Bid Them Sell My Bones

The typical Ancient Egyptian presumably had a very high carbohydrate diet. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia — as far as we can tell — were the very beginning of widespread, organized agriculture, and hence the very beginning of the diseases of carbohydrate-eating.

But here’s an intriguing hint that even though the Egyptians needed the carbs for pure calorie value, they also knew that such a diet was leading to all kinds of disease.

Will Durant (in the Story of Civilization, Volume I), reports that Diodorus Siculus observed of the Egyptians:

In order to prevent sicknesses they look after the health of their body by means of drenches, fastings and emetics, sometimes every day, and sometimes of intervals of three or four days. For they say that the larger part of the food taken into the body is superfluous, and that it is from this superfluous part that diseases are engendered.

And Herodotus records, “they suppose that all diseases to which men are subject proceed from the food they use,” and that the Egyptians were, “next to the Libyans, the healthiest people in the world.”

What seems more superfluous to you, a bite of meat or a spoonful of wheat gruel? One is the essence of life, the other is mere filler. We can presume that by “superfluous food,” the Egyptians and their Greek observers were referring to bowls of porridge and loaves of bread.

Perhaps, as the first lasting civilization to arise from the wilds of the hunter/gatherer past of humanity, the Egyptians retained a sense of just how unnatural a grain-based diet really is. These days we don’t need to eat mass-produced grains just to stay alive, but we do it anyway.

Here’s an entertaining blog that covers the problems with eating carbohydrates.