Hybridized foods vs. Wild Food: their Glycemic Impact

The following thoughts on hybridized foods and glycemic impact are largely borrowed from the teachings of David Wolfe and/or Dr. David Jubb , although much is also my own personal experience.

Hybridized food goes against the food described in the bible because it either does not bear seeds (has been made seedless and therefore sterile like seedless watermelons) or does not yield viable seed. It's glycemic impact to the body is usually un-natural and un-healthy. They are crops and fruit trees that have been grown inside a farmer's fence line under a human's protection, and either no longer have seed or viable seed, or at the very least the genetic strength to survive on their own in the wild. They would be overcome by animals, insects, and microbes on their own.

Most plant foods people eat today are not found growing wildly in nature; pesticides are used to control the insects and fertilizers to poison the soil microbes and allow them to grow. Some of these foods will revert back to a wild or semi wild state if subjected to wild conditions, and the plants and seed that survived would then be the ones with the stronger genetic state to withstand the wild. This is true for things like nightshades (tomatoes and peppers), avocados, and cherimoya fruit. These are less of a concern to our health, unless heavily sprayed with pesticides, and can still be healthy foods.

However, seedless fruits and fruits with non-viable seeds are so hybridized that they cannot reproduce at all and should be avoided all together due to their low nutritional value (little or no minerals) and/or their extremely high glycemic index and glycemic impact. I've noticed that I can only eat 5 or 6 seedless grapes before I feel totally 'sugared-ou't or hypoglycemic and my taste buds are revolted from too much sugar. The insulin effect that happens is very dangerous from a health standpoint, and if it happens consistently, it leads to heart disease and diabetes.

Hybridized produce to avoid:

Seedless Fruits (that create a negative glycemic impact):Seedless Watermelon, Seedless Grapes, Seedless Apples, Bananas, several varieties of Dates (especially Medjools), Kiwis, Seedless Pineapples, Seedless Citrus Fruits, Seedless Persimmons. (The tiny black seeds in Kiwi and Bananas are not viable).

Main Hybrid Vegetables (create a negative glycemic impact when cooked):Beets, Carrots, Corn, Potatoes

Hybrid Nuts and Seeds:Cashews, Oats, Rice, and Wheat, Alfalfa and Alfalfa Sprouts. (Even "wild" rice is not really wild but hybridized, and both white and brown rice is hybridized.)

Legumes (beans):Most commercial legumes are hybrids and some will revert back to their natural state if planted and the plants that survive live on. Soy beans are greatly hybridized today and often bio-engineered (Frankenstein produce!)

Overconsumption of hybrid fruits and hybrid sweet/starchy vegetables causes the body to leach minerals from the bones to deal with the glycemic impact of hybrid sugar. Hybrid sugars are not completely recognized by the liver and pancreas, nor do hybrid foods contain many minerals as do their wild counterparts, making the situation even worse for the human body consuming them.

Health Problems with Cooked Starches and Hybrids

If you are going to eat a starchy vegetable like cooked sweet potato, corn, rice, regular potato, wheat, etc...always try to eat it with a large amount of fat, like avocado, in order to slow the digestion of the sugar, lessening the glycemic impact. Small amounts of starchy vegetables or grains in an uncooked or sprouted state, especially consumed with healthy fat, can be an acceptable transition food to a healthier diet.

A majority of the population today consumes only 13 varieties of plants, 9 of which are so hybridized that they either do not have seeds at all or completely non-viable seeds in the wild (they would not repopulate the earth without our assistance): bananas, beans, beets and the refined sugar that comes form beets, corn, oranges, potatoes, rice, wheat, and soy beans. These are so low in nutritional value that they significantly contribute to malnourishment and starvation across the planet.

The best explanation and most logical hypothesis I have ever read on how the human diet became so unnatural in the first place, leading to the consumption of primarily unhealthy foods, was written by Frederic Patenaude, a portion of which I have attached below. It turns out that we are addicted to the glycemic impact of cooked starches! The best explanation for how modern business has further contributed to the unnaturalness of man's diet, I think has best been written by Annie and David Jubb in their Lifefood Recipe Book, and I have also included an excerpt from this.

Frederic Patenaude in Just Eat An Apple Magazine, on our Cooked Starch Addiction:

We once lived the life of gatherers, entirely subsisting on wild foods. Agriculture and the whole science of cultivating foods came very recently in our history: about 10,000 years ago. Before that time, humans like every other animal on this planet, lived on what was growing in their natural environment, most likely never planting a seed on purpose or watering a plant by artificial means. Now the idea of returning to such a state couldn't even cross the minds of many living in modern society. Because they have been altered by man, many of the plants grown on modern farms, including fruits, vegetables, grains, need our attention to stay alive. They need water, proper care, compost, etc. Even those of us who have home gardens are growing seeds that have been altered by humans. If we were to stop to watering our gardens and tending to the vegetables, they would likely die miserably within a few weeks. This is because many of the plants we grow for food are artificially adapted to our climate and can't even grow by themselves. Though they may provide us with tender and pleasing produce, they are most likely weak plants that cannot survive unassisted.

