I’ve been reading a book called Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered
“The bones indicate that overall nutrition was good. Remains of foods recovered through archaeological excavation indicate the extraordinary variety of foods available…Dental health was generally good, corresponding with the good diet and some degree of dental hygiene.”
This point about dental hygiene is notable. We have a modern myth that prior to scientific dentistry human beings – unlike every other species – had terrible teeth. Yet again and again in my reading I seem to find that the evidence indicates that the only premodern Europeans who had bad teeth were the rich.
Why the rich? Well, take Elizabeth I for example, who reputedly had terrible teeth. England was raking in the cash partly through the sugar trade. The rich therefore had access to vast quantities of the stuff and it ruined their teeth. This is rather analogous to the Roman nobility who got lead poisoning from their water pipes – their privilege ended up working against them.
If we didn’t eat so much sugar in modern times the dental profession would probably shrink dramatically. They’re an inadequate intervention against a problem that is nutritional first, a question of hygiene only second. Weston Price found in his survey of traditional cultures that not only was their teeth excellent but, for example, their jaws even had enough room to comfortably accommodate their wisdom teeth!
The fact that we moderns have to get our wisdom teeth removes reflects the poor quality of our nutrition compared to various supposedly backward peoples, including our own ancestors.
In that vein, Price also found that when isolated traditional cultures started eating modern processed food their good dental health declined dramatically and almost instantly (and in fact their health in general).
All of this just reinforces my argument that being Heathen should probably mean being anti-refined sugar. I mean, everyone should be anti-sugar regardless of their spiritual affiliation really, but for Heathens it seems especially important because of our emphasis on reconstituting the old wisdoms of Europe.
Despite how strongly I feel on this subject, I still find it very hard to overcome my sugar addiction – even knowing how bad the stuff is I still get tempted, for example in situations where I don’t expect to be offered some evil sugar-based substance.
I worked out that I need to have a blanket no-sugar policy established in advance. So a couple of days ago I set myself a dare – for the next 30 days, no refined sugar. I can assuage my addictive voices with the promise that this isn’t a permanent break, just an experiment.
At the end of my 30 days I’ll be able to take stock. Already my allergies are getting less severe (though this is also due to high consumption of Eyebright, Camomile, and Licorice root teas, and rubbing them on my eyes and forehead, which is incredibly effective against even the worst hay fever migraines). I seem to have more energy and be less irritable, too.
It is quite likely that after 30 days I’ll choose to keep going for another 30 days, and keep doing that ad infinitum. Sounds good to me! 25 months ago I quit smoking cigarettes and that was hard – it took years and years of struggle and effort. But now I know I can overcome any addiction, because nicotine is powerfully scored into my personal and family orlogs as a deadly foe. I’m sure many readers could find similar sources of inspiration to fire up the anti-sugar quest.
Here comes the part where I lay down the challenge: join me on the 30 day no-sugar challenge! Think of it as an act of devotion to your body, your life, your spirituality. I’ve already managed to inspire two people to commit to a similar project and I want to spread the no-sugar disease!
It takes a little advance preparation, and you’ll find it necessitates a few big changes, for example only eating very high quality bread (or none at all) – because most white bread is just sugar; and also you might want to cut back on fruit juice (actually, orange juice is much nicer when cut with water anyway – smoother and more refreshing).
Trading white rice for brown is also a part of “no sugar”, because this extremely simple carbohydrate is basically sugar. You’ll never get over your chocolate and candy cravings if a third or a half of every meal is white bread or white rice.
When I first tried to move away from a carbohydrate overloaded diet I couldn’t imagine what I could eat instead. Then I discovered vegetables! The less white bread, white rice, and refined sugar you eat, the more you realise that vegetables actually taste really good.
Also, traditional cookery offers a myriad of creative ways to make them even more mouth-watering than they are in their natural state. My homemade sauerkraut is so good that people ask for second helpings when I serve it to them. Note that I am not advocating an extreme anti-carb diet, just a balanced diet with “real” carbs rather than refined wheat and sugar poison.
