Wizard Recipes

Your body needs more than 40 nutrients and other substances for good health. No one food can give you all the nutrients your body needs, no matter how much you enjoy it or how nutritious the food is.

By eating a wide variety of foods each day, you will keep your meals exciting and you will achieve the balance of nutrients that best ensures good health

Choose a variety of grains daily, especially whole grains

Choosing a diet rich in grains, especially whole grains, reduces your risk of many diseases. These foods provide different types of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, as well as phytochemicals-important plant substances that may be beneficial to health.

Rely on a wide variety of these foods rather than supplements as your source of nutrients, fiber, and phytochemicals. Aim for 6 servings each day-more if you are very active-and include several servings of whole-grain foods.

Choose a variety of fruits and vegetables daily

Fruits and vegetables are essential in your diet. They provide many vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and fiber, and they are low in calories and provide no fat. The goal is to have at least 2 servings of fruit and 3 servings of vegetables every day.

Variety is important.  Choose different colors and kinds of fruits and vegetables

Keep foods safe to eat

Food safety is vital. It starts well before you purchase food. However, the steps you control also make a difference.They include making sure you have clean hands and work surfaces-before and during the handling of food. Take care to separate raw, cooked, and ready-to-eat foods at all times.

Keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold. Make sure to cook food to the proper temperature. Refrigerate perishable foods and leftovers promptly. Follow the dates on containers. And finally, when in doubt, throw it out

Choose a diet that is low in saturated fat and cholesterol and moderate in total fat

Fat is a nutrient that is essential for health, but too much fat in your diet, especially saturated fat, increases your risk of several diseases, including heart disease.

Most important, learn to identify the sources of fats, saturated fats, and cholesterol, and make healthful food choices.

Choose beverages and foods to moderate your intake of sugars

Some foods that contain natural sugar (such as fruits, vegetables, and milk products) also contain essential nutrients. Others, such as table sugar, sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages, candy, and some baked goods, supply calories but few other nutrients. When consuming sugar, moderation is key.

Choose and prepare foods with less salt

Sodium, a nutrient, is a major part of table salt (sodium chloride). It is found naturally in many foods in small amounts. Salt and sodium compounds are also added to processed foods, and salt may be used in cooking or added at the table.

Reducing sodium intake lowers high blood pressure in some individuals. Moderation in sodium intake is recommended.

If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation

Alcoholic beverages (beer, wine, and hard liquor) are a source of extra calories. When consumed in excess, alcohol can impair judgment, result in dependency, and lead to several serious health problems.

However, evidence suggests that a moderate intake of alcohol is associated with a lower risk of disease of the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease) in some individuals. Discuss the consumption of alcohol with your health care provider

In the Mediterranean, snacking is a serious business. From the afternoon snack in the Italian trattoria to the elegant antipasti that precede the fanciest restaurant meals, from street fare of vendors working carts or bicycles or spreading their wares on a blanket on the street to the Spanish tapas bar where food and drink and fellowship can be found in equal parts, from the mid afternoon meze of Greece or Turkey to a quick bite of skewed, spiced meat in Morocco, snacking in the Mediterranean serves many purposes:

It fortifies the body and soul during that long stretch between the midday meal and the evening supper. It may accompany wine or ouzo or other alcoholic beverages, or it may be the perfect foil for a hot cup of tea.

Perhaps most importantly, snacking brings people together, furthering a sense of community. But snacking takes on a more insidious form in contemporary America. We eat our meals at our desks or in front of the TV or the newspaper, barely noticing the food as it passes from lips to stomach.

Because we barely remember those meals, we find ourselves still seeking satisfaction, so we snack between meals, all the while sitting at our computers or in front of our televisions. And then one day, we find that the number on the scale is a lot higher than it used to be!

It’s no wonder. We eat distractedly, so we neither taste nor recognize how much we’ve consumed. Combined with a sedentary lifestyle, such a method of eating spells disaster, for health and for spirit, as we become further and further removed from a sense of appreciation for the food that nourishes us.

The first step may indeed be to cut down on the amount of food we consume while upping the amount of attention we pay to the eating process. Less food of higher quality can help to nurture our palates and our appreciation for really good food.

For this reason, the Mediterranean snack can be, for Americans, a quite adequate and delicious meal. A hardboiled egg sprinkled with cumin and a pinch of sea salt, a wedge of rosemary foccacia, and a fresh piece of fruit make a delicious breakfast.

