Caveman skills just as relevant now as then

The food we eat should provide everything the body needs to keep us healthy and disease free – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

By Ranjit Seneviratne

The more we have moved humanity indoors, automated our skills away, and get our experience of the world filtered and sent to us through screens, the more we’ve lost touch with some of the vital skills cavemen and prehistoric people learned in order to survive.

We’re able to click an automated device to play a song by a famous dead artist, or microwave a meal, or fly to a different time zone at a moment’s notice, only because our ancestors developed the essential skills that were necessary to beat the odds and survive.

Now, our brains and urges haven’t changed all that much. We still want to get married. We still get cold and hungry. We still get bored if we are doing nothing. We still instinctively fight to save our young from danger. We still laugh when someone stubs their toe. We still delight in the beauty and awe of nature – when we get a chance to visit a park, that is. But the world looks very different now.

When the human brain isn’t occupied in storing enough rice to get us through the drought or providing every family member a plate of food, we’re able to focus on other things — like paying for gym memberships so we don’t have to run in the rain, or watch TV and be transported to another world. So it can be pretty easy to forget important lessons from our ancestors.

Like the absolutely essential need to:

• chew our food,
• live according to the circadian (day-night) rhythm,
• spend time walking barefoot, and even climb trees and
• being “bathed” by the natural world, just by walking through bushes and trees.

For a caveman, those things meant life or death. For us? They connect our lives to the eternal, to this earth, to the essence of humanity.

Chewing food

You see, our prehistoric ancestors ate raw food — like leaves, fruits (which were not “improved” and therefore full of nutrients) root tubers and nuts, so that the food we ate provided everything the body needed to keep us healthy and disease free. 

We had to really chew our food in order to break it into the smallest possible particles, so that the bacteria in our digestive system could have ready access (reason why cows do “chewing the cud” to re-chew the grass to smaller particles). 

There was no such thing as “diseases”, because that began only when we started eating food that we were not designed to eat and probably started the need for Vedaralas and Sinhala beheth too. This happened first, after the discovery of fire (only some 40,000 years ago), when we started eating tough meat and rice seeds which needed cooking, to make it digestible. So as we learned to soften our food, we didn’t chew our food properly, since we didn’t really have to.

Now, we all have smaller jaws and crowded teeth and if you have a ‘sweet tooth,’ less teeth.

But that’s not the reason you need to chew your food like a caveman would… Chewing your food for longer releases more saliva, which contains digestive enzymes and bacteria. Digestion begins with saliva mixing with food and the smaller you break your food down, the more access for bacteria, which means less stress on the oesophagus, and eventually the stomach. Plus, the more digestive enzymes released, the more essentials you give your digestive tract to do its job. 

When you don’t take the time to chew your food properly, just gobbling down food in your car or eating while surfing your cell phone, you risk:

• Bacterial overgrowth in the colon from undigested food particles
• Sending food to the digestive tract without sending it the signal it needs to start producing hydrochloric acid, which then slows down the digestion process. (That is why chewing gum or betel produces the acids, but without the food – gives you gastritis)
• And your lower stomach remains tense instead of relaxing before food gets sent to the lower intestines. (Remember babies “poo” after a feed as the previous food goes to the lower intestines and we should too, but we are “toilet trained” so we carry the rubbish around for 24 hours till morning – like the ‘kunu lorriya’ – reason for smelly gas?You should be chewing your food between 10 and 30 times before swallowing.

Living a circadian life

The term ‘circadian rhythm’ simply refers to the physical, mental, and behavioural changes that occur throughout a single daily cycle, corresponding primarily to natural light and darkness in a body’s environment.

Put simply? Waking when the sun comes out. Sleeping when the sun goes down. An area in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus controls our hormone production, increasing output of certain hormones and lessening output of others, depending on the time of day. 

For example, a body in touch with the circadian rhythm of the world around it, will produce melatonin when the outside light starts to dim. It also signals ‘autophagy’ – the process by which the body repairs damaged cells and the waste products are got rid of in the morning – the reason for the morning toilet.

(Note: Cells not repaired due to late nights or night shifts could become cancerous because ‘autophagy’ does not take place during afternoon sleep.)

A body out of touch won’t get the message, and so will have a harder time falling asleep at night. The closer you’re aligned to your body’s natural circadian rhythm and the timing of your environment, the healthier and more connected you’ll feel.

Walking barefoot

This is a tricky one for a lot of people, especially those living in urban environments. But realistically, humans only began wearing shoes around 40,000 years ago. We were able to invent tools like sewing needles and to consider our comfort, specifically in terms of warming our feet, especially in cooler climates or when the Ice Age hit the world. 

Today, walking barefoot on grass and the earth is recommended for ‘grounding’ and is now recognised as being beneficial to health, to rid the body of electric charges from electronic devices and to re-balance the charge of ions in our body..

But because we spend almost all of our time with our feet covered or in slippers, we have lost out on some fundamental developments in our bodies…

• Like our posture, which used to be regulated by managing our own steps and strengthening the muscles in the body that keep the spine erect.
• Or hitting the reflex points in our feet, which are covered by shoes/slippers and can’t be activated when we’re walking around.
• Or being disconnected from the ionic charge of the Earth.

