Studying the Natural #5: The Real Natural

The Real Natural

It's time we take a step back further to learn about the real Natural. The one who came before modern living. Before we "hunted" at the gym and "gathered" at the grocery store. Before we had 24/7 air conditioning and artificial lighting to trick our bodies. Far before we could fly fruit from Chile up to Chicago and think that's fine to eat(lol). Way before we've come to consider optimal health is hiding inside a smoothie or expensive supplement. It's time we understand our roots.

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The Obvious

What can we gather from looking at hunter-gather tribes (a.k.a. the original Natural)?

Barefoot or grounded through natural material soled shoes all day.
In the sun almost all the day & most of their skin showing.
No sunglasses, sunscreen, or any other potential disconnection from sunlight.
Woke up to the sunrise and went to bed after dark.
Local, in-season, and organic (how food is supposed to be) food.
No artificial light, nnEMF technology, or other man-made modern conveniences
No modern cushioned shoes with arch supports
And the list goes on...

What results do we see?

We don't see any obesity, heart attacks, or dementia. There's no torn ACLs or hamstring tears. There's no chronic injuries. Most are quite fit and have functional bodies. No teeth problems or digestion issues. There's no ADHD or anxiety issues. Basically all the modern health problems we've come to think as normal don't exist in this alternate universe (how it's supposed to be). This further reinforces the notion of working with Nature and doing what we can to limit our time working against Nature.

The common response from the average person is why learn from hunter-gatherers? They live much shorter lives than advanced civilizations. Right? Not really. Average human life expectancy in the West has been decreasing since 2016. Not to mention, quality of life (physique, function, etc) is far worse in modernized western countries...

Average life expectancy in hunter-gatherer societies is lower than in most affluent nations today, which largely stems from higher rates of infant mortality and a lack of medical assistance. However, it’s important to note that recent studies that have looked into the life expectancy of adult hunter-gatherers refute the idea that our Stone Age ancestors lived nasty, brutish, and short lives. A compilation of data on hunter-gatherer societies suggest that modal age of adult death is about seven decades (adaptive life span of 68-78 years). Moreover, foragers, unlike most westerners, tend to be healthy all the way up to old age. (Source)

Below, we'll have a look at a few prominent hunter-gatherer tribes that have been studied by researchers.

The Hadza

Who: A group of people who live in an area of the world where our species most likely originated. The lifestyle of Hadza hunter-gatherers is thought to resemble that of early humans.
Where: Tanzania.
Health: The incidence of the diseases of civilization is very low among traditionally living Hadza people. Studies dating back a couple of decades show that the prevalence of infectious disease among the Hadza is relatively low when compared with the prevalence among other settled groups in the northern Tanzania and southeastern Uganda region.
Primary subsistence mode: Hunting, scavenging, and gathering.
Traditional diet: Meat, honey, baobab, berries, and tubers**.** Macronutrient intake fluctuates with the seasons. Men eat more meat and honey than women, who rely more on plant foods for nourishment.
Lifestyle: Plenty of sun exposure, moderate levels of physical activity, and lots of microbial exposure.

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For instance, the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer group in northeast Tanzania that Pontzer has studied for the past ten years, spend their days walking eight to 12 kilometers, climbing trees and digging for root vegetables. Their diet consists of various meats, vegetables and fruits, as well as a significant amount of honey. In fact, they get 15 to 20 percent of their calories from honey, a simple carbohydrate.

The Hadza tend to maintain the same healthy weight, body mass index and walking speed throughout their entire adult lives. They commonly live into their 60s or 70s, and sometimes 80s, with very little to no cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure or diabetes—conditions that are rapidly growing in prevalence in nearly every corner of the world. (Source)

Hadza people in Africa can eat shit on a shingle, take antibiotics and never get sick. Their redox is high because they live on the equator. nnEMF is also low in environment of the Hadza.

Dr. Jack Kruse

The Hadza, like most hunter-gatherer tribes who are able to maintain their traditional lifestyle, unconsciously work with Nature. All the positive health outcomes speak for themselves.

The Maasai

Who: A Nilotic ethnic group of semi-nomadic people.
Where: Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania.
Health: Low incidence of diseases of civilization as long as they stick with their traditional lifestyle. The Maasai are no different from other Africans who don’t have access to modern health care in that they are not spared from infectious diseases.
Primary subsistence mode: Pastoralism.
Traditional diet: Primarily milk, meat, and blood.
Lifestyle: Moderate-high amounts of physical activity, regular sun exposure, and little access to modern hygiene and pharmaceuticals.

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You can watch the ankle stiffness here in their foot/ankle complex as they effortlessly spring back up after each landing. This is created through the fascial tension built up over their lifetime living naturally and having full functionality of their feet. The lack of modern shoes allowed this function to grow and be fostered during childhood as opposed to broken down in western cultures. I can tell you confidently they probably don't have any fascial adhesions or quad dominance. As PJF was saying, this is NBA level "bounce".

No gym, no trainers, and no freak genetics. Just built in Nature. Simple.

Below we'll look at some Australian aboriginals and other tribesmen.

Son, Grandfather, and Father - Australian aboriginal males, ripped and muscular without the use of a gym, calorie counting, or fat-burning supplements.

