We are no longer kings of the savannah or rulers of the rainforest’s green canopy. The center of human power has shifted to cities of high-rise buildings and industrial complexes. The surrounding natural world has been divided into production areas for pulp, timber, starch, and fatty acids. Small fragments of nature have been recreated close to us as gardens. We are the human species, gradually attempting to extend our control over the natural world that once shaped us. Yet while we believe we have mastered the Earth and its living organisms, we are increasingly losing control over ourselves. The modern lifestyle we have created may also inflict deep and lasting harm on the very organism that occupies several levels of the ecological food pyramid. We cannot escape our biological heritage as omnivorous Homo sapiens.
It is from this perspective that an increasing number of naturalists have begun to take a broader view—both in time and space—of human life on planet Earth. One of them is biology teacher and author Lars Wilson. In his book The Ill Health of Prosperity, he examines the increasingly common diseases affecting modern people and their underlying causes. In short, he argues that throughout several major stages of historical development, we have dramatically changed our lifestyles, while our genetic code—and our cells’ ability to adapt to these changes—has evolved only very slowly.
It is in this context that the concept of the Stone Age diet becomes understandable. By exposing our bodies, as far as possible, to the conditions for which they evolved—dating back to the time when our ancestors lived as ”aquatic apes” along the water’s edge—we are better equipped to cope with those conditions because our cells possess the enzymes needed to make optimal use of the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats naturally available in that environment.
Modern humans, however, have taken a different path. In the interest of efficiency, nature’s resources—especially food—are increasingly processed long before they reach the body. The food industry, in particular, has transformed natural raw materials into products designed to be easily digestible, shelf-stable, and standardized in taste.
According to Lars Wilson and others who share his perspective, this is the foundation of the so-called diseases of affluence—an unnatural form of ill health. Collectively, these conditions are often referred to as metabolic syndrome: the harmful changes in metabolism that are attributed to highly processed foods. Metabolic syndrome includes conditions such as obesity, diabetes, allergies, and cardiovascular disease.
Health authorities are well aware of these issues and periodically issue dietary recommendations. At one time, the public was encouraged to eat a certain number of slices of bread each day. At another, they were advised to avoid fat. Many people have followed these recommendations, yet, according to the text, they have had little positive impact on metabolic syndrome—if anything, the opposite appears to have occurred.
The stone age diet
In contrast, many biologists and naturalists advocate what is commonly referred to as the Stone Age diet. Their position is supported by an increasing number of archaeological findings suggesting that the diseases associated with metabolic syndrome either did not exist or were extremely rare among our ancestors, whose livelihoods were based on hunting, fishing, and gathering. Similar lifestyles are still practiced today by some Indigenous peoples living in widely separated parts of the world.
Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of a Stone Age diet, according to this perspective, is that the human genome evolved over a very long period under those conditions. For approximately 95 percent of the time that Homo sapiens has existed, humans lived as hunter-gatherers. Our eating habits underwent their first major transformation only when humans became settled agriculturalists around 10,000 years ago. Some archaeological discoveries from Sri Lanka suggest that this transition may have begun as early as 30,000 years ago, although the text argues that this does not substantially alter the overall picture.
But what did a Stone Age diet actually consist of?
Our knowledge comes partly from archaeological excavations and partly from records of the diets of Indigenous peoples collected during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Naturally, these diets varied enormously depending on local environments and available food sources. For example, the Inuit traditionally consumed an almost exclusively animal-based diet centered on fish and seal meat, while rainforest peoples in Africa could rely on a wide variety of foods, with fruit often making up a significant portion of their diet.
An interesting observation is that the time required to obtain the necessities of life under a Stone Age lifestyle may have ranged from only a couple of hours to around four hours per day for working adults. By contrast, the text notes that many modern policymakers argue that even reducing the workday to six hours would be economically impossible.
Despite the diversity of Stone Age diets, certain common characteristics can be identified. The body’s energy intake—measured as calories (or, in modern terminology, joules)—comes from three major nutrient groups: protein, fat, and carbohydrates. According to the text, a typical Stone Age diet derived approximately 30 percent of its energy from predominantly animal protein, 30 percent from fat, and the remaining 40 percent from slow-digesting carbohydrates. The concepts of slow carbohydrates and dietary fats are discussed separately in articles on the glycemic index and omega fats.
As for the foods themselves, the text argues that prehistoric people consumed a much greater diversity of plant and animal species than most people do today. They ate leaner meat, while fish and other marine animals played a more prominent role in the diet. Meals were also far less refined or processed than modern foods. Nuts, roots, fruits, and berries were likely much more important components of the diet than they are today, whereas cereal grains such as wheat and rice were comparatively uncommon.