Such weak seedlings cannot sustain life to its highest level. A plant that cannot grow by itself in Nature is not likely to have enough life-force to turn us into vibrant beings. Every analysis you can read will show how wild foods have, by far, the highest amount of vitamins and minerals. For example, wild dandelion contains more beta-carotene than any other cultivated vegetable, even though it does not receive any additional compost, and grows often where the soil is of poor quality. Wild foods are superior on every nutritional level to cultivated foods, besides the fact that they will grow without human care and give without needing anything. If wild foods are so far superior to hybridized foods, you might ask: then why did we start to cultivate foods in the first place? Why didn't we just keep freely eating what just naturally grew around us, instead of messing with the plants, grafting them, selecting them, and soon having to plow, sow, water, and work the soil to harvest our miserable pittance. Although nowadays we can reason that plants are hybridized for economical reasons, to create bigger, tougher, rounder, cold resistant plants, etc. (They also do this to raise the sweetness and glycemic impact, which people enjoy experiencing).But this alone cannot explain why humans began modern methods of agriculture.

Let us suppose for a moment that all tribes of humans on this planet were once eating all raw foods, until one fateful day when they got to taste something cooked, after having discovered fire and cooking a food by pure accident. Perhaps it was a cooked sweet potato and they found this to be quite a new and tasty experience. It tasted a lot sweeter than the raw root (high glycemic impact!), and they found themselves eating a lot of it, not experiencing a "taste change," like every other mono raw eater would. The taste change (alliestetic change) a raw eater experiences indicates when its time to stop eating a certain food. After the taste changes, the food becomes less attractive: too acid, bitter, sweet, bland, etc. The taste change we are talking about happens when you eat foods one at a time, in their raw, unadulterated state. It is part of our genetic makeup, and is an instinct that regulates our nutritional intake. But going back to our early "chefs," what do you think happened the next day? They found that, being overloaded with this cooked starch, their attraction for the typical wild, raw fruits they were eating at the time decreased tremendously. They didn't taste as full and sweet, and our cooks just wanted to eat more of the heavy, cooked sweet potato instead. The situation probably got worse after they started eating cooked cereals. Grains grown are hybridized version of grass seeds, and are much higher in starch (false sugar), than all the primitive cooked-foods humans ate. This means more sugar overload, and decreased attraction for natural wild fruits. Some modern research indicates that cereals contain compounds that are chemically addictive.

Could it be possible that we are not really adapted to the plants our ancestors bred for thousands of years? Why are the fruits and vegetables created by modern agriculture techniques less than excellent for us? Our ancestors certainly have not done much different than reproduce plants that seemed nourishing and ,but nothing apparently different than what is done in the rest of the animal world. But there is one factor that differentiates today's mass marketed fruits and vegetables at a fundamental level. And this may very well be the spontaneous selection as it occurred originally, and what it became since humans started to alter their foods. It is that our sense of taste ceased to function normally.

Once the metabolism was surcharged with cooked sweet potato, manioc, taro, and other first foods in this ever advancing gastronomy, our ancestors couldn't experience in the same way the flavors in the natural fruits and vegetables. They then automatically preferred and started to propagate the fruits they found good in spite of their altered physiological state, which were the fruits that, following a genetic accident, were forcing the instinctive barrier. In other words, all the fruits that were the most adapted to us didn't taste good to us anymore, and all the fruits that were the least adapted passed this disrupted instinctive taste barrier. (We became addicted to the foods with too high of a glycemic impact!)

Now, since this selection of plants has been done since the beginning of modern agriculture, over 10,000 years ago, if you were to go wander in most tropical jungles of the world, you would be surprised to find how little food there is to eat. Almost nothing edible, just enough to let starve the poor unaware camper who would venture without a plethora of canned goods It would seem quite surprising that Nature would refuse us the foods we are supposed to thrive on.

There are some places though, where a huge variety of the most amazing fruits is still growing in the wild. These include durian, cempedak, rambutan, and other delights that can only be appreciated by the pure taste buds of the raw eater. These places are the jungles in South-East Asia where some of the great apes live. Only they were left to practice natural and wild permaculture for all these eons. When they like a fruit, or another natural food, they eat it and carry the swallowed seeds inside them, thus propagating the species they prefer. They then create, after hundreds of years, the food environment best suited to them. Since our tastes are still very close to theirs, it's only in the regions where the primates live that we may find an abundance of edible, wild fruits.

Humans intoxicated with cooked-foods cannot appreciate the pure taste of wild fruits. For them, wild foods are not sweet enough, or, to the cooked food eater, carry a "weird" flavor. Adults especially, after a lifetime of feeding on cooked starch, cannot even appreciate the flavor of a wild blueberry without adding cream and/or sugar. These same people when they were children were probably very fond of the wild berries, eating the fruits straight from the bush. But as they became older they could not find the sweetness and flavor of the old days, thinking that the pollution or the weather probably had something to do with the change of taste, and ended up wasting the good fruit under a mountain of cream and baking them into horrible pies and other cooked concoctions.

Annie and David Jubb on Hybridized Food

David Wolfe on Hybridized Food

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