Those Healthy Diets and Lifestyles That Have Vanished

Anthropologists study the coprolites (fossilized feces) of ancient people to learn their diets. Coprolites contain many things—pollen, plant crystals, feathers, bones, hair, eggshells—which help us understand what our ancestors ate day to day.

Beyond doubt, the diet of early humans was far broader than that of people today. In the early industrial age, the food-gathering tribes still surviving in corners of the world (primitive tribes that had not entered agricultural society) also had very broad diets.

Whether the Australian aborigines or the !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, they lived by gathering wild plants and animals from nature. These food-gathering people could not read or write, but they had astonishing memories and knew the plants and animals around their homelands.

The !Kung used nearly 500 types of plants and animals as food, medicine, cosmetics, poison and other supplies. Because of their broad diet, when drought struck and the agricultural tribes around them suffered great famine, the !Kung had ample food. Moreover, the overall health of the !Kung was comparable to that of industrial-society residents: they were not short-lived, and rarely suffered the industrial-diseases of high blood pressure, obesity, varicose veins, ulcers and colitis.

Vaughn M. Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, while doing field excavation at an archaeological site in southwest Texas, reconstructed the diet of prehistoric people who had lived there and decided to eat that way himself. He also added exercise to daily life: cycling to work instead of driving, climbing stairs instead of taking the elevator home. This change made him physically and mentally much healthier than before. He did no dieting, yet in three months he lost about 30 pounds. Over the next four years he never again fell seriously ill; the modern diseases that had plagued him for years resolved on their own.

As humans evolve, they also degenerate. Social progress does not mean that people's health and happiness have progressed along with it. Greater production efficiency lets the earth support more people, but this progress is not necessarily always beneficial to human physical and mental health.

Those living in gathering societies also lived more comfortably than we do. They needed only an hour or two each day to collect food; the rest of the time was mostly free and leisurely, without our nine-to-five work. Their activity levels were also higher than modern city-dwellers'. In their world there was no past and no future; they focused only on the present. So they had no anxiety and sorrow, and lacked the psychological stress common to modern people.

Our modern pursuit of tasty food is driving those foods healthier for us out of our diet. The vegetables and fruits once widely known as both food and medicine have become neglected wild greens and wild fruit. We no longer even know their names, let alone eat them.

We eat more and more meat, casting aside the plant foods that benefit our health but do not taste so good. I often meet cancer patients seeking high-nutrition supplements like sea cucumber, lingzhi and cordyceps, believing them beneficial to their health. In fact wild greens like dandelion and purslane benefit them more than sea cucumber by a hundredfold or more. Yet, driven by habitual thinking, they doggedly chase "high-nutrition" and "high-protein" supplements.

Our body's pursuit of comfort has also distanced us from exercise. People today prefer lying on soft sofas playing electronic devices rather than going out into nature to stretch their muscles and strengthen their bodies. We are superstitious about science to an incurable degree, always believing medicine can free us from disease. We rarely consider that by adjusting our lifestyle and changing our diet we could reach a state of not being ill at all.

The philosopher Thoreau once tried, at Walden Pond, to live naturally like our ancestors, and wrote the celebrated masterpiece Walden. But his attempt was ultimately only a shallow experiment; in the end he returned to "normal" modern life.

We very much need to examine the beliefs fixed in our minds, to subject our diet and lifestyle to a truly scientific trial, and to hold some reverence for the survival experience our ancestors worked out over millions of years, taking from it what is sound. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has more than once stressed that the modern diet is drifting ever further from health.

Many of our psychological problems are also closely tied to the modern lifestyle. If—as Bacon said—our appetites and bank accounts can never be satisfied, how could humanity not live so exhausted? And the earth would not be so overburdened.

I myself am trying to return to a healthier lifestyle and change my diet. In the wild there are many edible plants others do not care for; I am identifying them and bringing them to my table.

Every day I also try as much as possible to get around by bicycle and on foot, not reducing my activity out of laziness or love of comfort. I hope to carry out, in unity of knowledge and action, the lifestyles and dietary habits I have read about in Chinese and Western medical books that truly benefit body and mind.

A friend once introduced me to a veteran TCM physician under seventy, hoping I would take him as my teacher; but when I saw his shuffling, aged gait, I lost confidence in his level. Another friend also introduced a veteran TCM doctor he praised to the skies; but when I saw his big belly and his breathless walk, I too lost confidence.

I do not want to become such a person whose knowledge and action do not match. Anyone who boasts of his superb medical skill—if he himself lacks a strong body and vigorous spirit—I instinctively doubt whether he really has the skill.

Just as Buddhism and philosophy, though seemingly alike, differ in essence, so knowledge and wisdom, those twin brothers, are worlds apart. In ancient India, only one whose knowledge and action were united could be called the "Great Hero" (the Buddha is one of those called the Great Hero, which is why the main hall of a Buddhist temple is called the Mahavira Hall; but the Buddha was not the only teacher called Great Hero—the Jina of Jainism is also called Great Hero). One united in knowledge and action is called in Buddhism the one whose awakening and practice are perfect. Whoever can know but cannot act is a mere talker. He may indeed know something, but that knowledge is not realized as wisdom in him. Only when a person's knowing and acting both conform to a spirit is that person truly at the stage of wisdom.

As Einstein said, humanity's future depends on the balance between the knowledge humans possess and human wisdom. In an age of knowledge explosion, without sufficient wisdom, humanity will ultimately destroy itself. For each of us this is also a maxim. We learn more and more; if we lack the wisdom to master it, all this knowledge becomes an obstacle to our happiness—what Buddhism calls the "obstruction of views and knowledge."

A leaf before the eye hides Mount Tai. When our nature to love ease and hate work, our greed for possessions and our craving for good food control our minds, we must pay for what we want with health and happiness. For most people, health and joy were lost by their own hands; no one else is to blame.