We Shouldn’t Want to Eat Like Our Great-Great-Grandparents

 

While the "eat like your ancestors" movement—popularized by Michael Pollan’s rule to “not eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”—aims to avoid modern ultra-processed items, there are several practical and health-related reasons why strictly following that diet might not be ideal.

1. Rampant Malnutrition and Deficiencies

At the turn of the 20th century, when people had "no choice but to eat real food," malnutrition was widespread.

    Common Illnesses: Many people suffered from anemia, scurvy, rickets, and pellagra due to a lack of specific vitamins and minerals.

    The Goiter Epidemic: Iodine deficiency was so common that it caused disfiguring thyroid swelling (goiters).

 

2. Benefits of Modern Food Enrichment

Much of our current health is a "miracle" of industrial food processing.

 

    Fortification: The modern addition of iron to flour and iodine to salt virtually banished many of the deficiency-driven illnesses our ancestors faced.

    Consistency: Industrial supply chains ensure year-round access to fresh produce (like tomatoes in January), which provides essential nutrients that were previously unavailable in winter months.

3. Safety and Sanitation

Our ancestors' diets often lacked modern safety standards.

 

    Preparation: Many vegetables were traditionally "boiled to a mush," which was neither tasty nor particularly healthy as it can leach out water-soluble vitamins. 

    Contaminants: Without modern pasteurization and filtration, risks from bacterial contamination (like botulism in honey) were more prevalent, especially for vulnerable populations.

 

4. Lifestyle and Caloric Needs

The physical demands of life 100+ years ago required a much higher caloric intake that doesn't align with modern sedentary lifestyles.

 

    Activity Levels: Past generations engaged in intense manual labor and lacked modern transportation; eating their high-energy, fat-rich diet without that level of physical activity can lead to modern metabolic issues.

    Food Scarcity: For many, protein was a luxury rather than a daily staple, and diets were often restricted by what was locally and seasonally available.

 

While avoiding ultra-processed "food-like substances" is a healthy modern goal, a total return to ancestral eating ignores the significant public health advances—from enrichment programs to global supply chains—that have largely eliminated historic nutritional crises. 

 

Here's a typical modern food advertisement: 

“Dr. Dutkiewicz and Dr. Rosenberg are the authors of the forthcoming book “Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better.”

 

Between the social media influencers extolling the benefits of local, organic and natural food, and the government’s new dietary guidelines commanding Americans to “eat real food,” ideally cooked from scratch, it’s easy to look at your beloved morning bagel with cream cheese and see only a minefield of ultraprocessing and refined carbs.

 

But before you hurl that bagel into the trash, consider that it represents much that is good about our food system: It is affordable, convenient and nutritious. Virtually all the food we eat, junk and vegetables alike, is part of an industrial system. Acknowledging that fact and embracing the system’s scale, reliability, safety standards and abundance is a far better path to improving it than chasing a fantasy of Edenic premodern food that never existed.

 

Your morning bagel is, in fact, a small miracle made possible by conventional, mass-produced and enriched ingredients, like flour and salt. At the turn of the 20th century, when our great-great-grandparents had no choice but to eat “real food,” malnutrition was rampant. Anemia was common, as was iodine deficiency, which could cause a disfiguring swelling of the thyroid gland known as a goiter; in one Michigan county on the eve of World War I, nearly a third of potential Army recruits were rejected because of such thyroid problems. Enrichment — such as the addition of iron to wheat flour and iodine to salt — and easier access to grain and fresh produce, made possible by productive industrial farming, reduced anemia and virtually banished not only goiters but also illnesses like rickets, scurvy and pellagra.

 

Perhaps you want a slice of tomato on that bagel? If it’s January on the East Coast, it won’t be local. Your tomato will come from Florida or, more likely, Mexico, where it will have been grown on high-yield farms using conventional fertilizers and pesticides. Want it organic? It will still take industrial supply chains to get it to you. Shunning those globe-spanning supply chains in favor of sparse and often more expensive local and seasonal alternatives is likely to result in everyone eating less produce.

 

Adding fruit will make your breakfast even healthier. Here, too, modern food technology can help. Half a century of worry about the safety of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s, often derided as “frankenfoods,” has not yielded a shred of compelling evidence that they endanger human health. The genetically modified Rainbow papaya, which is resistant to the ringspot virus, saved Hawaii’s papaya crop. Arctic apples from Washington State, genetically modified to brown more slowly, reduce food waste.

 

It’s true that the bagel’s cream cheese, made velvety with carob bean gum and shelf-stable and mold-free with potassium sorbate, is considered ultraprocessed. But the idea that ultraprocessed foods are categorically unhealthy is an oversimplification. While eating too many highly processed sugary and fatty foods is bad for you, research has also shown that many ultraprocessed foods, such as yogurt, whole-grain bread or ready-to-eat plant-based burgers, are not linked to worse health outcomes and may even be beneficial.”

 

Sorbate slows down metabolism and contributes to the obesity epidemic. Pesticide residues in food, thanks to which a small number of people grow a lot of food, accumulate in our body fat for many years and slowly damage our health. Seed oils (such as sunflower) have several unsaturated bonds in the molecule, so they easily oxidize when heated and become poisonous.

 

This is a very interesting and relevant topic. Many of the problems of modern nutrition that worry scientists and health enthusiasts are correctly identified here.

 

However, the statement that we should (or should not) want to eat like our great-great-grandparents is a double-edged sword. Let's look at this through the prism of objectivity: what was better in their diet, and where do we have an advantage today?

 

Why are the arguments we have listed correct?

 

Here are three critical points that explain why modern food is often bad for us:

 

Food additives (e.g. potassium sorbate): While preservatives prevent food from spoiling and protect against mold poisoning, a growing body of research shows that they can negatively impact our microbiome (good gut bacteria). A disrupted microbiota is directly linked to slower metabolism and inflammation.

 

Pesticides and toxins: In our great-great-grandparents’ time, agriculture was “naturally organic.” Today’s pesticides are lipophilic (fat-soluble), so they actually tend to accumulate in human fatty tissue. This is called bioaccumulation, which can disrupt hormone function.

 

Seed oils and oxidation: Sunflower, canola, or soybean oils are high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (Omega-6). When heated, they become unstable, oxidize, and produce free radicals that promote chronic inflammation. Our ancestors used stable fats: butter, lard, or olive oil.