The major changes
The first great revolution in human subsistence came with the transition to agriculture. The availability of calories improved dramatically. More people could be fed from a smaller area of land, allowing populations to settle in increasingly large villages that eventually grew into cities. Entirely new civilizations emerged, capable of supporting slave labor and constructing monumental buildings.
At the same time, the variety of foods declined as cereal grains became the foundation of mass food production. Depending on the region of the world, wheat, rice, or maize became the dominant staple of the human diet. According to the text, however, this development was a double-edged sword. Although agriculture could feed far more people in quantitative terms, the overall quality of the diet declined. Average life expectancy fell, infant mortality increased, and deficiency diseases—such as iron deficiency and osteoporosis—became more common, particularly among the working population, including slaves and farmers in the wheat fields of the Roman Empire or laborers cultivating rice in East Asia.
Another major milestone, particularly relevant to those living in temperate regions, was the introduction of the potato from South America. A new staple food had arrived, one whose carbohydrates could readily be converted into simple sugars—either through microbial fermentation into alcohol or by digestive enzymes in the human body. In the latter case, the potato provided a rapid source of energy that could be converted into muscular work, whether by peasants farming aristocratic estates or laborers in the emerging industrial economy. It was an inexpensive, energy-dense, easy-to-store, and easy-to-grow crop that helped reduce the threat of famine.
With the introduction of these new staple foods, the text argues that humanity had already moved a considerable distance away from the original Stone Age diet. Dietary variety declined, while the proportion of carbohydrates increased due to cereals and potatoes. Nevertheless, the distance from farm to table remained relatively short. Most food preparation still took place in the homes of farmers and workers, with milling grain into flour being one of the few significant processing steps carried out elsewhere.
The next major transformation came with the rise of the food industry. Rather than simply processing raw ingredients, manufacturers increasingly refined them and combined them with thickeners, flavorings, colorants, and other additives to create entirely new food products. These products supplied both fast-food restaurants and ordinary households.
White flour, refined sugar, pasteurized white milk, and polished white rice are all examples of refined foods that were absent from the Stone Age diet. The text further argues that when much of today’s dietary fat consists of margarine and inexpensive vegetable oils that have undergone extensive industrial processing—losing many of their original components and replacing them with more stable, artificial fatty acids—the modern diet diverges even further from that of our prehistoric ancestors.
This raises an important question: has the human body had sufficient time to adapt to this new way of eating? Might our cells have developed the capacity to utilize these modern foods just as effectively as those on which our ancestors evolved?
Genetic change is a slow process
According to the conventional genetic paradigm, changes in our genetic makeup occur very slowly through mutations—changes in DNA—combined with natural selection. This process generally requires at least hundreds of generations, or roughly 10,000 years or more.
We know that major changes occurred in our genes—and consequently in our enzyme systems—when our ancestors diverged into two major evolutionary branches: one leading to chimpanzees and the other to humans. For example, chimpanzees are genetically poorly adapted to obtaining nutrition from marine foods, whereas humans depend on specific fatty acids found in seafood, particularly for normal brain development. That evolutionary process, however, had ample time to unfold—probably over the course of nearly a million years.
By comparison, our adaptation to refined convenience foods or diets rich in potatoes has had, at most, only about ten human generations to occur. Adaptation to agriculture and cereal grains has had a somewhat longer period—on the order of 10,000 years or more, equivalent to approximately 400 generations if one assumes an average generation time of 25 years. Even so, according to the traditional model of mutation and natural selection, this is still considered too short a time for substantial genetic adaptation.
The text then turns to newer theories in genetics. In addition to the genes that code for functional proteins, our genome contains a vast amount of DNA that was once referred to as ”junk DNA.” For many years, scientists neither understood why these sequences existed nor what function they might serve. The author suggests that they may represent remnants of earlier evolutionary adaptations that could potentially be reactivated if environmental conditions resembling those of the past were to return. If so, humans might possess a much greater genetic capacity to respond to environmental changes—and perhaps even to relatively rapid ones—than previously believed.
Another possibility proposed in the text is that entirely new genetic information might be generated, not through random mutation, but by mechanisms capable of reading biochemical molecules—perhaps proteins—and using them to produce RNA, which could then be reverse-transcribed into DNA and incorporated into the genome within the cell nucleus.
