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Wwkd?

Posted on: Saturday, 26 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

Wondering what you should feed your family? The cornucopia of choices available in the modern world can pose a real dilemma for any responsible menu planner.

The question might be more easily answered if put another way: What would Koko do?

Koko, the gorilla who famously learned to communicate with sign language, was apparently not consulted on this latest study. But the Journal of the American Medical Association reported the other day that the best way to avoid a high cholesterol count may be to adopt what is affectionately called the "ape diet."

Those who conducted the brief but intense examination of diet concluded that eating the very things that our primate cousins prefer is just as effective as modern drugs in lowering levels of the bad cholesterol, known as LDL. The ape diet, heavy in whole grains, nuts, soy and fruits and vegetables, is also cheaper than medicine, has fewer side effects and, if properly prepared, tastes a heck of a lot better.

The primate line that gave rise to humanity had neither pharmaceuticals nor health clubs to fight off the fatal clogging of its arteries. So they wouldn't have lived long enough to give rise to anything if they didn't have another way of staying healthy.

The University of Toronto study suggests that the ape-friendly diet did as much to reduce LDL levels as did a more traditional low- fat diet, even when the low-fat fare was supplemented with statin, a drug commonly prescribed for the treatment of high cholesterol.

The results of this study, like all the others that tell us what we should and should not eat, are not exactly final. The study was short and involved only 46 subjects. The scientists provided the food, so they could be sure they knew what the volunteers were eating. The Almond Board of California helped pay for it. And it is, after all, Canadian.

But it is not the first suggestion that humans would be better off if they were more respectful of their evolutionary roots. The judgment as to whether humanity is better off with or without something has to be based in large part on our imperfect knowledge of what our complicated bodies evolved in and around.

The substances we can tolerate, the compounds we can digest, are what they are because millions of years of evolutionary feedback accustomed us to them, and them to us. To turn our back on those hard-won niches because of some discovery, invention or fad only gives the illusion that we are in control of our own destiny.

Humanity, of course, aspires to be more than apes with a bad diet. The first thing to do, though, is improve the diet.

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