Take the diet/eating habits of an agrarian peasant in England from 1000- 1300 CE and compare it to that of your average urban American in 2017 CE. Which diet is the ‘healthier’ of the two? By ‘healthier’ I mean more conducive to disease resistance, physical fitness, and longevity. From the research Ive done, it seems the medieval peasant ate a very simple diet that would make a modern dietician cream his pants- whole grains, fruits and veggies when in season, legumes, and little meat (apparently the average person eating meat on a regular basis doesn’t even become a thing till the advent of factory farming). Their food was also minimally processed and refined sugars and grains were unheard of. However, these people lived a complete hand to mouth existence, with scarcity and famine not at all being uncommon. Lack of refridgeration, food safety standards, etc probably made foodborne ilness common.
The typical American on the other hand probably has access to more food and a greater variety of food than even the nobles of the middle ages. But everone knows how ‘bad’ the standard American diet is. The diet is rich in meats and other animal products, refined grains, refined sugars, oils, and highley processed foods. The average American is incredibly well fed and his food is subject to rigorous safety regulations before being certified for consumption.
Which one of these is healthier, taking all factors listed and any ones not listed into account.
Well, one way to examine the question is to look into the average lifespans of the rich and the poor at any given time. The rich were more able to eat any rich food they wanted, but still were subject to the same diseases as the poor. Did the rich live longer or shorter lives than the peasants?
Instead of artificial preservatives, modern carcinogens, growth hormone and “empty calories”, they had to face a lack of food sanitation, ergot rye, even sometimes malnutrition or outright starvation. Peasants may have eaten more fresh fruit than today’s first world people, but … what fresh fruit would they be eating in the winter? (We didn’t hear about winter attacks of scurvy, probably because they preserved fruit.)
They had less food variety. One common food, potatoes, came from South America. Rice came from Eastern Asia. Both would have been unavailable in Medieval Europe until shipping became effective and economical. (On the other hand, I don’t think the variety of food was low enough to be unhealthy. Millions of people thrived on the stuff.)
I would have been especially worried about the lack of refrigeration, and many “preservatives” (such as pepper) were more about preserving taste (masking the taste of rot) rather than actually fighting off decay.
What about what they drank? The water couldn’t be trusted, so people had to drink light beer, whose alcohol content would kill at least some of the bacteria. Not very alcoholic, but it’s literally homebrewed beer. Moonshine. I wonder if people often went blind as a result of accidentally consuming methanol. (We don’t hear about plagues of that, though.)
I don’t think their diet was objectively healthier, but they undoubtedly had some healthier foods than we do today.
Now about quality? Would you have rather eaten a big lump of black bread (with risk of ergot poisoning), or today’s light (but possibly nutritionally inferior) bread intended for slicing?
Peasants would not have understood a lot about nutritional deficiencies. For instance, what if phenylalanine was poisonous to someone? Or they had diabetes? (I suspect incidences of both were less in those days.) The lack of food sanitation would result in lots of people infected with tapeworms and the like.
The OP specified 1000 - 1300 AD so we can rule out any foods from the New World. I’m reminded of a scene in *Narcissus and Goldmund *(By H. Hesse) where the peasant farm family Goldmund stayed with had a dinner that was: Bread dipped in milk. Not particularly nutritious if had on even a semi-regular basis.
I think about how ancient peoples had to find out by trial and error which foods (or which preparation methods) resulted in diets that didn’t lead to malnutrition if not outright poisoning. For instance, if your diet depends too much on corn (maize to some parts of the world), you will develop pellagra. the biological cause of which wasn’t figured out until the 1930s.
Actually, by spring a lot of people were showing signs of at least mild scurvy. One reason early greens like dandelions were popular is that they did show up early and helped alleviate many deficiencies that cropped up during the winter.
Peasants wouldn’t have had much access to pepper and their main preservative was salt, with some drying and smoking as well. Keep in mind, though, that meat for them was scare and likely eaten before it went bad.
Methanol poisoning is a problem when you’re distilling liquor as opposed to home-brewing beer. Distilling of spirits didn’t get started in Europe until really post-1300. While beer and wine have trace amounts of methanol (especially fruit-based wines) these are extremely small amounts. Distilling concentrates certain chemicals, such as various alcohols, methanol as well as ethanol. In fact, it raises the amount of methanol from innocuous trace amount to dangerous or even lethal amounts
Bottom line, home brew beer and wine don’t have enough methanol to cause methanol poisoning.
Problems with phenylalanine like PKU are genetic and would have occurred at the same rate in Medieval populations as modern ones, but because little to nothing was understood about the disorder such children would have been much, much more likely to die in infancy or childhood, and at best would grow up to be a “village idiot” due to neurological damage. Some people postulate a sensitivity to phenylalanine that isn’t PKU or otherwise as straightforward. Well, it’s a bit like saying you’re allergic to salt - too much salt might cause a health problem, but so will too little. Phenylalanine is one of the essential amino acids and “essential” says a lot - you have to have at least some. Some of the top sources in the diet are things like chicken and beef - you know, that meat stuff peasants didn’t get a whole lot of. (Also eggs and soybeans - but wait, those are Asian and probably not seen in Medieval Europe - and spinach, but it IS an essential amino acid so it’s good they had some sources.)
