In an era of Big Macs and the Pillsbury Doughboy, Dr. S. Boyd Eaton is a throwback to the age of big mastodons and Cro-Magnon man.
He does not agree with the notion that we are what we eat. Rather, he says, we are essentially what we were as far back as 400 centuries ago: We are cave men.
And, he says, we should eat accordingly.
”Our genetic makeup hasn`t changed greatly since the first modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, walked in widespread areas of the Earth 40,000 years ago,” he says. ”But our cultural changes have far outstripped genetic changes, and this has produced big problems.”
At the top of his list is modern Western civilization`s prevalent diet, which he contends is flawed, in many cases fatally:
”Chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease and strokes, and cancer of the lung or colon, kill 75 percent of Americans today.
”Such diseases, along with high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and even tooth cavities, are modern health problems. Anthropological studies, particularly of surviving tribes whose lifestyle and diet resembles our Stone Age ancestors, find such health problems to be virtually unknown, or at least infrequent.
”Those modern conditions and diseases are related to high-fat, high-salt, low-fiber diets and cigarettes, all of which were also unknown to primitive hunter-gatherers, both past and present.”
He says what we could and should be eating, essentially, is what the cave men ate.
Up front, be assured there were no bones of deer, rhino or wild horse on the table during a recent lunch at Eaton`s home, a very civilized neoclassical two-story frame house with a pillared porch. The host
drank water from a glass; wore a white shirt, jeans, and suede shoes; and was clean-shaven. The meal was dominated by celery sticks and grape clusters–but more about that later.
The Stone Age is definitely where Eaton is coming from when he talks about nutrition.
And he talks about it quite a bit these days. With the husband-and-wife anthropologist team Melvin Konner and Marjorie Shostak, with whom he has worked extensively, he is writing a book with the working title ”The Paleolithic Prescription,” scheduled for publication next spring by Harper & Row.
For 10 years Eaton has been doing research to compare modern man with his paleolithic ancestors, and Konner and Shostak lived for two years with a hunter-gatherer tribe in South Africa. Although Eaton is not an anthropologist by formal training, his interest in bones goes far
beyond those he sees in X-rays in his day-to-day career as a radiologist.
He practices medicine at West Paces Ferry Hospital here and holds two faculty titles at Emory University here–clinical associate professor of radiology and adjunct associate professor of anthropology. Dr. Konner is chairman of the Emory anthropology department.
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Hunter-gatherers have been found to be good, and tall, athletes, but Eaton says that modern Americans are only now becoming as tall as Homo sapiens sapiens were. ”Their average height was around six feet,” he says, ”while the average height of soldiers in the American Revolution was only 5-foot-5.” What was missing in the short generation`s diet, he explains, was animal protein.
Modern Western diet has reinstated necessary animal-protein content for bone growth, Eaton says, ”but our food today has tremendous amounts of energy –calories–and much less vitamins and minerals than our ancestors` had.”
He calls the disparity ”affluent malnutrition.”
”Humans with affluent Western lifestyles are the only group of mammals who consume more sodium than potassium,” he says. ”And that`s a leading contributor to high blood pressure and hypertension.”
Konner and Eaton have remarkably convergent interests: Konner, 40, had been an anthropologist for two decades before deciding to become a physician. He graduated from Harvard Medical School last year but has not yet served an internship.
On the other hand, it was two decades after the 49-year-old Eaton graduated from Harvard Medical School that he joined the Emory medical faculty and, lured by his lifelong interest in the subject, drifted into the school`s anthropology department.
”I spent so much time there,” he said, ”helping write papers and guest- lecturing, that they asked if I could be made a graduate assistant or something. But the university rule is that I couldn`t have that low a position if I was a professor in another department, so I got an instant promotion. I don`t really deserve to be a professor of anthropology.”
Eaton remembers that when he was a 1st-grader, ”My grandfather had a 10- volume `History of Greatest Nations.` I read them all, and found more, going further and further back into history.”
Between his English major and pre-med courses at Duke University, he says, ”I never had a chance to take any history or anthropology courses. But it`s always been a hobby of mine, and I`ll match what I know with most history majors.”
He and his ”Paleolithic Prescription” co-authors stress that Stone Agers–whose life expectancy was only 30 to 40 years, with many dying of diarrhea as infants or infected wounds as adults, conditions easily treated today–would probably change places gladly with Jet Agers. But those in hunger-gatherer societies, past and present, who lived to old age, suffered far less from heart disease and lung cancer than modern societies. Rather, they died mostly from infections, trauma and other forms of cancer, Eaton said. Therefore, how necessity forced our early ancestors to eat and exercise are profitable lessons today, the authors contend.
While they are ”dead-set against making this a menu book,” Eaton says, it defers to the continuing diet fad by including sample breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
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Supermarket shelves are not stocked with the 130 varieties of flowers, gums, leaves, nuts, roots, seed pods, stalks, venison and other wild game that our ancestors ate and that researchers still find hunter-gatherer tribes in the Third World eating today, Eaton concedes.
But he insists, ”it is possible to reach an accommodation between our Stone Age ancestors` diet and the realities of modern society.”
He does it.
A lot of what he prescribes and practices for a healthy diet is familiar, if not mainstream, in America`s diet: He eats no-salt, no-sugar cereal topped with fruit and wheat or oat bran; plenty of yogurt; fresh or steamed vegetables; and chicken. He drinks lots of water, skim milk and orange juice. Some of his diet ideas are a little offbeat: He loves snails, and sometimes, for extra protein, he eats fish for breakfast popped in a microwave. He occasionally eats venison, and fresh fruit includes dates and prunes.
