Satisfying Your Ancestral Appetite

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Living La Vida Local

Excursions to the taro fields yield another hugely important benefit: exercise. Traditional lifestyles required a lot of traditional work, exertion that many lifestyles lack today. For example, many Alaskan natives have higher rates of heart disease and stroke than people in the rest of the country, even if they eat native foods, says Barbara V. Howard, Ph.D., a professor of medicine at Georgetown University. "The huge differences between the native way of life and now," says Howard, "are the lack of physical activity and the amount of calories." Even among ancient peoples, it appears that the active hunter-gatherers were healthier than their more sedentary agriculturalist counterparts, in whose dense communities diseases could spread.

Dining Outside the Box

Fortunately, experts say there is no need to import your ancestral diet from Africa or China. Eating a healthy diet with lots of plant foods and fiber, cutting back on processed foods rich in refined sugar and exercising regularly will go a long way toward protecting your health, says Terry Shintani, M.D., author of The Hawaii Diet (Atria, 1999, $24). After his success in getting native Hawaiians to lose weight by following their traditional diet, Shintani expanded his scope to develop a multicultural diet. Despite what research is telling us about genetics and diet, says Shintani, "People are more similar than they are different. You don't have to eat one type of ethnic food; the idea is to eat ethnic foods from many cultures." Shintani's high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet improved weight loss and lowered cholesterol in non-native Hawaiians who ate locally obtained foods in season prepared as healthily as possible.

A number of companies are now offering to test your genes and tell you what you should and should not be eating. However, we still don't know enough about how these genes interact with other genes, nutrients and factors in our environment, says Jim Kaput, Ph.D., an expert in nutritional genomics at the University of California, Davis. Until we do, although we may not know exactly where great-grandmother was from, we can follow the global tradition of choosing healthy foods purchased from local sources. Now my family spends weekends at a nearby farm, getting exercise while learning about our foods' origins. Both my children love picking ripe cherry tomatoes and eating them right in the field.