Urban Hunter Gatherer

For 1.8 million years, before the advent of agriculture, humans consumed a “hunter-gatherer” diet. Modern research into tribes that still consume food in this way have found that these groups take-in 100–200g of Fiber/Prebiotics per day and often eat over 1000 different types of food in a given year, including barks, grasses, roots, fruit, vegetables, meat/bones and insects. Broadly speaking these populations have robust digestive health and microbiomes and nearly non-existent incidences of cancer, obesity, heart disease and stroke.

Unfortunately, the inverse of this model is the modern industrial diet. The average American gets 10–15g of Fiber/Prebiotics per day and less than 200 types of food per year (at a stretch). We have significantly less diversity and abundance in our microbiomes and a range of chronic digestive and metabolic issues. Instead of 200g of Fiber per day we get 80g of sugar and a glut of hybridized and processed food options.

Published and peer reviewed research into digestive health has found that our microbiomes and overall health react quickly and positively to dietary interventions aimed at increasing Fiber/Prebiotics and nutritional diversity. Fiber and prebiotics are key to feeding the probiotics that already live inside of our body and nutritional diversity ensures we have a sufficiently broad range of digestive flora. Current research has pointed to diet as the key factor in forming the foundation of good microbiome and digestive health, along with the cascade of benefits associated with those things. The microbiome is…