Who wouldn’t be satisfied with a lunch of capered fish cakes with olive-anchovy relish and a salad of fresh greens dressed in olive oil and a splash of vinegar? Or how about a plate of almond couscous and a serving of white beans with basil and cumin for dinner?

Grilled stuffed portabella mushrooms perhaps? A lovely plate of sautéed shrimp with chilies and broiled tomatoes on crispy rounds of French bread toast?

Here some ideas for Mediterranean-inspired “snacks” in just a sampling of their many wonderful incarnations. These meals are light, satisfying, portion-controlled, and best of all, fantastically memorable.

TAPAS (APPETIZERS)

In Spain, tapas are the snacks, usually served in bars, designed to accompany sherry. However, anyone can enjoy tapas, as a midday snack or as a light lunch-alcohol not required!

Tapas can include any kind of Spanish-inspired hors d’oeuvres, so use your imagination. Add a dish of almonds lightly tossed with sea salt. Wrap slices of melon in paperthin strips of proscuitto. Enjoy a few slices of Spanish goat cheese. Or serve a heaping plate of fresh, bite-sized vegetables with a shallow bowl of olive oil sprinkled with pepper and a pinch of salt, for dipping.

And of course, don’t forget the plate of olives. Try green, black, speckled . . . experiment to see what you like, but please avoid the “California-style” black ones, which are green olives treated with lye to turn them black. These can’t begin to approach the naturally brine-cured olives from Greece, Spain, Morocco, or elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

The superiority of taste in these olives far outweighs the slightly higher cost. (Serving suggestion: Invite friends! It would be a shame to deprive others of such a delightful eating experience!)

ANTIPASTI

In Italy, the fanciest of meals begin with antipasti, or a collection of Italian hors d’oeuvres made just for the purpose of announcing a grand feast and warming up the palate in preparation for the wonders to come. But antipasto can be a meal or midday snack in itself.

You don’t need a recipe to concoct a pile of crudités and a bowl of fresh green olive oil topped with pepper for dipping, which can satisfy the urge to crunch in a way no potato chip ever could.

A few marinated mushrooms, artichokes, and olives on a bed of greens make a luscious lunch, and you can buy these, imported from Italy, in any gourmet food store, and in many grocery stores, too. In the mood to cook? Try a few of these Italian-inspired recipes.

The soy controversy is alive and well in the West nowadays. The debate revolves around the phytoestrogens in soybeans.

When you eat a normal amount of these foods, it should have no affect on your health.

Soy has come under heat about their phytoestrogens since 2006, when an American Heart Association review of a 10-year study found that soy protein may not reduce post-menopause hot flashes, may not be good for the heart, and may not prevent breast cancer, uteran cancer, or prostate cancer.

It is interesting to note that soy foods and beans don’t have the highest levels of phytoestrogens. In fact, the order goes like this… nuts and oil seeds, soy products, cereals and breads, legumes, meat products, and processed foods (from highest to lowest).

Basically, the soy controversy comes down to a general lack of solid data on the risks of soybeans. Some say that it is not good for the body, and others say that the data cannot be substantiated with solid evidence.

Also, many of the studies are using extremely high dosages in their treatments and are using concentrated phytoestrogens that are taken from soybeans. The studies are not done with actual soybeans, where the concentration is much lower.

Concentrated amounts of virtually any substance are likely to be bad for your health.

Estrogen is no different.

Again, to go back to the study down in 2006 by the American Heart Association, soy supplements and pills are not good for you. We know this about supplements already.

You cannot expect to extract all the good stuff from real food, eat that, and still be healthy.

You must instead eat the good stuff to be healthy.

So, the soy controversy lives on.

The foods we buy and consume have an impact on our economy as well as our environment and there is a growing concern about how the way we live affects our global environment. Two words that are growing in popularity are green and sustainability. They both refer to the idea that products can be high quality and good for the environment, or at least not harmful.

The cost of putting food on our tables has gone down over the past few decades, mostly due to advances in agricultural techniques that allow farms to produce massive amounts of crops and animals in less time or in smaller spaces. But there are questions about how this food production is affecting our planet. Fisheries are being over-fished, rain-forests are being destroyed to make way for food production, and fertilizer and pesticide use is increasing as farmland erosion occurs worldwide. Large-scale farming also relies on massive amounts of fossil fuels and water. Plus even more fuel is used to transport foods to the market

Some forms of agriculture are more sustainable. They pollute less, may be better for the environment and include more humane farming practices for food animals. You can support sustainable agriculture by following a few green tips for your diet. Here are some ways:

Support locally grown foods. Food grown close to home requires less fuel and other resources to get to your grocery store. Eating local is also a good way to support your local economy because you buy products produced by farmers who live in your area. You can also join a Community Supported Agriculture group in your area to make supporting nearby growers easy.

