Eric Edmeades lays it on the line: “The entire food industry is predicated on making you afraid. They’ve made you afraid of meat, of eggs, vegetables, even friggin’ water! This way you have to pop pills and buy supplements.”

And yet we grow steadily unhealthier ...

“Our bodies evolved to survive sub-Saharan Africa. To move. To adjust to inconsistent food supply and seasonality. And our ancestors didn’t feast on glyphosate, toxic food additives, and seed oils.” What Edmeades calls “The Evolution Gap” has opened. “It’s the gap between our very slow pace of evolution and our incredible capacity for innovation. It’s creating sickness, stress, anxiety, disease, and addiction and suicide.”

Slowly, says Edmeades, “we’ve been moving away from our naturally evolved lifestyle. And the further and further we move away from that, the worse it gets. In the 1970s, you pretty much had to be over forty years old to get type 2 diabetes. But the food industry has changed so much since then that it no longer takes thirty years. You can have diabetes as a teenager. And, by the way, it’s the single biggest risk factor for the development of cancer and heart disease as well.”

Watch Eric Edmeades

According to the American Diabetes Association, by 2021, 38.4 million – or 11.6% – of the US population had diabetes. And according to Heart.org, 115.9 million Americans have pre-diabetes.

THE SUGAR LIFESTYLE GRIFT

“You're fat and here’s why.” Edmeades explains that there’s sugar in all processed food – and a lot of it. “The food manufacturing industry, their lobbyists, and their effect on our legislation is killing you. The cigarette industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince people that lung cancer was just a lifestyle disease. This way, you choose to smoke, you choose the lifestyle – so it’s your choice. You’re to blame.”

Similarly, the food industry has been working hard to convince you that if you’re overweight, if you’re pre-diabetic, or already have type 2 diabetes, you have a lifestyle disease! “No you don’t,” Edmeades insists. “You have a disease of captivity – a disease of unethical food manufacturing and production.”

THE CLEANSING GRIFT

You can cleanse, drink expensive juices, and give up juicy steaks for a few days all you want. “But it’s pointless,” Edmeades explains, “if you just put crap back into your body afterwards.”

He reminds us that we have a natural cleansing system: the lymphatic system. 

“The purpose of lymph is to cleanse you out. But we haven’t evolved a physical pump to move it around our body. In our evolutionary history, when you woke up in the morning, there was no food, and you had no choice but to go out and move. If you didn’t take a thousand steps a day, you didn't cleanse that day. You’ve got to move lymphatic fluid around your body by moving.”

The second most important cleansing practice, he says, “is to fast occasionally and extend it beyond 48 hours. Because it's only after 48 hours that your body moves into the burning of old proteins.”

Burn your proteins? Read on …

THE OVEREATING GRIFT

Common wisdom holds that you’re supposed to have three “square” meals a day, right? You’re supposed to eat as soon as you feel hunger pangs.  Untrue, says Edmeades. Intermittent fasting allows your body to use all three fuel sources: sugar, fat, and protein – the last of which most people never consider, to their detriment.

“You can burn sugar, and your body will always burn sugar preferentially, as it's toxic. Your body wants to get rid of it whenever you put it in. When you don't put any sugar in at all, as when fruit season ended in nature and the honey was gone, your body would switch to burning fat. That's the slow-burn energy that you run marathons on. But what happens when you stop burning fat? You move into this next phase where you're not burning fat at all: autophagy. This is where you burn protein.”

Edmeades laughs. “You're gonna go: ‘Oh, my God, that's bad for my muscles! And I worked so hard to get them!’ But it’s not bad. Your body is smart. It burns old, sick, and broken diseased proteins first, and it is important to burn those out. Fasting allows your body to clean out sugars, fats, and then old proteins.

“The body is metabolically flexible,” he explains. “You have three gears, three modes of sugar-burning, fat-burning, and protein-burning, and you should be able to run all three of them, and with some regularity. The average person in America is stuck in one gear, and that one gear leads to cancer, heart disease, terrible Covid outcomes by the way, obesity, and the rest.”

The problem, he says, is that we’ve moved away from our evolutionary truths. Our ancestors had a rhythm of eating from three or four hours after they woke up until about three or four hours before they went to sleep. “They didn’t call that intermittent fasting! They had to wake up and go out and find food. I call that natural nutritional behavior, natural human behavior.”

Edmeades recommends making fasting a part of your health regimen. He goes on a three-day fast monthly. “I don’t counsel that for everyone. It just works for me.”

START ‘EM YOUNG

Edmeades is equally passionate about closing the evolutionary gap for children. “The only milk they should be drinking should be coming from an animal with only one stomach, not an animal with four stomachs and an udder. Human milk is designed so that a human mother produces different milk on a week by week basis to be perfect for the stage of her particular infant.”

Obviously, he says, avoid sugar for your 2-to-4-year-old child. “Why be the drug dealer to your own children?”

As they get older and start going to birthday parties, your task is not to say “no sugar” to them, but to educate them about the impact sugar has on them. You can say, “hey, you can have this candy if you want. But remember when you have sugar, thirty minutes later you have a temper tantrum?”

If you point out the effect food has on them in advance, they will start to spot the relationship and make the right decisions. For early teenagers, he reminds us that they want to rebel. So your task is to join the rebel alliance, rather than be the one they rebel against. “Make sugar and the food manufacturing industry the enemy and ‘co-rebel’ against it with them.”

Edmeades is a crusader against the modern habits that undermine our body’s evolutionary wisdom. “The priority? Don't let fear guide you, let real knowledge guide you. And get nutrition in as clean a way as you can.”

Today's email was brought to you by Adam Gilad.