Diabetics were a HELL of a lot less common - if you had Type 1 you’d be lucky to survive two years, if that long. Prior to artificially produced insulin that could be injected into the body Type 1 diabetes was 100% lethal. Peasants were unlikely to have Type 2 because they were active enough, and suffered food shortages often enough, that being overweight and/or obese was unlikely and that’s the highest risk factor. It probably did happen, but mainly to the elderly and the more well-to-do. Even nobility and royalty lived pretty active lifestyles for the most part compared to today.
True. And the general lack of sanitation made other, potentially lethal diseases like cholera more common. Which meant more deaths from them. Use of fresh, untreated human feces as fertilizer could make eating fresh vegetables hazardous - might be why boiling them to death, or pickling them in strong brine, became popular options.\
In some ways the Medieval peasant diet was healthier, and for those that were resistant to disease spread by bad water and human/animal waste and could tolerate a bunch of parasites in their gut might contribute to a relatively healthy old age - but that was a distinct minority of people at the time. Our diet is better due to nutrients being available year round, better preservation methods like freezing that preserve both quality and nutrition, and modern concepts of sanitation.
diet wouldn’t help here; poor/non-existent sanitation is a big factor in the spread of plagues. modern sanitation (i.e. getting our literal shit away from us as quickly as possible) has contributed more to the advancement of human society than just about anything else.
One area where primitive diets were superior to modern ones was dental hygiene. Dental carries (cavities) were fairly rare in societies that did not have ready access to refined sugar and still are in the relatively few places where that is still true. I took an excellent class in college called Bones, Bodies and Disease taught by a well-known forensic anthropologist. We had to learn to diagnose diseases presented in actual skeletons that were anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years old.
The one thing that almost all of them had was a beautiful set of teeth despite the lack of modern dental products and dentistry. The lack of refined sugar combined with some grit in their diet kept their mouth in really good shape. We also learned that dental health went to absolute shit when refined sugar became readily available especially in Europe and would still be a huge problem today if we didn’t invent decent toothbrushes, fluoridated water and everything else that keeps the ever-encroaching decay at bay.
That said, a nice smile was one of the only benefits of such a diet. Vitamin deficiencies were common especially in the northern latitudes. They got rickets because of a lack of Vitamin D, scurvy because of a lack of Vitamin C (especially sailors) and lots more. A modern American diet may make many people fat but it rarely causes malnutrition and severe vitamin deficiencies that were once common.
Didn’t many Native Americans get ground-down teeth from the grit created by grinding corn in metates? I would think exposing the dentin would have led to cavities even with a diet low in sugar. But IANAD.
The concept of “empty” calories is a modern concept, that assumes you have unlimited calories available. “Empty” calories, like big macs, candy and sugary soda, would have saved the lives of plenty of starving peasants during a medieval famine.
Even in recent, as in post-WW2, history (in the UK at least) products like glucose tablets and a high sugar drinks like Lucozade, were sold basically as medicines, on the assumption that if you were sick there was a good chance you were also malnourished to some degree, and getting “empty” calories into your system would do you some good.
They might not have known the specific cause, but the people of old had figured it out empirically. Corn and beans or rice and beans were commonly eaten together.
yeah. consider that even on the poor western/American diet, people can live into their 70s, 80s, or even 90s on it. though not in the best of health at the end.
It wasn’t the alcohol that killed the germs so much as it was boiling the wort, although they didn’t know it yet. The time period specified would be pre-hops, so they would add gruit to the beer as an additional flavoring and preservative. And don’t knock homebrew. There are a number of us here who turn out some killer brews.
Evergreens such as spruces and pine trees are a rich source of vitamin c, and were valued as such by Native Americans. These sources were assuredly available most the world over where winter occurs, so presumably Europeans knew of them too.
As for sugar:
Plenty of preindustrial foods were worse for your teeth than candy
This is very true, but dental issues other than carries could be problems - the ancient Egyptians for example literally ground their teeth away, probably largely due to abrasives present in their rather montonous diet. No cite but I believe this was still an issue in medieval society, since stone-ground bread didn’t go out of style until relatively late. So fewer cavities and whiter teeth, but worse abrasion and wear, probably leading to a lot of pain and tooth loss later in life.
That is a pseudo-science cite that isn’t accurate at all. The only thing that is accurate in the “article” is that dentistry is ancient practice. That doesn’t mean that most people required it though. Oddly enough, dentistry and even sophisticated brain surgery predate the wheel in parts of the world like South America. Those were anomalies however. Most people in pre-agricultural societies had very good teeth.
If you don’t believe the cause, stop brushing your teeth for 6 months and make it a point to eat several pieces of candy a day. It is absurd to claim that sticky, refined sugar and carbohydrates aren’t the major cause of tooth decay and general mouth rot. Pure chocolate won’t cause it on its own but it will when you mix it with carbs and sugars to create a candy bar or modern hot chocolate.
Here is a more reputable article but there are plenty of more. The causes of tooth decay in ancient people is a surprisingly active research area:
There are a whole bunch of malnutrition-based illnesses like beriberi, kwashiorkor, scurvy, rickets, pellagra, Keshan disease, etc., that have virtually disappeared with modern diets.
Poor diet only takes a few years off life expectancy, maybe 3. So someone who eats a poor diet may die at 78, someone who eats a healthy diet may die at 81.
Considering all the benefits of our modern diet (free of pathogens, full of micronutrients, prevents famine) I’d say the modern diet by far.
It is 5 steps forward, 1 step back (since the modern diet causes obesity and metabolic disorders).