The McCarrison Society - World Food Shortages and brains.

World Food Shortages and brains.

Written by Michael Crawford

THE UN, CNN AND WORLD FOOD SHORTAGES:
A popular view on food shortages is that the problem is one of distribution of food. Another view favoured by the World Bank and the like is that the solution to poverty and malnutrition is improving earning capacity.

I do not believe either of these notions is true.

From my experience of working in Uganda for example I would say that the Kwashiorkor was not due to lack of distribution but to lack of education and the recent reverence for the plantain, yams or sweet potatoes. None are indigenous to Africa. “Plant one offshoot of a plantain tree the day the child is born and with it and its progeny you have food for life” we were told. These crops grow so easily in the warm climate with ample rainfall. The plantain is a high carbohydrate food so it does not give enough calories for weaning the infant. It is essential fatty acid and protein deficient but has stacks of carbohydrate.

In India you have a similar situation with malnourished women giving birth to low birthweight infants where in some regions it is as high as 50% of the births. You also have iodine deficiency disease which in Kerala affected 60% of the school children but less than 1% in the fishing villages. Vitamin A deficiency often co-exists. The same is true in Indonesia. Although they have largely sorted vitamin A deficiency with injections for infants, there were 1 million severely mentally retarded children and 800,000 malformed cretins when I visited in 1992 for their Health Ministry. Over 50% of pregnancies became anaemic. Yet the women and children looked well nourished. None of those nutrition related health issues were seen in the fishing villages.

Food shortages in Ethiopia for example are met with sacks of corn. In an emergency any food is better than none. However, corn is an omega 6 food and whilst omega 6 fatty acids are essential you also need omega 3 if your brain is to survive long term. This of course is particularly important for women and especially pregnant women who are the worst affected in these and refugee situations when mortality and morbidity both of the mother and new born increase. Moreover, if in a refugee or famine situation, you only feed omega 6 corn to pregnant women you risk adversely affecting the development of the brain of the baby she is carrying.

You could say much the same for USA and Europe. When I was in Uganda, heart disease, breast and colon cancer were unknown, a fact confirmed by the National Institutes of Health, USA who set up a cancer registry in Uganda to test this situation. The work of that Cancer Registry under Professor Jack Davis gave the first evidence of a viral cause for cancer with the description of Burkitt’s Lymphoma. So the people like Davis. Burkitt and their researchers were no slouches. The absence of these cancers common in the UK and USA was real.

The reason for the obesity, heart disease, breast and colon cancers in the USA and EU is not because of poor food distribution but because of an unsound food system and a flawed food policy. It is a different form of malnutrition but malnutrition none the less..

This again is not distribution or income but a food system which does not contain an adequate supply of nutrients. Sir Robert McCarrison lectured on the unsophisticated foods of nature, departure from which he had shown with his studies in India to be associated with diseases. During World War II, Sir Jack Drummond, promoted this idea of nutrition and health as the bulwark of food security, production and securement policy. After the war this policy was abandoned, despite its manifest advantages to the health of the fighting force and the home based population. Drummond and his family were murdered and nutrition and health was replaced by production – nutritional quality was replaced by fast weight gain.

Never mind obesity, diabetes, heart disease, breast and colon cancers, the scary thing is the €386 billion Euro for brain disorders overtaking ALL other burdens of ill health at 2004 prices for the 25EU. (Eu J Neurology June 2005 whole issue). That is especially worrying as it has been escalating over the last 3 decades amongst children.

When humans started to populate the planet “out of Africa”, they migrated around coastlines (Stringer C Nature). Populations exploded and they moved inland and you know the rest. In different places the food systems differed, became narrower in a few centuries after 7 million year adaptations acquired since the human line separated from the chimps. People now have different food systems that departed in different ways from the “unsophisticated foods of Nature” and now have different health problems in consequence.

So the issue is not distribution but restoration of the nutrient balance that enabled human evolution and cerebral expansion to take place. It is now going in reverse gear. The coastal resources with food from the sea and land fringe would have been (still is in some rare untouched places) the richest food resource on the planet. Abundant food was available at the coastlines for pregnant women and children to gather with the little expenditure of effort and abundance.

The importance of the marine food source is that the brain evolved in the sea 500-600 million years ago and despite the massive changes in genomics since, the same lipid nutrients used then, are still used in the eyes and brains of the cephalopods, fish, amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals and us.

Today the estuaries are polluted and the seas are exploited by a stone age system – sort of thing we were doing 100,000 years ago – hunting and gathering but with better technology. Now the big issue of fish and sea foods is the complaint about lack of sustainability!

Some people 10,000 years ago sitting round the camp fire said “Hey guys this hunting and gathering game is unsustainable”. What about agriculture? The rest is history. Although I bet it was the women who complained as they would do most of the gathering. At the same time the habitats around rivers, estuaries and coast lines would have meant that whilst they had to agriculturalise the land they did not need to worry about the rivers and oceans because they were so incredibly rich in food.

So what about oceanic use getting out of the stone age mentality of the fishing business today, and like the camp fire people of the Fertile Crescent agriculturalise the oceans? They did not say we need a committee, we need more research! They did it. The rise in brain disorders is almost certainly connected to the downsizing of fish and sea food consumption in the last century. It is time to change before it is too late.

Comments (0) Add Comment

Show/Hide comments

Write comment

Show/Hide comment form

[ Back ]