If you made a scale from ideal to worst regarding the ratio of nutrition to calories, white sugar, manioc and most fats are at the extreme undesirable end.  Frankly I don’t know which single food might lie at the extreme positive end of the scale.  Close to perfect might be certain leafy green vegetables that can be eaten raw.  When they are grown on extremely fertile soil, some greens develop 20 or more percent completely digestible balanced protein with ideal ratios of all the essential amino acids, lots of vitamins, tons of minerals, all sorts of enzymes and other nutritional elements—­and very few calories.  You could continually fill your stomach to bursting with raw leafy greens and still have a hard time sustaining your body weight if that was all you ate.  Maybe Popeye the Sailorman was right about eating spinach.

For the moment, lets ignore individual genetic inabilities to digest specific foods and also ignore the effects stress and enervation can have on our ability to extract nutrition out of the food we are eating.  Without those factors to consider, it is correct to say that, to the extent one’s diet contains the maximum potential amount of nutrition relative to the number of calories you are eating, to that extent a person will be healthy.  To the extent the diet is degraded from that ideal, to that extent, disease will develop.  Think about it!

Lessons From Nutritional Anthropology

The next logical pair of questions are:  how healthy could good nutrition make people be, and, how much deviation from ideal nutrition could we allow ourselves before serious disease appears?  Luckily, earlier in this century we could observe living answers to those questions (before the evidence disappeared).  The answers are:  we could be amazingly healthy, and, if we wish to enjoy excellent health we can afford to cut ourselves surprisingly little slack.

Prior to the Second World War there were several dozen sizable groups of extraordinarily healthy humans remaining on Earth.  Today, their descendants are still in the same remote places, are speaking the same languages and possess more or less the same cultures.  Only today they’re watching satellite TV. wearing jeans, drinking colas—­and their superior health has evaporated.

During the early part of this century, at the same era vitamins and other basic aspects of nutrition were being discovered, a few farsighted medical explorers sought out these hard-to-reach places with their legendarily healthy peoples to see what caused the legendary well-being they’d heard of.  Enough evidence was collected and analyzed to derive some very valid principles.