We are the only animal on planet earth that eats a non-local, non-seasonal diet, and yet suffers from catastrophic levels of nutritional disease.
This is so tragic it’s downright funny.
Non-local, non-seasonal diets are one of the major causes of disease and suffering in our modern world.
Our society and the global economy could easily collapse under the weight (pun intended) of nutritional disease. This is, of course, by design. This is what my book, Dying to Be Free, is all about. I joke with patients that the secret to a long and healthy life is to sell all of your worldly possessions, move to a tropical island, and eat a local, seasonal diet rich in fish and shellfish. So far, only one patient has taken me up on this.
The one diet to rule them all is a local, seasonal diet without dogmatic exclusions.
What is a local, seasonal diet, and why do I consider it to be superior to all others? First, it is a diet that emphasizes foods in season and that are grown locally. Our nutritional requirements are largely seasonal. For example, when we get abundant ultraviolet-B light from the sun or a vitamin D lamp, we need less vitamin D from food. All cultures that live in high latitudes emphasize foods that are rich in vitamin D during the winter. Imagine eating high-vitamin D fish twice a day, every day in the winter. Likewise, ultraviolet light destroys folate, and for that reason we should expect that we would need to consume more folate in sunnier climates and seasons. Not surprisingly, folate rich foods like greens and legumes grow only in warm, brightly lit environments. The nutritional requirements of summer are best met by the foods that grow in summer, and the nutritional requirements of winter are best met by those foods that are available in the winter.
The nutrients you need most to meet the needs of the season are found in the foods that grow abundantly IN THAT SEASON.
This is a very simple premise that is proven by the literature in medical anthropology. When anthropologists (and doctors) have examined the health of indigenous cultures, they find that those who have adopted modern foods (white flour, sugar, canned and processed foods) suffer from modern diseases (dental decay, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, and more). Dr. Francis Pottenger found this in his studies on nutrition in cats. When he fed the cats raw meat, raw milk, and cod liver oil, they were healthy. Just cooking the food or pasteurizing the milk led to worse health that increased from generation to generation. So severe was this degeneration that by the third generation, the cats were sterile and died out. Consider the fact that humanity has been experimenting with highly processed food diets for several generations by now, and the modern epidemic of infertility suddenly isn't so surprising.
This is why one of my first webinars on this Substack was on Pottenger’s Cats.
What many people fail to appreciate is that with modern, processed foods come modern, high-tech lifestyles. People who have access to processed food don't need to hunt, gather, or garden, and this changes how much time they spend outside and how much exercise they get, and this in turn affects their health. As humans have moved indoors, rates of autoimmune diseases, allergies, hormonal disorders, neurological diseases, and psychiatric illness have all risen disastrously. This is not a coincidence.
Living an unnatural, indoor lifestyle is creating disease just as surely as fake, processed food. This is creating a vicious cycle. Your immune system gets confused when you give it unnatural signals, like artificial light. This is why I wrote this blog post on blue blockers and this blog post on fixing your light environment. It’s also why I wrote this blog post on how important UV light is.
As the immune system becomes confused, it tends to attack more and more foods, leading to allergic and autoimmune diseases. This is why elimination diets are so popular today, and will only become more popular in the future. Our modern, indoor lifestyles are responsible for the rise of allergic and autoimmune diseases. I write more about this in my book, Dying to Be Free, including what people should do about it. Just because you feel better on an elimination diet does not mean that that is the best diet in the world for you. It may mean that it is the best diet in the world for you right now, but what about in six weeks? Six months? A year? A decade?
One of the problems with elimination diets is that they frequently lead to diets that are low in certain nutrients. If you go back and read the work of scientists like Linus Pauling, it becomes apparent that low nutrient levels are a recipe for degenerative diseases like heart disease, dementia, stroke, and cancer. The literature is clear that there is a "sweet spot" for nutrient intake. Not too much and not too little is the secret.
How do we define not too much and not too little? I base this on labs, because otherwise you really have no idea what your nutritional status is. I also base it on comprehensive analysis of your diet, down to the exact gram quantity of different foods. This "not too much, not too little" is also affected by nutrient-nutrient interactions. For example, excessive phosphorus in the diet leads to release of parathyroid hormone, or PTH, which triggers excretion of phosphorus. PTH also triggers the resorption of bone, which can lead to osteoporosis. This is also linked to excessive losses of positively charged minerals like copper, zinc, calcium, magnesium, and potassium. So excessive phosphorus in the diet can lead to losses of vital minerals in the urine.