The author acknowledges that these ideas lie outside the standard genetics presented in most textbooks but notes that the transfer of information from RNA back to DNA, once considered impossible, was demonstrated in the 1970s with the discovery of reverse transcription.
The hypothesis is further supported, according to the text, by the immune system’s ability to recognize proteins from viruses and bacteria, produce highly specific antibodies against them, and retain a lasting immunological memory of those antibodies.
It is from this possible capacity for generating new genetic patterns that the theory developed by father and son James D’Adamo and Peter J. D’Adamo becomes particularly interesting, according to the author.
The blood type diet
While working as a naturopath in the United States, James D’Adamo observed that the dietary programs he prescribed produced different results in different patients. He also recorded each patient’s blood type according to the ABO system and believed he had identified certain patterns. He summarized his observations—that particular diets appeared to be better suited to specific blood groups—in his 1980 book One Man’s Food. The book, however, initially attracted relatively little attention.
His son, Peter J. D’Adamo, later expanded upon these ideas by exploring the possible relationship in greater depth. He compared the global distribution of blood groups among different populations and proposed that the various blood types evolved after the emergence of modern humans, with blood type O being the original type. According to his hypothesis, blood type A evolved later, followed by blood type B, as adaptations to changing diets—particularly the transition to agriculture and the consumption of cereal grains.
Another important element of the theory is the proposed relationship between blood type and susceptibility to certain physical and psychological conditions. D’Adamo argues that understanding one’s blood type can help guide dietary and lifestyle choices in ways that optimize long-term health. For example, he suggests that people with blood type O generally benefit from a diet containing a relatively high proportion of meat, whereas those with blood type A are better suited to a more plant-based diet.
D’Adamo further argues that lectins—complex molecules composed of proteins and carbohydrates found in foods—can interact with receptors on intestinal cells and, after entering the bloodstream, may bind to blood group antigens. Another central element of his theory is that the genes determining blood type are correlated with a wide range of other biological characteristics. Together, these relationships could form what he describes as an individual’s ”metabolic fingerprint.”
According to D’Adamo, a detailed understanding of both a person’s genotype (the genes they possess) and phenotype (the traits those genes express) could help predict not only which foods are most beneficial but also which forms of physical activity are most appropriate, how the individual responds to stress, and even aspects of personality.
Although D’Adamo’s books have been criticized and some of his ideas regarding human evolution and the origin of blood groups have been challenged, the text argues that his work nevertheless offers an interesting complement to the perspective presented by advocates of the Stone Age diet.
Wawle’s chewing gum
As early as 1998, we published a major article in 2000-Talets Vetenskap on the background and results of the chewing gum developed by inventor Thorwald Wawle of Malmö. Just as the modern human diet has changed dramatically compared with the Stone Age diet, the very act of eating has also changed.
According to the principles of biopathy, deviations from our natural way of living place burdens on the body that can help explain the development of disease. From this perspective, human teeth evolved to withstand considerable chewing resistance—to bite through tendons, crush fish bones, chew tough skin, and break down raw root vegetables into pieces suitable for swallowing.
When the teeth are exposed to this level of mechanical stress during childhood and adolescence, the jawbone develops more fully, creating sufficient space for the wisdom teeth to erupt properly. Conversely, when the mechanical load is inadequate, jaw development may be limited, increasing the likelihood that wisdom teeth will fail to emerge correctly. According to the text, insufficient chewing stress may also contribute to weakened tooth support structures, leading to inflamed gums and periodontal disease.
In comparing wild mammals with modern humans, Thorwald Wawle believed he had observed precisely these differences. To compensate for what he considered the inadequate chewing demands of the modern diet, he developed a chewing gum with carefully selected hardness that was intended for daily chewing exercise as a means of preventing what he regarded as ”deficiency diseases” affecting the teeth.
According to a survey of people who purchased and used Wawle’s chewing gum, the reported results largely matched his expectations: significantly improved dental health, similar to that observed among Indigenous populations whose traditional diets continue to provide the natural mechanical stimulation that human teeth evolved to handle.
The fact that Thorwald Wawle’s efforts to interest public authorities in what he regarded as a simple yet ingenious method of improving dental health were unsuccessful is, according to the text, perhaps not surprising.
Conclusion
It is not only important to consider the food we eat and how it is processed by the body. Elimination is equally important, and here too modern humans have departed from what the author describes as our natural behavior. Ever since modern toilets became standard throughout the Western world, we have adopted a seated position for bowel movements instead of the natural squatting posture. In many parts of the world, however, people still use the traditional squatting position, and according to the text, this is reflected in differences in the prevalence of bowel-related disorders.