If you want to Take the Elhaz Ablaze 30 Day No Sugar Challenge then please, post a little comment to that effect, and let us all know how you are going with it. This has to be one of the most constructive and fun ways to express our Heathenry that I can think of. See you at the other end of the big Three Oh!
The Vikings used honey as sweetener. The following is an interesting article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/vikings/food_01.shtml.
So to take out sugar from one’s diet is to become like a Viking! Heilir Aesir and Vanir!
Review of Weston Price’s magnum opus, “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration”: http://www.westonaprice.org/Nutrition-and-Physical-Degeneration-by-Weston-A.-Price.html.
When I lived in Germany I enjoyed eating multigrain bread with lard. Lard is really tasty and contains fat soluble vitamins lacking in processed food. German bread is uniquely good: you just can’t get it in Australia. Even when baked in the German style, the ingredients are different.
There is science to back you up you know…take a look at anything by Kathleen DesMaisons – Potatoes Not Prozac is a good place to start. Our bodies need the ‘whole foods’ to function properly – physically and mentally. Sugar is a poison. Mental biochemistry is greatly affected by what we put into our bodies. Good luck on your challenge! We’re on slightly different journeys but I think the destination is the same.
I have been reading a bit in the area of medical anthropology. Price needs to be read critically – there is a lot of Romanticism in the way he viewed non-Western cultures. Vascular and heart diseases already existed in ancient Egypt. As to life expectancy in medieval Britain: an average of 30 years. Infectious diseases were common causes of death in pre-modern Europe, and the Catholic Church did much to obstruct the development of medical science. Sick people were often left to die because they were viewed as sinners punished by God!
Heathenry is about being well-informed, so we should all keep reading. The Vikings explored new horizons – the world of knowledge should be treated the same.
Thinking critically is good, but I think a lot of the points you raise don’t do much to impair the credibility of Price’s theories about human nutrition.
Sure, he is a romantic, but that doesn’t mean that his claims that – to pick three central points of his views – nutrient dense food is good for you, that vitamins A and D are good for you, or that high calorie processed foods are destructive to your health, are false! It just means that he lived and wrote in a time before political correctness and while his tone can offend our more refined sensibilities that doesn’t make a lick of difference to the truth or falsity of his nutritional ideas.
A lot of the counter evidence you cite is also irrelevant. Price says nothing about medieval Britain, for example. That said, we know that in medieval Europe there was an incredible level of squalor, particularly in cities – plenty of conventional epidemiological research has concluded that the biggest contributor to modern health has been improved sanitation, not diet or medical developments. Similarly, in medieval Europe infant mortality was much higher and so were deaths by injury…but if we control for these factors then the life span back then suddenly gets a lot longer. These factors have vevry, very little to do with nutrition and everything to do with having limited access to emergency medicine.
Similarly, Price doesn’t say that all premodern peoples had perfect health – re: those ancient Egyptians. He merely reports that a range of premodern cultures that DID have excellent health that he encountered had certain common themes in their diets – low calorie but high in nutrients, plenty of fat-soluable vitamins, etc.
So yes, let us all keep reading, but also let’s try to think carefully about what we read…as I know you do!
Price has some fundamental good points but in my view he draws broad philosophical conclusions about human health in general that disregards empirical variations in the real world (e.g the sustainability of vegetarianism with many people and cultures). If we delve more into medical anthropology, a lot more examples and counter-examples in relation to Price will come up. Sure processed food in modernity brings on more diseases like cancer and heart and vascular disease, but they already existed in ancient cultures. Processed food exacerbates an ancient problem. But it does not follow logically that in ancient (and medieval) times there were less health problems. This is what Romanticists tend to ignore as they perpetually seek for the perfect alternative not existent in the present. Will they understand what it would be like to live with parasites in your body? That was a common pre-modern problem across the world.
