Healing Ourselves with Foods from our Ancestors
Feb 6, 2022
Healing Ourselves with Foods from our Ancestors
The land holds memories in its soil.
The body holds memories in its bones.
We eat from the land to remember.
We eat from the land to let go.
Our relationship to food is a profoundly intimate one, and is also rooted deep within our long ancestral heritage and throughout the plants and earth that nourished our great, great, great, great grandparents. Diving deeper into our own lineage can give us invaluable clues that can help us to unlock our own personalized nutrition origins.
In recent years, the dawn of certain diets like the Paleolithic Diet, for example, have seemed to popularize the potential benefits behind eating more like our ancestors. While I don’t necessarily agree on many of the intricacies of this specific diet (and most other fad diets, for that matter - please see my blog on Keto vs Paleo from May 13th for more info), I will say that adopting a diet rich in your own ancestral lineage is rooted in a great deal of truth, and ultimately health for your specific body. Looking to your own ancestors for certain nutritional guidance can also help you embrace foods native to your bloodline for physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment.
I write this article for three reasons:
1. The first is rooted in my own wholistic nutrition philosophies that no one diet – nor any one food – is innately good or bad for everyone. Sure, eating vegetables and whole grains will almost always be more optimal than a diet high in refined sugars and saturated fats (like those found in modern-day fast foods); however, the way a person achieves their own unique equilibrium will vary. And because this process is not only highly individual, it should never be compared to the masses, most especially to any dietary “fads” or popular trends of the moment. Animal meat and potatoes might actually work much better for some people than cauliflower and citrus fruits. This is the beauty of discovering your body’s unique needs and ancient knowing.
2. The second reason is rooted in longevity and our overall healthspan. Recent research suggests that the closer we stick to the diets of our own lineage, the more likely we are to live longer and healthier lives. Part of this is tied to the length of time it takes our body, evolutionarily, to adapt to new foods. If our ancestors were brought up eating certain kinds of food, our DNA will have evolved to the efficiencies of those foods too. It goes without saying that the more similarly we eat to our ancestors, the more likely we are to avoid highly processed foods of Western tradition, too, that are well known to make most of us sick.
In modern-day societies, especially if you live in a metropolitan city, we are lucky to be able to experience foods from cultures all around the globe. This exploration can be exciting and fun! From a digestive perspective, however, there’s a good chance that you are more likely to absorb and tolerate foods from your native origins than those grown in geographies far different than your ancestral line. Yes, avocados are packed with powerful nutrients, but this “superfood” might not work well for everyone’s body, especially those who may not have lineage in South America, for instance, where avocados originate. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid these foods necessarily. In fact, you may tolerate them fine, and that’s ideal! But this is all part of an interesting exploration and the start of a larger discussion about your own personalized nutrition.
3. The third impetus for this article is to celebrate the nourishment that the foods of our ancestors provide our physical bodies, as well as our spiritual and emotional bodies as well. Food is sacred. When we eat, we are connecting to the earth and animals that were sacrificed in order to feed and to fuel us. We are one with the earth and nature, especially when we choose the most natural and whole versions of foods to eat. Choosing traditional foods, spices and cooking techniques used by our ancestors can be incredibly nourishing to our souls. It can connect us to all the family members who came before us and bring us closer to our roots. This is powerful and should not be overlooked as an important component to our overall wellness and connectedness to our community, and to ourselves too. It is a topic I plan to dive deeper into as a means of helping people to utilize ancestral foods to heal personal and familial trauma.
I highly recommend to all of my patients to take a few hours and dig into what they know about their own ancestral heritage and the foods that are native to their origins. This exploration might give you a unique perspective about your own diet, and also help to pave a path to discovering the foods that work best for your body and soul too.