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Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Health and Our Food

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I've read 70+ books in the last four years on diet, nutrition, food intolerance, gluten intolerance, autoimmune disease and diet, paleo diet, and related medical and nutritional issues. And literally thousands of online medical abstracts and articles. Geoff Bond's book "Deadly Harvest" is the best and most comprehensive overall resource to date.

Ultimately the weight of everything that I've read points toward Bond's conclusions as to the foods to eat, fresh greens, vegetables, fruits and selected fish and meat in close to a wild state. And the foods to avoid, wheat, dairy, grains, legumes, perhaps nightshade vegetables, lectin containing foods. But nobody else pulls it all together as well in one volume, the rationale and the practice.

Anyone struggling with excess weight, or hard to resolve chronic health problems, should consider acquiring this book and adopting the practices advocated, at least for a strict trial period of several months. This includes those with gastrointestinal problems, autoimmune diseases including lupus or multiple sclerosis, diabetes, depression, anxiety, acne,osteoporosis and many others.

As I learned these principles the hard way by drawing on numerous sources, and adopted them, I gained many concrete health benefits and overcame nagging medical problems. I lost 35 excess lbs four years ago with no trouble, easily achieving my ideal weight, and have not had any tendency to gain any of the excess weight back. My cholesterol levels and blood pressure improved markedly. Gastrointestinal problems disappeared. Energy and clarity of mind increased. Now virtually all the useful principles that I had to draw on so many sources to acquire are available in one comprehensive source, Geoff Bond's book, Deadly Harvest.

Even if the author had stopped at dietary issues and the rationales for them, the book would have been invaluable. But he goes on to explore other issues of lifestyle, community, and rites of passage that may be critical to our mental health and happiness. Bond asks crucial questions that almost nobody else is asking: "What is the environment our human bodies and minds are really made for?" "Why?" "How can we best approximate that environment in the 21st Century?" And, "What physical and mental health, and happiness and satisfaction, can we gain?"

A health educator wrote of long experience in working with people dealing with chronic health problems: Twenty percent of people are not willing to do anything to resolve their health problems. Sixty percent are willing to let their doctors do the work if not much is required of the patient. Only twenty percent are willing to do whatever it takes, themselves, to get well and achieve optimum health and well being. This book is written for the latter one out of five. And for anyone willing to inquire, plan, and work to avoid problems in the first place.

Deadly Harvest This book is the "Bible" of optimal human nutrition. I'm a medical doctor, and find Geoff Bond's research the best I've ever read on human nutrition. His recommendations have guided me, as well as my patients, to better health & wellness.
Rita J. Stec, MD

I have had bouts of intense pain for a period of 11 years. I have gone screaming into emergency rooms, screaming into my doctor's office. I was told I need colonoscopies, hysterectomies, laparocscopic surgery. You name it, I have successfully avoided all of those. I just kept pressing for,"Isn't there something I can do with my diet?" The answer always came back that I could eat whatever I want. The pain I had was at my right side near my pelvic region. I knew it was digestive because of how the pain came on. I was told for years it was endometriosis. Then I went to Dr. Rita Stec, a renowned doctor in Palm Desert, Ca. I saw Deadly Harvest in her office. I started to read the book, finished the book, it worked. I have been pain free for weeks, which is a milestone. I completely believe that what the book says is true. I have researched enough with my Master's Degree to know a lot, Geoff Bond knows a lot more! READ THE BOOK.

Following on from 'Natural Eating', 'Deadly Harvest' builds on a very broad range of food/lifestle issues, and adds other important concepts including the specific history of changes in food supply/demand over the ages. It also provides references to more detailed reading on particular topics. It's all kept in perspective though and related to the bigger picture, without overshaddowing it, and whilst cleverly illustraing that the nuritional devil is often in the detail.

Further, it goes beyond the first book by examining the lifestyles of our ancient anscestors and how our current lifestyle, for good or for worse, can be in contrast to those hard-wired behaviours practiced for so long.