Herbal medicine existed in medieval Europe but it was not effective against serious infectious diseases. Also the mechanisms of the spreading of diseases were not understood at the time. Likewise elsewhere in the world. This has nothing to do with the ability of a people as a cultural group in any part of the world. There was a universal absence of the concept of microorganisms and in many cases, public health control. Religion was often obstructive rather than being of help (but it probably made the dying feel better.)
Elsewhere in the world, say in the Far East, the Chinese developed a seemingly sophisticated system of herbal medicine that was a mixture of empirical studies and unquestioned philosophical and religious ideas. It was no match against the wrath of infectious and chronic diseases. Life expectancy in ancient China ranged between the early twenties and the mid-thirties – pretty comparable with other parts of the world.
How do we actually measure the immune level of pre-modern peoples?
In relation to Egypt medical studies were performed on mummies. Similar studies were performed on mummies in China to identify the diseases that ancient Chinese died from.
Price has some very good ideas but in true heathen spirit we have to be careful about the fallacy of “confirmation bias”. Nutrition is a very complex field and I don’t believe that one thinker – and Price is an original thinker – has all the answers!
Life expectancy is ironically higher among we modern people who are “unhealthier”, because we now have medical help. Even in 1900, life expectancy in the West was 45. Antibiotics changed all that decades later.
Let us apply the principle of avoiding confirmation bias again: Japan has reportedly the highest life expectancy in the world, despite the fact that white sugar is a main ingredient in modern Japanese cooking (along with other processed nasties); high stress in social norms and structure; overcrowded living. The Japanese level of medical service is comparable with the West. So what is causing this? One suggestion is that the great amount of seafood that they consume may counter the effects of the nasties that they also ingest and are surrounded with, such as pollution and congestion.
We cannot get away from diseases, partly because bacteria and viruses are all around us, and partly because we have to live with genetic anomalies and the natural wear and tear of the human body. Physical existence involves a high level of contingency; this is probably why religion is still with us. (A joke: immortal vampires may have less need for religious faith!) Good nutrition will help us live better and longer, I believe, but we cannot do without modern medicine.
So by bringing up the subject of life expectancy (a theme in medical anthropology as well as an issue of practical concern), other factors are thrown into light. We all want to live long in a healthy body – otherwise the topic of nutrition will not have come up at all in the first place.
As to your suggestion that taking away ancient and medieval living conditions will mean that our ancestors would have lived longer, that is an ahistorical argument after the fact. Those conditions were part and parcel of those historical periods and in modern heathenry, we have no need to “reconstruct” them! Adopt our ancestors’ wisdom and the good things about their life-style and their belief systems, but let us not mimic them uncritically! The Odinic spirit is open and enquiring, in contrast to mainstream Christians, Buddhists etc. who want to adhere to processed dogmas in order to avoid living with the contingencies of existence on earth. (The spirit realm has different laws but as spirits – including ghosts – do not eat, nutrition is not relevant to them. What they need is a healthy mental “diet” so that they can ascend.)
This is why it is important to keep on reading both inspirational and scientific sources (and the latter can be inspirational, too), so thank you to your blog articles to provoke and to encourage thoughts on this subject matter – and its relevance to living a heathen life in postmodern times!
Thanks for your thanks ;) To be honest I’m not all that strongly swayed by a lot of the points you raise, but I’m happy for readers to sort out what they think for themselves. Too much debate can lead to simplistic polarisation of one’s thinking!
Two points though:
1) I don’t think its ahistorical to offer a theory for the cause of historical phenomena such as death rates or life spans;
2) I’ve never actually said anything anti-vegetarian in my posts – other people have been reading between the lines.
As for modern medicine, remind me to lend you a book called “Confessions of a Medical Heretic.” It is a bit dated, but also quite shocking. I’m not trying to sway your point of view in any direction, however.
Too much sugar kills the heart: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/sugar-as-bad-as-fat-20100421-su8s.html.