three months.

The human body developed over many eons eating in a certain way.  Our ancestors' diets were made up of a lot of vegetables and fruit, with the occasional eggs and meat from wild animals.  This diet began changing with the advent of agriculture around ten thousand years ago.  Up until recently, humans consumed around four pounds of sugar a year, mostly in the form of honey.  Our ancestors occasionally had some wild grains, but they'd never heard of flour.

In less than two hundred years, the Western diet went from under ten pounds of sugar eaten per year to over one hundred and fifty pounds.

Editor's Note from Anna: If you missed the first week of the food and health series, you can find it in our archives.  Daddy introduced the Anticancer book in part two.

This post is part of our Food and Health lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Food and health: Introduction Food and health: Anti-Cancer Food and health: Inflammation Food and health: Plant food Food and health: Red light and green light foods Food and health: Ancestral diet Food and health: Glycemic index Food and health: High glycemic index foods Food and health: Low glycemic index foods Food and health: Red light foods

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.