Eat less beef. Meat products require more resources to produce because the animals need to be fed until they are large enough for slaughter. It takes eight pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. From this perspective, chicken is a more sustainable choice because it takes about two pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken. Fish and seafood require even less - about a pound in a half to produce a pound of farm raised fish.

Choose fish carefully. When you buy fish, you can choose either wild-caught fish or farm-raised fish. The most sustainable choices include farm-raised plant-eating species such as catfish, tilapia, and trout, which are grown in farm ponds that take up relatively small amounts of space and are quite productive. Wild-caught salmon and pollack from the Pacific ocean are also fairly sustainable, but farm-raised salmon and other carnivorous species such as tuna and sea bass are not as sustainable when compared to their plant-eating counterparts. Also avoid predator species such as swordfish, marlin, bluefin and albacore tuna.

Go organic. Plants that have been raised organically have not been exposed to artificial fertilizers or pesticides. Organically produced animal products such as milk, milk, eggs, poultry and seafood are produced from animals that have not been raised with growth hormones or given antibiotics. Organic foods are becoming more common in most grocery stores, just be sure to look for the “100% Organic” label on the product.

Read labels carefully. Some labels, such as the 100% organic labels are regulated, but words like natural and healthy aren’t regulated to mean anything specific. Other labels have low standards, for example free range chickens only need to be outside for five minutes each day. They can spend the rest of the day confined in small cages and still be considered to be free range. When you read the claims on food packaging labels, look for some indication of a certification from an organization - they’re more likely to be sustainable.

Grow your own foods. Depending on the time you have and the amount of land you own, you can grow some of your own food in a vegetable garden or possibly raise a few chickens for poultry and eggs. But even if you don’t have much space, you can still grow a few greens or tomatoes in a small container garden on your deck or if space is even tighter you can have a little herb garden in your kitchen.

Buy shade-grown, fair-trade products. Many of the regions where coffee and cocoa for chocolate are grown are suffering from loss of biodiversity as the forests are destroyed to produce cropland. Shade-grown, fair-trade products may be better for the environment and buying them helps to support small farm families who grow them.

Reuse grocery bags and containers. Many stores offer inexpensive but durable grocery bags that you can reuse every time you shop. Some stores offer incentives such as giving you a few cents off your order when you bring a bag back in. Reusing grocery bags cuts down on the number of plastic or paper bags that need to produced, and since most of them end up in the garbage, reusing garbage bags cuts back on litter and landfill use.

Filter your own water. Those plastic bottles of water may be convenient but they take a lot of resources to produce. And while some bottles are recycled, most end up in the trash. You’ll save money and help the environment by filtering your own tap water and reusing your own water bottles

Apart from breastmilk, no single food contains all the essential nutrients the body needs to be healthy and function efficiently. The nutritional value of a person’s diet depends on the overall balance of foods that is eaten over a period of time, as well as on the needs of the individual. A healthy diet is likely to include a large number or variety of foods, from each of the food groups, as this allows us to get all the nutrients that we need.

We need energy to live and this is provided by the carbohydrate, protein and fat in our diets. But the balance between these nutrients must be right for us to remain healthy. Getting the right amounts of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre and water is also important for health.

So what becomes as important as the type of foods we eat, is the amount and frequency that we include different foods in our diet. All foods can be part of a healthy diet, so you don’t have to give up the foods that are a real treat, as the key message is that it is the overall balance of foods that is important for health.

The food groups

We can think of all foods as belonging to one of five different food groups:

• Bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods
• Fruit and vegetables
• Milk and dairy foods
• Meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein
• Foods and drinks high in fat and/or sugar.

We will look at these food groups in more detail on the following pages, but let’s first think about the proportions of these food groups in our diet.

Our diets should be based on bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods and rich in fruit and vegetables. A variety of foods from these two groups should make up two-thirds of the food we eat. Most of the remaining third of the diet should be made up of milk and dairy foods, meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein, with limited amounts of foods and drinks high in fat and/or sugar.