This is just one of an infinite number of examples. With my patients, I am always working toward a local, seasonal diet. They can't always tolerate this right away, or even after months of years of careful living and eating, but that is always the end goal.
What about all the people who say that they have gotten better on this, that, or the other diet? There is obviously and undeniably therapeutic value in various diets. In my opinion, their benefits come down to one of two factors. First, the elimination of foods to which the patient is allergic. Second, changes in the balance of nutrients in their diet. Let me give you two very clear examples.
Certainly the most controversial and extreme diet that has become popular in recent years is the carnivore diet. There are many variations on this diet. Some people will include fruit, honey, and seafood, but let us just consider animal meat as the base of this diet. First, this eliminates the vast, vast majority of foods to which patients have allergic reactions. Food additives, including natural and artificial colorings, flavor enhancers, preservatives, anti-caking agents, anti-humectants, emulsifiers, and more are excluded on this diet. The problem with allergies is that they are so protean in their manifestations. I have seen food allergies trigger headaches, inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease), irritable bowel syndrome, joint pain (various forms of arthritis), brain fog, fatigue, and much, much more. This is the first reason that elimination diets (like the carnivore diet, which eliminates virtually everything) are so effective. Once the immune system is no longer spending all of its time and energy attacking food (or other elements of the environment), the body can do things like repair itself and eliminate lingering or hidden infections. As the body comes back into a healthy state, the patient frequently discovers that they can tolerate foods that they had previously been allergic to, at least in small doses and infrequently.
The second reason elimination diets work is the biochemical. If you look at the nutritional content of aa vegan or vegetarian diet, there is an abundance of copper and low level of zinc. Copper and zinc compete with one another, so excesses of one can create deficiencies of the other. If there are two symptoms I expect to see with high copper and low zinc levels, it is headaches and abdominal pain. A typical story of a vegan going carnivore is that their headaches and abdominal pain go away.
What most people miss about this is that nutrients accumulate in the body, so sticking with a carnivore diet for too long may be a recipe for copper deficiency and zinc excess. However, the patient can readily avoid this if they include seafood and beef liver in their diets, which are both rich sources of copper. I don't think it's a coincidence that about two years after the carnivore craze caught on, the carnivore influencers are busy pumping up the benefits of beef liver.
My problem with extreme diets like the carnivore diet for prolonged periods of time is that no one has ever observed them for long periods of time in large cohorts. The notion that one can eat a carnivore diet indefinitely and live a long and healthy life is a premise that has not been tested. The world's longest living people and communities do not eat a carnivore diet. They observe a traditional lifestyle, which includes a local, seasonal diet. It also implies limitations upon technology use, such as social media or television.
These changes in nutritional content in the diet take places over weeks to months. For example, someone who transitions from a vegetarian diet rich in vitamin C to a carnivore diet low in vitamin C might see scurvy manifest within weeks to months. I know, I know, the carnivore influencers say this is not a problem - I have seen scurvy in a patient observing a Paleo diet. It is possible if there is excessive consumption of vitamin C due to a pathological condition, or inadequate absorption due to diseases in the gut. In contrast, someone transitioning from carnivore to vegan might see B-12 deficiency manifest over several months or even a year, because that is how much B-12 the liver can store.
When we eat a wide range of foods, we guard against the development of food allergies and intolerances, and the development of nutritional deficiencies. By emphasizing a seasonal pattern to our eating, we naturally get more of the nutrients we need to cope with the various stresses of that season. As we move away from local, seasonal diets, we see more and more disease manifest. The more stress we endure, from sound to light to EMF to psychosocial stress, the greater our nutritional needs in order to cope with those stresses.
This is why nutritional deficiencies are rampant today, and this is why the careful use of nutritional supplements is fundamental to my practice. That is why I wrote The Rational Use of Nutritional Supplements.
Soon, I will be releasing the companion article to that post - The Rational Use of Herbs and Adaptogens.
Until then, be well,
Dr. Stillman