Biran Online

When I first started training Aikido I was a vegetarian of several years standing, five of which were as a full-on vegan. This was a diet I had adopted in my freshman year of college out of convictions, learned mostly by word of mouth from my politically active peers, that vegetarianism was the most sustainable diet for the planet.

I was secondarily concerned with health and accepted the conventional belief that it was a healthy diet. Though there are plausible competing arguments out there about the importance of animal husbandry in making our agricultural systems sustainable, for years I stuck with these convictions in spite of signs that my health was deteriorating.

This began to change when soon after beginning hard Aikido training I found myself craving more substantial sustenance. My self-righteous resolve began to crumble. A few pieces of sushi after training on a Friday night soon evolved into "Mrs. Chiba's Chicken" and some venison stew at a seminar potluck. That was all she wrote. My return to an omnivorous diet came from a gut feeling (so to speak) about what kind of sustenance my body actually needed.

Editor's note: Biran and Biran Online will be featuring essays on diet and Aikido practice for the next few issues. Please send contributions through your chief instructor or directly to the Biran editor. Let's make this an ongoing dialog!

Since reintroducing animal foods to my diet, which I now understand to be essential to human health, my decisions about what to eat have continued to evolve quite a bit.

This year I enrolled in a postgraduate program in nutritional therapy, as a complement to my current practice of acupuncture. I intentionally chose a program through an independent, against-the-grain school whose teachings are in line with what I had confirmed through years of independent study and self-experimentation.

There are many concepts regarding what constitutes a healthy diet out there and blindly adopting the most attractive, romantic or popular ones (even the ones taught in standard dietician or nutritionist curricula) can lead to many poor choices. I have certainly made this mistake. In modern times and especially in America we have lost much of the traditional wisdom that would have guided us toward health-promoting foods and preparation practices. Where did this wisdom go, and how can we find it again?

Thanks to a very short view of history and poor sources of information many people harbor a fantasy that modern dietary practices have improved the overall well-being and longevity of the human race. For the most part we have come to rely on some very inadequate sources of information about nutrition: the commercial food industry and its advertisements and propaganda; the government and public health authorities, highly influenced by said industry; scientific studies, which although sometimes useful are again highly subject to said industry and at best provide limited, one-dimensional ways of understanding the human body; the popular news media which further bastardizes and skews all that information from industry, government and science; and of course our peers, teachers, schools and families who typically get their information from the above sources. There also is a tendency toward one-off fad diets that are very clever and look very good on paper (e.g. eat all raw vegan; eat only fruit; eat mostly brown rice...) usually promoted for spiritual or health benefits.

That gut feeling about meat being necessary raised a lot of new questions for me, and in my quest for better guidance one place I looked to, of course, was Eastern Medicine. I had spent some time flirting with macrobiotics, a modern vegetarian system structured around classical philosophical concepts, so was somewhat surprised to learn in school that, more traditionally, Eastern Medicine considers meat indispensable to the human diet. Different foods have different energetic properties, and red meat, so maligned in Western medicine, is of special importance in many cases. But an even more important takeaway concept is that the healthiest diet is a diverse diet, with a ceaseless variety of both plant and animal foods.

This may bring to mind the thing most Westerners know about East Asian diets: they include a lot of "weird" foods: unusual animals, animal organs and non-muscle parts, strange kinds of seafood, an array of fungi, seaweeds, herbs, spices and so forth. This approach treats food as medicine on a daily basis. A highly varied diet ensures that all your nutritional bases are being covered, and that your body isn't overburdened by any one energetic tendency or toxic effect. Many Americans are only familiar with a few vegetables, just as few kinds of meat or fish and even fewer cuts of meat. Eating meat is important, but eating your protein exclusively from chicken breasts is another kind of "ism" ("skinless-boneless-breastism") that can get you in just as much nutritional trouble as being a vegetarian.

After Eastern Medicine there have been two other great influences that have helped me find my way through the world of misinformation. The first is a rather simple and basic perspective: that the basis of what constitutes a healthy human diet is derived from our evolutionary design. Archeological evidence supports the premise that the physiological health of our paleolithic (stone age) ancestors was generally far superior to that of our neolithic (agricultural era) ancestors and of modern people.

Studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups also confirm that a diet of foraged and hunted plant and animal foods supports optimal human health and longevity, promoting freedom from and even reversal of modern health scourges like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune disease, allergy and cancer. Paleolithic and hunter-gatherer diets were diverse, always included animal foods, prized dietary fat, and never included the large amount of starchy carbohydrate foods eaten today on a daily basis, particularly grain- and legume-based foods.

The gut-irritating proteins and mineral-binding substances in grains and legumes are innocuous in small amounts but in the large quantities consumed since the spread of agriculture a few thousand years ago, gradually deplete and inflame the human system. (Rice, especially polished rice, happens to be the least problematic grain.) Mature nutritional systems in traditional neolithic societies dealt with this problem by fermenting, sprouting and soaking grains and legumes to reduce their toxic, anti-nutritive effects, and balanced them with plenty of nutrient-dense foods. These preparation techniques are largely ignored today.

My other great influence has been the invaluable research of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist who traveled the world in the 1930s in order to understand why isolated indigenous peoples had perfect teeth, virtually free from cavities and tooth crowding, and also nearly perfect freedom from degenerative disease. He surmised and confirmed that it had to do with diet, because as each of these groups became exposed to the refined, denatured foods of modern commerce and ceased their own highly evolved nutritional practices, their mental and physical health drastically deteriorated. They suffered rampant tooth decay, and the next generation was born with marked skeletal malformations, tooth crowding, previously unseen health problems and greater susceptibility to infectious disease like tuberculosis. These problems reversed by returning to the nutrient-rich native diet.

Of crucial importance was Dr. Price's discovery that though all of these groups relied on very different food sources, they all prized "sacred" foods that sustained them with high amounts of certain fats and fat-soluble vitamins, in amounts unheard of in most modern diets. All of these sacred foods came from animal sources. Examples are organ meats, certain seafood, fish eggs, butter and cream from cattle fed on nutrient-rich pasture, certain insects, and egg yolks. Conceiving, pregnant and lactating women and growing children were always secured with higher amounts of these special foods to safeguard the health of the next generation. This is a wisdom all but forgotten in our time, but contemporary research increasingly supports Dr. Price's observations.

Not only did all of the groups in Dr. Price's study rely on animal foods; they ate high amounts of saturated fat, animal protein and cholesterol and still enjoyed nearly perfect health and longevity. This is in line with newer research showing that cardiovascular and metabolic disease have little to do with animal fat and cholesterol consumption, and everything to do with the inflammation provoked by processed foods, refined carbohydrates, hydrogenated fats and modern vegetable oils.

While being vegetarian had taught me to eat many wholesome foods I still ate plenty of sugar and junk in those years. Cutting sugar, refined flour and modern grain and seed oils (so-called :healthy" vegetable oils like canola, cottonseed, soy and corn oil) completely out of my diet probably has had more impact on my overall health than whether or not I eat meat.

These days I eat what can be termed a "paleo" or "primal" diet, essentially a modern approximation of a hunter-gatherer diet that avoids the kinds of foods that weren't available to humans during most of our evolutionary history (such as, large quantities of grain, sugar and refined oils). Since I live in rural Pennsylvania my meals center around natural, pasture-raised meat from local, sustainable farms. (The quality of meat is just as important as the decision whether or not to eat it; eating an unhealthy animal will not promote health.)

I eat eggs from pastured chickens and lots of fresh veggies, local and organic whenever possible. I eat nuts and coconut and avocado, and a little seasonal fruit. I eat only traditional fats like butter, olive oil, coconut oil, lard and other animal fats. I make broth from the bones of the animals I eat and try to eat organ meats when I can (nutrition is a practice, like anything else...). And I borrow from the advanced nutritional wisdom of the groups Dr. Price studied and take a sacred food, cod liver oil.

Specifics aside, studying nutrition has taught me a lot about the importance of connecting to our ancestors to understand how to grow and thrive as a human being. Bowing to our predecessors, symbolized by the kamiza, has taken on a new meaning for me. Aikido is a beautiful way to explore the threshold of human potential. The wisdom of our ancestors guides us in that journey.

For more information on Weston Price, visit this website: www.westonaprice.org

Grace Rollins, M.S., L.Ac., NTP candidate, practices acupuncture at Bridge Acupuncture in Doylestown, Penn.