The funny thing is, as left-field as its thesis may sound to a 'Joe-blo', the content combines anthropology and contemporary 'main stream' science. There is nothing 'whacky' about it. I'm an engineer, and although I by no means hold my profession in paticularly high esteem, generally speaking my personal moral/intellectual compass for decisions and actions is guided by logic, reasoning, intuition and evidence, not dogma, status quo, fear and tradition. So its right up my alley.

The recommendations in this book are on another tangent to modern western nutritional science in spite of them being based on anthropological evidence, modern medical studies, anecdotal evidence, and joining the dots of history. As such, and due to the incredible compexity and lack of understanding of the human body, many issues (as with modern western nutritional science) are arguably 'uncertain' and can possibly never be 'proven'. But, even if your God came down today and told us that 'only 80% of the book is right', if you put it's principles into practice, then I believe you would still be light years healthier than 99.99% than anyone else on this planet, including just about everyone that tells me 'oh I eat pretty well'. How would you know? Unlike many things in life that you read about (finance, theolgy etc.), the main thing is here that you can put things into practice immediately and watch your health probems drift into another distant self.

The book can be as little as an insightful and concerning read for the converted, all the way to a life-changing, mind-changing book for the rest of us, that shows us the elephants in the room.

I hope others can use the insight within it to fight the dogma and challenge the status quo from grass roots level.

But a warining: You'll need courage, motivation and dedication. Unlike anything else I've read it makes no glamorous claims to the process and the lifestyle that it advocates. There are no easy answers, no silver bullets, and it's hard work because, to the disappointment of most, the food criteria of 'tasting good', 'being filling' and 'being cheap' must be a distant second to its basic principles if you want to obtain good health. But there is pleny of guidance in this book and his others about relating the first principles to modern day living and food supply, and the steps to sucess.

It's undeniable if you look at the state of modern health around the world today that we have dug ourselves into a huge hole as a society. Obesity, diabetes, and preventable chronic diseases have spread like wildfire despite the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in finding pharmaceutical drugs to allegedly counter all of these health ailments. However, the one area most of the so-called health "experts" have conveniently neglected to invest any time and effort into examining more closely is also the most cost-effective when it comes to resolving this monstrosity that befalls us in modern times is our diet. What if we could reverse the negative impact of most chronic diseases simply by making some basic changes to our diet that could restore weight to normal levels and dramatically improve health without the use of any questionable drugs? What if all it took was going back to the diet of our ancestors which bears very little resemblance to what we refer to as "food" in the 21st century? Would it make a noticeable difference in the collective health woes we now find ourselves facing? That's the bold thesis presented by UK-based nutritional anthropologist Geoff Brown in his historical look at the evolution of our diet detailed in the book Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Health and Our Food.

Bond has a personal connection to this subject since he lived in some remote African villages early on in his career where he saw firsthand how primitive tribes lived and ate for survival. This once-in-a-lifetime experience gave him ample evidence that he later used to compile much of the material contained in this book. He notes that our bodies are highly adaptable to the rigors we put them through, but they still require some elementary elements to function properly. One of the reasons Bond says we've gotten away from this basic nutritional concept in favor of what we have today is the onset of industrialized farming. Deadly Harvest provides all the dirty details about how and why grains (grass seeds) were introduced into our diet which began "a massive upheaval in human nutrition" that took us one step "away from our ancestral diet." The consequences of this change are now rearing their ugly head in the weight and health of people today.

The sordid history of nutritional guidelines from government agencies is also discussed in this book and Bond explains how this came into being. It started in 1917 when food groups were first established by the USDA with recommendations to the public about what and how much to eat of each group. A couple of updates later in 1942, we find that starchy carbohydrate sources like potatoes are included amongst the "other vegetables and fruit" while eggs and beans have suddenly become part of the "meat, poultry, and fish" category. In 1956, the revisions continued in an attempt to simply things even more to create the infamous four basic food groups until 1979 when the category "fats, sweets, and alcohol" was added with the idea of "moderation" introduced regarding portion sizes and calories. Then in 1980, the USDA introduces their first-ever Dietary Guidelines for Americans which further convoluted the issue by presenting an updated version every five years since in an attempt to "educate" the public. Bond says this flip-flopping with the changes to the prescribed diet has to do with pressure from special interest. Industries directly impacted by the pronouncements from the federal government about diet will fight tooth and nail to protect their financial interests and do whatever they can to prevent any negative publicity. In the end, he says the USDA's Dietary Guidelines are "not a gold standard-on the contrary, they are a weak and deceitful compromise between all the competing interests" which is a "major cause for concern" as we seek to educate the public about the vital importance of traditional diets on health.

