Season, geography, and diet

I have been pondering a dietary theory for a while now. I don't know if it's on target because I am unable to find research on it, but it makes sense to me. See what you think.

We sometimes hear of people in other countries around the world who eat foods that we have been told are "bad," but the people who eat those foods are reasonably healthy so we speculate there is something special about the particular combinations of foods they consume. We name diets after their geographic locations, and try to emulate their health and vitality by following the "Mediterranean Diet" and the "Japanese Diet," etc.

It occurs to me that those diets keep those people healthy not because the diet contains one food or another in any particular quantity or order, but because the basic diet is of foods local to the area, local to the people, local to their physiological growth and development. The foods and the people grow in the same area, and I honestly believe they may be connected in ways we haven't even begun to imagine, never mind understand. Maybe we should give some serious time and study not only to what we eat, but when we eat it, and how far the food had to travel before it arrived at our table. Do you suppose it is possible that foods not native to your specific area are somewhat unhealthy if included regularly, or in large quantities, in your diet? I wonder – I really do – if that could possibly be true. Unfortunately I have been unable to discover any studies on the topic. However, perhaps the best "study" we have are these geographic diets we keep creating because the people who do eat a diet consisting mostly of local foods, no matter what those foods are, seem to be the healthiest people!

The other thing that occurs to me, somewhat related, is that over its course of development, human physiology spent thousands of years eating and digesting seasonal foods seasonally – berries in the spring and summer, pumpkins and apples in the fall, cereals and meats in the winter. Are we, just possibly, throwing our bodies out of balance by striving for an unnatural state of dietary equilibrium when we should be striving for dietary cycles of seasonal varieties of fresh foods instead? (What actually got me wondering about this particular aspect of diet is the post below where I share what I've labeled "The Seasonal Diet" from a book by Maurice Messegue who was a famous French herbalist in the 1970's. He doesn't call it "The Seasonal Diet" though; I added that tag.) Our bodies go through seasonal cycles of varying levels of hormones, vitamins, minerals, etc. Could we possibly be causing chronic illness (or at least chronic "un-wellness") by eating foods that our bodies are not chemically prepared to deal with because it's the wrong season? When we take supplements, are we upsetting the way our physiology works by trying to maintain throughout the year a steady level of a particular mineral when that mineral is supposed to be low at a particular time of year?

I don't know. I really don't have any answers to these questions, it's just a topic I've pondered from time to time. It's certainly something to think about. I just may make a serious attempt to follow "The Seasonal Diet" this year. If I do, I'll let you know what happens. If you do, you let me know how it goes, too!

P. S. I am heading south this weekend if I have to crawl, though I'm much better now after last weekend's sudden bout with the flu. We're doing things a little differently, not trying to do the whole drive in one day, so I'll likely be offline Saturday and Sunday, and hopefully hooked back up for Monday morning.