It might be helpful for you to think of your diet as a big plate, with sections representing the different food groups. This is the healthy eating model that we use in the UK to describe a healthy varied diet and it is called the eatwell plate.

You should aim to achieve this balance every day, although it is not necessary to achieve it at every meal.

This guide is appropriate for most people over the age of two years, including: vegetarians; people of all ethnic origins; people who are a healthy weight for their height as well as those who are overweight; and pregnant women. People under medical supervision or with special dietary requirements may want to check with their doctor if this general description of healthy eating applies to them.

Children under the age of two years have high energy needs compared to their size and capacity for food so some of the foods (especially those low in fat or high in fibre) included on the eatwell plate are not suitable for them. But between the ages of two and five years, children can make a gradual transition towards the type of diet depicted in the eatwell plate.

For most healthy people, eating a healthy varied diet will provide all the vitamins and minerals the body needs. There are certain times in our lives when we may benefit from taking supplements, e.g. when you are thinking about having a baby or when you get older and you need to take a vitamin D supplement. But you should remember that supplements cannot replace a healthy diet.

Here are two easy examples to help you see that by making very simple changes to your diet, you can easily achieve the right proportions of different food groups within a meal.

Pizza:

Pizza can contain ingredients from the four main food groups:

• A dough base – from the  bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods group
• Tomato puree and other vegetables such as mushrooms, sweetcorn and peppers – from the fruit and vegetable group
• A moderate amount of cheese, or low fat cheese - from the milk and dairy foods group
• A moderate amount of ham or tuna - from the meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein group.

Bacon sandwich:

A bacon sandwich can contain ingredients from three main food groups:

• Two slices of thick cut wholemeal bread – from the  bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods group
• Lean, grilled bacon – from the meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein group
• The sandwich can be filled with plenty of lettuce and tomato and served with a glass of pure fruit juice or a piece of fruit – from the fruit and vegetable group
• If served with a glass of low fat milk, all four groups would be met.

Often the long nearness between various food and those that are consuming them creates complex communication systems along the food chain, so that the creatures come to know that certain elements are edible guided by taste, smell and color. Very often, even foods emit these signals, because it is in their interest to be eaten.

The fact that a fruit is ripe is signaled by a specific odor (a seductive aroma that reaches quite large distances), color (a shade that stands out from the green mass) or taste (usually sweet).

Usually, maturity, is when the plant seeds are ready to unwind and to germinate, is the period when the fruit has the highest concentration of nutrients and therefore the interests of plants (spreading the seeds) coincides with (the feeding) of the consumer. As a result of the previously received signals from various fruits and vegetables, our body has established that a fruit is edible, it occurs for enzymes and acids required for its decomposition. Health depends largely on the body’s ability to decode these biological signals: this fruit seems ripe, that there seems altered, that cow looks good.

This process is much easier when you know for a long time a particular food product and much more difficult if the food that you have to deal with was created just to fool your senses, using, for example, artificial flavors or synthetic  sweeteners. Food products that are fooling our senses are difficult issues of Western food to manage. It is important to note that the ecological relationships involve, at least in the first instance, those creatures that eat whole foods, not the nutrients or chemical elements contained in them.

Even if, eventually, once they have reached in our body, food is decomposed into simple chemical elements such as maize, for example, is mostly reduced to simple sugars, the whole food qualities are not unimportant. For example, the quantity and the structure of corn fiber will determine the speed with which will be released and absorbed the sugars that it contains, this is an essential aspect for the metabolism of insulin. A chemist will tell you that once in the blood the corn starch will turn into glucose, but such a reductionist view overlooks the complex and variable process that it assumes this transformation. Despite the nutritional labels, not all carbs are equal.

In other words, our body has an old and lasting relationship with maize, but not with the corn syrup with high fructose. Perhaps at some point humans will create this type of relationship with corn syrup with high fructose (as people will develop superhuman insulin systems to cope with the regular flow of pure fructose and glucose), but for now, this interaction make us sick because our body doesn’t know how to deal with all biological innovations.

In the same way, the human bodies that can handle chewing coca leaves - an old relationship met between indigenous and coca plant in some parts of South America -can not cope with cocaine or crack cocaine, even if those are three substances containing the same active elements. Maybe that reductionism, as a way of understanding, is a harmless vision or even required vision in terms of food and drugs, but the applied reductionism means to reduce food or narcotic plants to the chemical elements that they contain, and this can create problems.