The ramifications of consuming foods like bread, rice and pasta are outlined in great detail in Chapter 3, including what's wrong with eating grain-based foods such as stunted growth, infant mortality, shorter lifespan, increased susceptibility to infectious diseases, anemia, bone and tooth decay, autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, eczema, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, colon cancer, Celiac disease-the list goes on and on! Avoid grains as much as possible and returning to the foods that our early ancestors lived on for thousands of years will help prevent these diseases from taking hold. Vegetables are also discussed with a particular focus on the good kind (non-starchy) versus the most commonly consumed ones (like potatoes which aren't really a vegetable anyway). Fruits are also far different today than they used to be with the focus on breeding them to make them look good, last longer and taste sweeter and sweeter.

The much-maligned fatty, protein-rich animal foods are somewhat defended by Bond, although he accurately notes that our ancestors didn't just eat the parts of the muscle flesh that are commonly consumed today that comprise most of our meat-based meals. They also consumed other parts of the animal such as the brains, hearts, liver, and guts which provided healthy nutrition when consumed after a kill. Today's diet contains little to no consumption of such alternative animal parts despite the fact that hunting for wild game is still possible today. Eggs were also on the menu of an ancestral diet when they could be harvested from just about any bird they could find. Nuts, beans, milk, butter, sugar, salt, and beverages origins in the diet are also shared with the consequences of each are expressed.

Deadly Harvest devotes a good amount of space to the anthropological science behind various diets and their impact on modern health. Carbohydrates are what drives up blood sugar levels if consumed in quantities higher than the body can use for energy. Hyperglycemia makes the pancreas work harder pumping insulin into the body to counter the "sugar rush" and then overcompensates by throwing your blood sugar into the other direction known as hypoglycemia where feelings of dizziness, headaches and cravings for more food commence within a couple of hours of consuming a high-carb meal. Insulin stability can only happen when carbohydrates are kept under control. The replacement of fat in our diet with sugar-based carbohydrates has only led to more obesity and obesity-related diseases. Fat consumed by itself does not increase insulin levels as evidenced by the fact that the Cretans "could consume a whole jigger of olive oil on an empty stomach and not get fat."

The imbalance of essential fatty acids remedied by the consumption of meats and eggs is revealed by Bond with the problem of excessive omega-6 fats in the modern diet explained in detail. Omega-3 fats are found in greater quantity in quality meats and eggs that are raised on a farm as compared with the ones found on a grocery store shelf that were fed a grain-based diet and not allowed to roam freely as nature intended. One major problem I have with Deadly Harvest is Bond's insistence that saturated fats are "almost certainly unhealthy." Like many of the health journalists and nutritional health "experts" he rails against in the pages of his book, Bond also lumps together trans fats and hydrogenated fats with saturated fats in the "unhealthy" category. His recommendation that "all fats should be avoided" except for small amounts of omega-3-rich oils is just too sweeping a comment without an explanation of why they are harmful. A list of the good vs. bad kinds of fats to consume is shared on page 153, but I still think Bond is missing the boat in light of what the science is showing us regarding dietary fat consumption as part of a healthy lifestyle. He claims that our early ancestors ate very little fat in their diet which seems incredibly odd.

The "Savanna Model" of eating is shared to give people an idea about how they can eat like our early ancestors, including food lists and suggested meal options. Bond explains what kind of positive changes you will experience once you make these dietary alterations like reduced digestive problems, fat loss, normalized bowel movements, mouth hygiene improvements, and more! Regardless of your age, this is a way of eating that will change your life forever by altering the course of your diet that almost certainly would have led you down a path of disease and possibly death. He also points out that vegetarians and vegans can eat this way by avoiding the animal-based food recommendations rather than the "eat anything" besides meat diet that many of them adopt. Although he does share his concerns that vegans are severely lacking in an essential nutrient in their diet in vitamin B12 which led Bond to conclude that "veganism is not a natural human eating pattern." Interesting.