A few of his no-nos, however, are almost un-American: No cookies, cake or ice cream (which was once among his favorite foods.) He hasn`t used sugar for years, and avoids red meat, cheese and fried food. ”McDonalds would go out of business waiting for me,” he says with a smile.
Much of what he prescribes sounds like other so-called diet food. But there are some significant differences: He says diet books ”are too concerned about reducing calories, cholesterol, and amount of food consumed.
”Modern weight-loss experts tell us to eat less,” he says, ”but I think we should eat more, but eat properly and exercise more.
”For example, the number of calories you take in is not as important as where those calories come from.”
He points out that venison, a tougher meat commonly consumed by hunter-gatherers, derives 80 percent of its calories from protein and 20 percent from fat, just the reverse of beefsteak, the tender meat popular today. Protein contains four calories per gram, while fat contains nine calories per gram–so cave men ate much less fat while eating the same amount, or more, meat than modern man.
Back in the Stone Age, Eaton says, ”our ancestors ate twice as much food as we do, up to five pounds a day, and every bit as much cholesterol as we do, twice the 300 milligrams per day recommended by U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.”
Lack of concern about cholesterol per se is perhaps the most controversial aspect of ”The Paleolithic Prescription,” according to co-author Shostak. ”But that is what we`ve found,” he says. ”Hunter- gatherers have a high-meat, high-cholesterol diet.”
What they did not have, she and her co-authors reiterate, ”is a high saturated-fat diet.”
And, she says, ”with all the modern approaches to diet coming out, no one talks about what the starting point is, what the basic human diet is, what we are most suited for. We are talking about that.
”Every baby born today is equipped to exist in hunter-gatherer society.”
Contending that cave men were healthier than we are, Eaton cites paleontologists` findings that Stone Age humans` bones had ”large muscular insertion sites that indicate their muscles were as strong as a good athlete`s today.”
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Eaton refrains from terming his subjects cave men; he calls them ”our ancestor hunter-gatherers,” and explains: ”First of all, they didn`t live in caves that often,” he says. ”They built shelters, lean-tos or tepees in many cases.
”Secondly, they weren`t all men. Fifty percent were women.
”And, calling them cave men is pejorative. It conjures up visions of Alley Oop, etc.”
But, once that is said, Eaton shows a sense of humor and equilibrium about his nutritional views: ”To launch into long diatribes about diet and healthy foods is a good way to destroy friendships. When we go to friends`
homes for dinner, I eat what they offer.”
After a pause, he adds, ”I figure it won`t kill me.”
And, he notes, it is not that difficult for him any more because many people now eat healthier foods than they used to–with menus including salads, chicken, raw or steamed vegetables and fresh fruit–foods that are in his regimen.
He knows that some acquaintances ”go out of their way to serve meals they think will be acceptable to me.” But he feels most prepare what they would if he weren`t the guest.
And, just as most hosts don`t get ready as if they were expecting Conan the Agrarian; being invited to the Eatons` is not exactly ”My Dinner With Oop.” For one thing, Daphne Eaton is not a total convert to her husband`s dietary philosophy.
She loves cheese; eats eggs despite their saturated fat content;
occasionally buys a hamburger or brings meat in among the groceries, especially when their three grown children are home, and makes dessert now and then, including ”raspberry or blackberry pie, which are among the few sweet things Boyd cannot resist.”
”A prophet is not without honor except in his homeland,” Eaton quips.
”I`m a moderate follower of his routine. A lot of the rules are easy to live with,” Daphne Eaton says, returning from tennis and setting out lunch on a recent afternoon.
”He`s raised my consciousness,” she says, stressing that she doesn`t buy certain prepared low-calorie foods because they have too much sodium.
”I`ve learned to do without salt.”
A ”typical” lunch she prepared recently included items on which they agree–whole-wheat pita bread, celery sticks, a tuna-celery salad, and red and green grapes. She fixed a plate of cheese toast sticks, which he avoids. He made dessert by dropping large strawberries into a 32-ounce tub of vanilla yogurt. After she and a guest declined sharing it, he ate it all.
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Eaton is just over 6 feet tall and a lean 180 pounds. His blood pressure is lower than average; and his serum-cholesterol level is 130 milligrams per deciliter, compared with an average of 220 per deciliter in his age group.
A self-described ”dreadful athlete” with problem knees that preclude much running and tennis, a sport he loves, he alternates days of weight lifting and resistance exercises with days of bicycling and aerobic exercises. And, he says, ”I eat a lot.
”Our bodies are really designed to consume a lot more food than we do. And if we eat right, it is not `natural` to put on a lot of weight as we grow older.
”We have it in our genes to live longer and more healthy lives. Our preconceptions of what it`s like to be old are warped because we`ve been living longer, but haven`t been thinking, exercising and eating accordingly.
”We still have the inherent body machinery and design to live in an environment of immense physical exertion, as our Stone Age ancestors did. But culturally, we exist in an age where you can almost live your whole life without even turning your hand.”
Eaton`s deliberate primitive thinking about nutrition has been, and remains, somewhat controversial. He says it took him and co-author Konner four tries before they got an article on paleolithic nutrition published in the New England Journal of Medicine a couple of years ago.
However, Eaton says, ”our views are now converging with modern dietary advice from a wide range of medical researchers.”
And he sees a bright future for the Stone Age.
After all, he concludes, society repeatedly shows it can change quickly and drastically.
”It wasn`t that long ago that we spoke of the `loneliness of the long-distance runner,”` he recalls. ”But anyone who`s seen a marathon these days knows you couldn`t use that description any more.”