You don’t have to give up your modern creature comforts to get in touch with the way cavemen lived — if they had the internet, of course they would have used it.

But the fact is, because they had less, they strengthened and toned what they did have…

And so can we. By eating natural food – leaves, fruits, nuts and tubers, avoiding cooked food, milk and dairy (we are the only animal that drinks milk after becoming adults – so why not drink coconut milk, almond milk, cashew milk and may I suggest kottamba’ milk if you enjoy a morning coffee with cacao too (as I do at the start of my brunch) before lunch of a raw salad, remembering to chew food well (which I have to consciously do or make a smoothie of the salad).

Walk barefoot as much as possible on uneven ground (I have rocks and stones in my garden which could trip me, so I am forced to look where I am putting my feet – an essential caveman skill. I should mention here that I am 84 years young and I can compete with an 11-year-old at climbing up a tree. 

And yes, I also have a forest garden, so there are trees to climb (good for both hands and feet) to pick the berries and entertainment to feast the eyes and ears – with all the chirping birds and colourful butterflies, two bee hives on trees at present and nesting birds (you have to pretend you don’t see them not to disturb them) but you get surprises too, like unusual visitors – peacocks, believe it or not, and when a particular berry tree is full of fruit – even the Ceylon Horn Bill. The ponds have their visitors too, the pond heron and kingfisher – so I need to replenish the fish from time to time – but it’s all great fun.

Coronavirus? Well we humans are basically condominiums for bacteria, viruses, fungi according to the ‘New Biology’ (www.greenmedinfo.com).

We are only about 50% human, the rest is the ‘micro-biome’.

So if we destroy our micro-biome with antibiotics, food preservatives (which kill bacteria) and agro-chemical inputs in our food, our condo becomes empty and if corona comes in – they have a great time filling up the condo and giving us the disease. Your body fights back by raising the temperature (remember the story about corona not liking high temperature? – so may be your body knows).

But you can keep your condo full by eating the right food, walking among trees and shrubs to get their microbes on to your body, gardening and getting them through your fingernails, etc. and corona will just not be able to get in as the other bugs will keep them out.

So simple – but then why is no one, not even the World Health Organization (WHO), advising about strengthening the immune system? It is probably because it has to be proved by ‘double blind tests’ to be officially acceptable and no human being will wait around with the coronavirus while the test is being done. So officially, all that can be promoted are ‘preventive measures’.

Therefore ‘official’ channels being off limits may be the reason why so many famous doctors and researchers are advising on the internet (www.greenmedinfo, www.mercola.com, etc.) and on YouTube – Dr. Glidden, ‘12 Bad Foods’ (https://youtu.be/Jm71w3LzhQE), ‘Do not eat wheat, rye, barley, oats, fried foods, milk and dairy, etc.” and Dr. Raymond Francis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XExB45GRrfc and for Dr. Tom O’Bryan to write a book ‘The Auto Immune Fix’ and so on, so that the responsibility is on you – the individual. 

But sadly in Sri Lanka, this could leave out those who do not know English. But we have an ancient indigenous medical system and if you visit a veda mahattaya, he will probably tell you some of these truths.

Incidentally, there is much talk about the large number of corona cases in Italy. I believe the most affected areas are in the industrial north, where there are many factory workers who probably eat convenience foods – that is, processed foods (processed using chemicals). The latest report states that most who died were already sick (www.greenmedinfo.com).

It is also noticeable from newscasts that there appear to be less deaths in poorer countries – could this be due to poorer people eating more natural foods and perhaps spices? (Group affected least in Malaysia by previous SARS virus were people of Indian origin, apparently because they regularly drank Rasam.)

There is also the good news of the gradual reduction of cases in China, reportedly due to the original coronavirus naturally mutating to less virulent forms which then offers protection to others in the population – the well-known way these ‘pandemics’ die out with time.

That said, while it is obvious that future pandemics and the present epidemic of NCDs (Non-Communicable Diseases) are affecting our country and especially the poor, they could be eliminated by simply following the example of our cavemen ancestors. Of course this will not happen because no country in the world or government or even religion has ever been able to eliminate the evils brought on by tobacco and liquor consumption and is a stark reminder that the world runs on greed – simple, stark greed, which over rides everything else.

(Ranjit Seneviratne is a marine engineer by profession. He also served as a Project Operations Officer, FAO, Rome and one of his projects dubbed ‘Blue Revolution’ by the locals, resulted in the Government of Bangladesh winning the first Souma Award, given by FAO to a government that best developed an FAO Project. His FAO Project in Eritrea was shortlisted for the second Souma Award and two of his Project Managers won B.R. Sen Awards for Excellence. He was also involved in pioneering the introduction of organic farming in Sri Lanka with Ranjith de Silva of Gami Seva Sevana. He is currently a soil healing consultant who maintains his Colombo home garden as a laboratory to develop various techniques of biodiversity conservation that includes agro-forestry and community gardens, rain-water harvesting, zero food waste by direct conversion to soil nutrients (worm food) and so on. At 84 he is totally disease free and practices all what he has written in this article. He cured his wife of diabetes 10 years ago, by adopting the ideas mentioned above. He has spent over 20 years researching on healthy lifestyles and uses his research to help himself and others. He eats only raw, organic food, mostly those grown by himself in what he calls his forest garden space in Colombo 3.)