What would happen if we begin to consider food is less a thing and more a relationship? In nature, things have always been like this: eating meant in fact interacting whit species in the systems that we call food chains or tropic networks, which include everything up to the soils. Species co-evolved with the other species that eat them and very often, among them develops a relationship of interdependence: I’ll feed you, if you spread my genes.

Following an evolutionary process of mutual adaptation, the apple or the pumpkin turns into a nutritious and delicious food product for certain animals. Over time and through processes of trial and failure, the plant becomes tastier (and often more visible) to answer the needs and desires of the animal, and so that the animal can develop various digestive tools (eg, enzymes) needed to exploit the plant as good as possible.

Thus, at first, the cow milk was not a nutritious product for people: in fact, it even harms them that until the people who lived around cows developed in adulthood the ability to digest milk. The gene responsible for producing lactase, the enzyme that make the digestion of milk possible, was disabled by humans shortly after medical ablation, but now five thousand years, people have suffered from a mutation where the gene which remains active throughout life, the mutation that quickly spread through a population of pastors in north-central Europe. Why? Because people which suffered this mutation have access to a new extreme nutritious food source and therefore they could multiply more easily than those who had not undergone the mutation that we are talking about. This adaptation was good for those who consume milk but also for cows that have multiplied and expanded their habitat (and have improved their health status) all because of this new symbiotic relationships.

Among other things, health status is determined by the type of relationships within a food chain extreme varied relation in the human case which is an omnivorous. So, when a link from the food chain health is affected, this can be passed on to all other living creatures that make up that food chain. If the soil is sick or suffering from certain deficiencies so will be the gras growing on it and the cows grazing grass and the people who drink their milk. This is what Weston Price and Sir Howard was thinking when they were trying to establish a connection between these apparent distant spheres: soil and human health. We can not separate our own health from the entire health chain.

Price didn’t found a singular ideal food, but met diverse population whose regime was based on fish and seafood, dairy, meat or fruit, vegetables and grains. The Masaya population from Africa consumed almost no plant, feeding meat, blood and milk. Sailors of the Hebrides did not consume milk at all; their diet was mostly based on fish, seafood and oat from which they were preparing porridge and cakes. Eskimos with whom he talked ate raw fish, hunted animals fish eggs, fat and rarely ate green plants. Along the Nile, near Ethiopia, Price met the healthiest population, according to their assessment: the tribes who ate milk, meat and blood from animals that were raised on pastures and animals from the Nile.

Price found out that the groups that were eating flesh from wild animals were generally healthier than populations of farmers who were eating mainly cereals and other plants, the farmer populations, caries and teeth problems were more frequent (but compared to us this problems remained rare). Price noted that many of the encountered populations, consumed especially animal organs which were rich in fat soluble vitamins, minerals and “active X”, a term made up by him and probably designating vitamin K2.

Price also found out that almost all studied populations valued fish and seafood, that have been eaten even by highlander groups which were crossing the mountain for long distances to obtain them, buying from the tribes on the coast, dried fish eggs and other foods. But the common denominator of a sound health, as he was saying, is a food based on fresh foods of animal origin and plants grown in soils that are rich in nutrients.

Price examined with very much attention the relationship between the quality of the foods with an animal origin and the nourishment of these animals. Comparing the vitamin content of butter come from cows that were eating fresh grass, with the butter prepared from milk of animals fed with forage, Price found out that, besides the fact that the levels of vitamins A and D were significantly higher in the butter that was yellow from the animals which were grazing pastures, the people who ate the animals were much healthier. He was convinced that the key for health was the soil quality. In 1932 Price published a book entitled New Light on Some Relationships between Soil Mineral Deficiencies, Low Vitamin food, and some degenerative Diseases.

By establishing these relationships between the quality of soil and the  of people which are on top of the food chain, Price promotes a critic against the industrialized agriculture that was just at the beginning in 1930. And was not alone: in the same period, Sir Albert Howard, an English agronomist, philosophical father of organic agriculture movement, he also claimed that the industrialization of the agriculture-especially the introduction of nitrogen synthetics as a fertilizer, which simplify the soil chemistry- will affect us eventually our health. Howard insists that “the health problems of soil, plants, animals and human must be treated together, being one and the same complex subject”. By the time as Howard’s note the above observations, they were merely a working assumption, Weston Price offered an empirical basis.