Contemporary hunter-gatherers demonstrate what I mean. Without the energy-dense calories, dietary poisons, and reduced physical activity of the Western way of life, most traditional non-industrial hunter-gatherers and agrarians don't normally have a problem becoming healthy, muscular, and/or maintaining a low body fat percentage. The Australian Aborigines pictured above are an awesome example of what the human body was designed to look like.

The human body is a powerful survival machine designed to be fueled by real food and regular physical activity. In our Western world we have lost sight of this, believing that it is perfectly normal to be sick, weak, and overweight. This is just not so. (Source)

A Kitavan male having his waist measured to determine his BMI (taken in 1989).

A picture taken of Matabele males in 1939.

Here is a painting of Maori defending a village.

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The chest development, of necessity, must have large lung capacity for living in the rare atmosphere of the high Andes. The boy shown above has a magnificent physique, including facial and dental arch development. Below is seen the typical clothing worn up among the snows. Even in frosty weather they are bare below the knees.

The modernization of the Sierra Indians through the introduction of foods of modern commerce has produced a sad wreckage in physique and often character. The boy at the upper left is a mouth breather because his nostrils are too small to carry sufficient air. The girl at the upper right has a badly underdeveloped chin and pinched nostrils. Both boys below have badly narrowed arches with crowding teeth

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THE FOLLY OF THINKING YOU NEED INDOOR GYMS TO REMAIN FIT IN A PICTURE FROM TIME

Aboriginals of Australia are the oldest living culture in the world and yes we too had dreadlocks. No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may do it. We must have skin in our own game.

From the Battye Library of Western Australia, this photo was taken in the early 20th century and shows two Njamal men whose heights were recorded at 6'7" and 6’5”.

This is how you look when you live in nature. They are muscular and strong and never go to the gym or do burpees. They ate local seasonal food including aquatic food. Their skin is shiny and healthy because it got sunshine all day every day and nothing but firelight or moonlight after sunset. The melanin in their skin hair and eyes harvested sunlight information and energy for seasonal cellular metabolism to keep their uncoupled mitochondria humming along.

They walked barefoot and slept on the earth and benefitted from the stronger magnetic field at night time that helped program their cellular metabolism. They did not get chronic diseases. So you wonder why you do..........maybe you should walk and live as you were designed by nature?

Dr. Jack Kruse

Dr. Weston A Price

Dr. Price was a dentist who went traveling the world to discover the truth behind beautiful and healthy teeth. His travels led to a whole plethora of books, articles, and teachings carried on by many other doctors, nutritionists, and other dentists of course.

The groups Price studied included sequestered villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, indigenous peoples of North and South America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maori.

Wherever he went, Dr. Price found that beautiful straight teeth, freedom from decay, good physiques, resistance to disease and fine characters were typical of native groups on their traditional diets, rich in essential nutrients.

When Dr. Price analyzed the foods used by isolated peoples he found that, in comparison to the American diet of his day, they provided at least four times the water-soluble vitamins, calcium and other minerals, and at least TEN times the fat-soluble vitamins, from animal foods such as butter, fish eggs, shellfish, organ meats, eggs and animal fats–the very cholesterol-rich foods now shunned by the American public as unhealthful.

These healthy traditional peoples knew instinctively what scientists of Dr. Price's day had recently discovered — that these fat-soluble vitamins, vitamins A and D, were vital to health because they acted as catalysts to mineral absorption and protein utilization. Without them, we cannot absorb minerals, no matter how abundant they may be in our food.

Dr. Price discovered an additional fat-soluble nutrient, which he labeled Activator X, that is present in fish livers and shellfish, and organ meats and butter from cows eating rapidly growing green grass in the Spring and Fall. All primitive groups had a source of Activator X, now thought to be vitamin K2, in their diets.

Weston A. Price Foundation

Dr. Cate Shanahan

Another great expert to learn from is Dr. Shanahan who wrote the book Deep Nutrition.

A key concept that we can take is that form follows function. This is something I always knew intuitively, but Dr. Shanahan was the first to put it into words I could understand. It's also something I've gone over before but still vital to reinforce.

Health and beauty is a package deal. Optimal form on the outside (in Nature) means one has optimal function on the inside to create that form. In our modern unnatural world, we've become able to cheat the outward form with surgery, bodybuilding, stimulants, and hormone replacement to name a few.

These things do nothing to replace the inward function. This is displayed when we see a big guy who looks strong but turns out is pretty weak in practice.

For all those that wish to blame genetics for great looks or athleticism, don't forget that diet and lifestyle influences gene expression. Dr. Shanahan talks a lot about how what you do affects the expression of your genes. All the Inner Furnace work takes that to another level by improving mitochondrial redox.

Eating indigenous foods, ancestral diet protocols allows your body to fully grow into the golden ratio bringing you closer to the divine growth template of nature itself.

Dr. Cate Shanahan

Final Thoughts

It sounds cliché, but hunter-gatherers are just living naturally. How humans were meant to live. Modern agriculture goes against many principles of Nature, and the environment (namely the soils and the ocean) pays the price. This leads downstream to us receiving nutrient-deficient foods and paying the ultimate price in our health.

That also doesn't mean we can't enjoy modern technology to some extent, but there are efforts needed to make modern technology safer. There haven't been incentives set up toward that end so it really has yet to be explored by modern science.

Understand how native hunter-gatherer tribes serve as a contrast to our modern unnatural world and the results speak for themselves.