The Winter Body Season: Is Your Diet Climate Appropriate? Part II

It's been a month now since we brought the idea of food being 'climate appropriate' to your attention.

We are constantly on a mission to find out everything there is to know about attaining optimum health,  so we've been doing heaps of research into what it really means to eat climate appropriately. It seems that not only is it important that we regularly eat foods that grow in the area that we live, but we have actually evolved to do so.

Have you ever wandered how some people can eat mountains of chips, and rounds and rounds of bread, and still not put on any weight? Well, it might just be that their ancestors are from a part of the world where starchy foods, such as pasta, bread and potatoes have been eaten for hundreds of years, so their bodies have been perfectly adapted to process starch efficiently.

  Potato plants contain lots of starch that they use for energy when it is cold or dry

Starch serves as energy storage for plants, to help them survive when the climate is cold or dry. In tropical rainforests with plentiful sun and rain, plants have little need to store energy. They focus on capturing it by growing big leaves and rich fruits that attract animals to disseminate their seeds. Historically, humans living in these environments would mainly eat fruit, meat, and honey, as they wouldn't have had access to starchy foods. Humans who lived in the most northerly regions of the world, would have had no access to plants at all, so lived almost entirely on animal foods. In temperate climates such as the United Kingdom, plants grow large starch supplies, so it has been apart of their diet for thousands of years. In fact most countries with a temperate climate have been cultivating crops such as wheat, maize, and rice, for over 10,000 years. It is this innovation that changed how starch is digested in different people’s bodies. These evolutionary changes would go on to have serious implications on people's health.

In tropical climates, plants grow huge leaves and fruit

If your ancestors have been living in temperate climates for the last few thousand years, the chances are that your body will be good at processing the sugars contained in starch. However, if your ancestry goes back to sunnier climates, the tropics, or some of the coldest areas of the world, then you might want to limit your consumption of starchy foods. This is because people in temperate climates have developed a higher concentration of a type of enzyme that breaks down starch into sugars. These sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream in order to feed tissues like muscle or fat around the body. In order for these tissues to take up glucose from the blood, a hormone called insulin is required. Insulin prevents blood glucose levels from getting too high and becoming toxic: as in diabetes.

Not everyone can get away with eating starchy foods ... it really is in our genetics

As it turns out, humans who have less starch busting enzymes in their saliva, also have lower insulin levels. This means that they are more likely to feel the negative impact of eating starchy foods, such as obesity and diabetes type 2.
 
The reality is that many of us don't really know where our ancestors lived all those years ago; so the trick is to be sensible, and listen to what your body tells you. If you notice that eating a lot of bread and pasta makes you pile on the pounds, it is likely that your body isn't designed to eat much starch. If you are a person that can eat mashed potato for lunch and chips for dinner everyday, and still maintain a healthy weight, it is likely that your ancestors have been eating starchy foods for centuries, and your body has evolved perfectly to do so.

For our final post on climate appropriate foods, we'll be giving you some simple ideas to maximise nutrition, without compromising on choice.

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