One of the most active voices of the prewar period was Weston A. Price, a dentist of Canadian origin who leaned on one of those questions of common sense, which today can not even ask us. Now, like heart disease, chronic dental problems are a part of our lives.

But if you think about it, it is strange that everyone needs a dentist and that so many people need braces, channel interference, the wisdom tooth extraction and other routine procedures necessary to maintain modern oral hygiene. The need of many remedial interventions for just one body part that is involved in the feeding activity, activity that is essential for our survival, reflects a defect in our design, a kind of omission of the natural selection? It is unlikely.

But what did Price found out? First, he found out that populations that eat traditionally have no need for a dentist.(Well, almost: the teeth of the “strong highlanders” in Switzerland, which have never seen a toothbrush, were covered with a greenish-filing but Price found that, below this layer, the teeth were well formed and had no cavity). Whenever he discovered a primitive population that hasn’t yet contact with “alimentary substitutes of modern trade” - as refined flour, sugar, vegetable oil, canned or preserved food trough chemical ways- revealed very few or none signs of modern degeneration - like chronic diseases, dental caries and dental arches with malformations. These problems were caused either by a certain element of Western diet either a certain deficiency.

Wherever Price went, he took pictures of the teeth of the populations that he met and took samples from their food and sends these to Cleveland for analysis so that he could determine the content of macro-nutrients and vitamins. He found out that the indigenous diets were much richer in vitamins A and D than the modern U.S. - in average about ten times higher. This was due in a large part to the fact that, as is it was noted in 1930, that by processing food, it loses nutrients, especially vitamins. Trade food are thought to be stored and transported over long distances and the only way that they can become more resilient and less vulnerable to pests is to remove some of the containing nutrients. In general, the calories are much easier to transport- in form of refined cereals or sugar-only nutrients that can alter or attract bacteria, insects and rodents, all extremely interested in these nutrients. (Even more than us, apparently.)

Price concluded that the modern civilization did sacrifice mostly the quality of the food in favor of the quantity and the length of the shelf-life.

Eventually, even the largest, most ambitious and most cited study on nutrition and health like Nurses’ Health Study, Women’s Health Initiative and almost all the other, leave the main features of Western food unaffected: many food products and processed meats, many added sugars and fats, except fruit, vegetables and whole grains. According to the nutritionist paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, most researchers are playing with various nutrients individually analyzed, but the subjects with whom they are working are ordinary Americans which are behaving like any ordinary American:          tries to eat smaller amounts of X nutrient and greater quantities of the Y nutrient according to the latest points of view from the nutrition field. But the global nourishment pattern is regarded as a “but” more or less invariable. Therefore probably it should not surprise us the fact that the results of these researches are so modest, equivocal and confuse.

But what about the obvious truth which nobody wants to talk about and what is the food model called Western diet? In the middle of all the nutritional confusion which is getting bigger and bigger, maybe it would be useful to take one step back and fix our eyes on this model, to review all that we know about the Western nutrition and its effects on health. We know that populations that eat like us, Westerners, register much higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity than those whit a traditionally diet. We also know that those who come to the Occident and behave and adopt our behavior food are quickly affected by these diseases and very often these diseases occur in an extremely virulent form, as happens in case of aboriginal and other indigenous peoples.

The story so-called Western diseases and their links with Western diet starts in the first decades of the twentieth century. At that time, some brave doctors, Europeans and Americans, working with various indigenous populations around the world have started to notice the virtual absence of chronic disease among these individuals, diseases that in fact had become current in the West. Albert Schweitzer in Africa and Denis P. Burkitt, Robert McCarrison in India, Samuel Hutton among Eskimos of Labrador, anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka among Native Americans and dentist Weston A Price in the middle of 12 different groups from all around the world (among the Peruvian Indians, aborigines from Australia and highlander from Switzerland) are drawn, all similar reports.

Researchers have developed lists, most published in medical journals, whit diseases which haven’t  been discovered on  indigenous populations that have been treated or studied: very few cases or no cases of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension or heart attack: no case of appendicitis , diverticulitis, deformed dental arches or tooth decay, no case of varicose veins, ulcers or hemorrhoids.

Suddenly, the researchers began to look all these conditions in a new light, just as it is shown by the name of “Western diseases” proposed for the affections by the British doctor Denis Burkitt, who worked in Africa during the Second World War. The formula suggested that these different diseases were somehow related and that probably had a common cause.