What you’re getting yourself into
Why the dietary guidelines are eerily similar to the diet of slaves and peasants, and why that absolutely is not a good thing.
Obesity rates have been reaching breakneck pace in recent times, and the projections from here are all doom and gloom. 26% of adults in England are now classed as obese. By 2040, we’re estimated to reach 36%. This calamity has been happening in blissful disregard for any attempts put up by the NHS to get the nation back on track.
In fact, anyone with a pair of eyeballs can make the case that the introduction of the National Dietary Guidelines in 1983 made the situation worse. In what was essentially a copy and paste job from USA’s Dietary Guidelines of 1977, the nation was encouraged to treat animal fat like the plague and swap them for more carbs and more polyunsaturated fats.
Obesity surged upwards right from that point, and an emerging problem became a fact of life that everyone seems resigned to dealing with. The establishment’s vision of a healthy high carb diet only appeared to fan the flames.
Luckily, the NHS has since realised their mistake, and amended it with the EatWell Plate in 2006, which was then upgraded into the EatWell Guide in 2016. The issue was that the 1983 version didn’t recommend whole grains over refined grains.
None of this has done anything to arrest the momentum of obesity, but don’t let that get in the way of another classic tale of government competence. The crisis has been averted. The problem was that we’ve been refining the grains that used to be the beacon of health across countless civilisations stretching back to the dawn of agriculture.
Because nothing spells out optimal human health quite like following the diets that slaves and peasants were forced to eat. Traditionally-made whole grain bread, a sprinkle of some legumes, and a good smattering of fruits and vegetables to add a tinge of rainbow to a diet of love and freedom.
It did the job for the slaves, who always exemplified the pinnacle of health in society. It will do the same for us now.
The EatWell Slave Diet
The EatWell Guide has a track record going back at least two millenia. Roman slaves were given what was deemed the lowest quality foods available. Bread, corn meal, cheap wine, soups, stews, fruits, and vegetables.
Meat was considered a luxury food, and typically reserved for the nobility. They dined on wild boar, beef, sausages, pork, lamb, duck, goose, chickens, small birds and fish. There are some curious novelty items thrown in for fine dining, like flamingo tongues, and peacock brains.
The gladiators that exemplified the dizzying heights of the peak Roman Empire were just another flavour of slavery. And unlike what Hollywood would like you to believe, they didn’t prance around the colosseum with glistening abs. Having low body-fat might be visually pleasing, but survival mattered more than titillating the Roman matriarchs. A six-pack didn’t do a great job of protecting the vital organs from the slash of a gladius, and it wasn’t good business for the slave owners if their subjects never made it past a day in the area.
So in the interests of survival, Roman gladiators ate a diet rich in barley, beans, and dried fruit. That gave them a generous waistline and a decent insurance policy. They were borderline vegan, and were colloquially known as hordearii, or barley eaters. The Russell Crowe of 2000 was a poor reflection of what a Roman Gladiator looked like. The Russell Crowe of today is much closer to the truth.
You should be getting a good idea of where the modern dietary guidelines get their inspiration.
The EatWell Peasant Diet
Fast forward a thousand years from the Roman Empire, and you have the peasants that toiled away in the fields of the feudal kingdoms of the Middle Ages. These people were often tied to the land they worked in, and required to work for whichever Lord sitting in the manor looking over that land. Once again, it’s just slavery with a different title.
Peasants settled for brown bread, cabbage soup, porridge, ale, small amounts of dairy and fish, with meat only thrown in on rare, seasonal occasions. Their diet was overwhelmingly grain-based.
It was only the nobility that could their hands on meat no matter the season, with plenty of delicacies like venison, eel, swan, alongside white bread and spices.
So one hand, you had a group of people regularly indulging in cholesterol-loaded red meat, and choosing refined grains. On the other, you had a group that ate the rainbow, plenty of whole grains, based their diet on carbs, and had very little animal fat. Even when you consider the financial advantages of the former, you’d think the latter would be boosted by following the evidence-based dietary guideline virtually to the letter.
The modal, or most common, age of death is a better reflection of health than life expectancy, since the latter can be heavily weighted by high infant mortality. The modal lifespan of a medieval noble was around 50-60, while a peasant was down at 30-40.
Clearly, it didn’t work out so well.
The EatWell Japanese Diet
When Japan decided to batten down the hatches and undergo two centuries of isolation, it developed a cuisine that dovetailed nicely with Buddhist sentiments of the immorality of killing and eating animals.
Very little meat was left for the peasants. They had water buffalo, but they needed them to plough the rice fields. They didn’t even have much white rice, because they needed it to pay their taxes.
So they had to settle for the “lesser”grains of barley, wheat, and millet, which were typically eaten as porridge. Tofu made its grand entrance during this period. The peasants then made the rest up from foraging, like wild berries, beans, seeds, and nuts. They even ate grasshoppers, crickets, grub worms, and other insects. Something we’ve been trying to roll out to school dinner menus lately.
The wealthy in Japan, on the other hand, were able to eat wild boar, venison, badger and fox. The labour-intensive process of removing the bran, meant that white rice was a luxury reserved for the elites.
Red meat has always been the most valuable meat across history, due to its richer flavour, and the additional uses for ruminant animals. The milk, hide, the fat, and the wool, and the draught power being just a few examples.
The Modern Eat Well Diet
There will be plenty of similar societal dietary divides to pick from across the span of history, but you should get the general idea by now. Whole grains, vegetables, and fruits made up the vast chunk of the diets of the poor, because those foods were prized as such. The upper crust of society had plentiful amounts of meat, because it was reserved for the elite, leaving the peasants of the age with slim pickings.
The thrust of modern ‘scientific’ nutrition, and the guidelines that have been gleaned from such evidence, has led to the widespread recommendation of whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. Meat, in particular fatty red meat, has been portrayed as something to be rationed, even minimised. That’s how we got the fictional Mediterranean diet being the poster child of healthy traditional nutrition. That’s how we got the fraudulent blue zones.
The dietary guidelines echo the diet of the downtrodden of past civilisations. To pretend that they somehow had a healthier diet compared to their overlords is laughable. If they were living in vibrant defiance of the nobility who were busy dying of constipation and clogged arteries, then these grain states would have barely made it past a month.
So why are we being encouraged to continue eating like slaves? I’m not here to be a conspiracy theorist. I have too much faith in the incompetency of governments to believe that they could be orchestrating machiavellian schemes of population suppression.
This nutritional advice is just the unfortunate consequence of letting powerful food and pharmaceutical industries dictate the agenda in both nutritional research and the dietary guidelines.
But what it does mean, is that it’s probably not the smartest idea to continue eating peasant food when the food that was long held hostage by the political elites, is now widely available in any supermarket, and affordable for virtually anyone who’s able to read this blog.
Knowledge is power. You might as well use it.
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