The conclusions of Deadly Harvest are that disease control happens by eating a strict low-glycemic diet, lowering the percentage of body fat you carry around, eat a diet consisting of mostly non-starchy plant-based foods, eat a low-fat diet with ample amounts of omega-3 fats, maintain good colon health, engage in regular physical activity, get some daily sunshine, and reduce chronic stress. If you do this, then diseases like cancer, heart disease, digestive problems, allergies, autoimmune diseases, brain diseases, diabetes, and obesity can be avoided. A full list of resources and references for the book are included in the back for further investigation and research for those interested in these concepts. While disagreeing with his assertions about saturated fat, Bond most certainly gets much of the rest of his message right on which is something sorely needed with the degradation of our modern diet. Perhaps we can get him to examine the Inuit people to see how a high-fat, low-carb diet was what helped them thrive with vibrant health for generations. If the evidence is there and he seeks it out, then I have no doubt Geoff Bond will have conclusions that follow the anthropological history.

I have read both of Geoff Bond's books and absolutely recommend his work. This book gives you the tools to achieve optimum health without pretense. Geoff substantiates his work with research and explains his way of living in a scholarly yet readable and entertaining way. Unlike most guides to health Geoff's work makes logical sense and really requires no sacrifice to follow though you may have to modify your way of thinking about nutrition. I have bought copies of his book as gifts for all of my brothers because I want them to enjoy the health benefits I have realized. I recommend you buy this book, follow its guidelines and reap the benefits for yourself.

The information Geoff provides in his book Deadly Harvest makes you think about what you eat. The relationship between the food you eat and how your body reacts to the food is a point Geoff makes very clear. Geoff takes an anthropology approach towards how food should be eaten, and his in-depth research is very evident. Anyone who understands basic chemistry and anatomy will also understand what Geoff is mentioning in his book Deadly Harvest. The depth of the reasearch Geoff has done for Deadly Harvest is incredible.

Geoff presents a plan how you can improve your nutrition and your overall health without having any negitive side effects like what we too commonly see with fad diets. He gives the reader a knowlege that is unmistakeable about improving their health and also mentions many times about how and why people got to where they are. He mentions several conditions that can be improved by just some simple changes to the persons diet.

This book is a must read for those who want to improve their nutrition and health without bad side-effects. The information how to do so is in Deadly Harvest and Geoff explains how you can improve your nutrition and health can be done.

I'm a proponent of this type of diet and looked forward to more of a history of agriculture and what that has done to our health. But then Bond goes off on a tangent about men's self-esteem as "hunter" and how women shouldn't make equal pay to men and that really turned me off to him. I wouldn't purchase another book by this author. What a weirdo.

I've been working with a nutritionist who asked me to give up gluten, dairy, soy, starchy veggies, sugar and beans. I've dropped about 20 pounds. Then I come across a book that makes the exact same recommendations and provides scientific logic for doing so! I'm 90% done reading the book and have now ordered the companion book Healthy Harvest written by the author's wife.

The book goes back to human's point of origin and talks about what we as a species ate. It explains why items that now appear key to a western diet aren't appropriate for optimum health. According to the author the food pyramid is based on politics rather than nutritional facts which you will definitely agree with by the time you're done reading! As a species part of the reason so many people are gluten and lactose intolerant is actually because we weren't designed to eat these items in the first place!

Now that I've read it I believe it will be easier for me to follow my nutritionist's recommendations and to adapt my lifestyle to this diet.

In addition to the section on foods, the author also writes about the community structures that were in place and relates this information to how we are wired.

If you have been looking for information on nutrition and healthy lifestyle, I would highly recommend reading this!

I recommend the book and the diet in it to everybody I know. It's very well written, full of interesting findings, stories, insights. Geoff Bond gathers research on a variety of topics and delivers a "darwinian" nutritional theory that makes a lot of sense - it had to, because he goes against many nutritional myths.

This book changed the way I eat.