The Jungle Effect: A Book Review

The Jungle Effect:  A Book Review

(c) Dorine Houston 2008 

Tarahumara patients came into the clinic at a steady clip seeking help for infected cuts and scrapes, broken bones and any number of injuries.  Day after day they came.  One day it dawned on the doctor that the bread and butter of her practice in California, chronic killers such as diabetes and heart disease, were simply not there.  The Tarahumara, not that far over the US-Mexican border, in their remote canyon, seemed impervious to the diseases that felled patients daily north of the border. 

Daphne Miller, M.D. and her husband and children had first encountered the amazing vitality of primitive, isolated people when they volunteered their services for the betterment of a tribe of highly isolated people living on the Amazon in a remote area of the Peruvian rainforest.  During their month of service, they shared the tribe's diet and primitive lifestyle.  It was a diet that would send many US and Canadian mothers squawking with dismay at the low amount of protein it contained.  Sweet-tooth sugar fiends would find themselves challenged by fresh mangoes and papayas.  Salt-loving potato chip and pretzel hounds would have to seek their salt fix from freshly caught fish.  Amazon tribespeople ate their fruits and vegetables only in season, and directly from their own fields.  The US volunteers were more energetic than any of them ever remembered being, brimming with good health and fitness.  The surprise was the change they felt even though they were the sort of people who ate right and exercised faithfully at home.  But they had never felt this good.

Miller later made the acquaintance of a tribe of highly isolated people, the Tarahumara Indians, in a remote corner of northwestern Mexico known as the Copper Canyon.  Again, she encountered a diet low in protein and utterly dependent upon the produce of the people's own fields.  Hominy, limed maize, was a daily staple, usually in the form of corn tortillas that bore only the faintest resemblance to anything known to Taco Bell.  Miller and other doctors found among the Tarahumara the same robust good health and high energy she had first encountered in the Peruvian jungle, people utterly untouched by the ravages of modern ills, especially diabetes and heart disease. 

There were no convenience stores in the Copper Canyon selling corn oil, energy bars, soda, candy salty and sweet snacks, or even the most ordinary of breakfast cereals or canned goods.  The Tarahumara and their guests-helpers ate off the land.  Their corn and tomatoes were the same as their ancestors had been eating for centuries if not millennia, not GMO and not sprayed with pesticides.  How could people eating such a primitive diet be so healthy and fit well into old age, so loaded with energy? 

Back in California, Dr. Miller treated a patient from Brazil whose childhood experiences included years of obesity and low energy on the rich diet of Sao Paulo as well as high energy and a trim figure on the primitive diet of her cousins in a remote native Amazon village.  Her life in the US as a professional with a degree from a prestigious university in New York included the obesity and sluggishness of her years in Sao Paulo and nothing of the energy and joy of her primitive Amazon village years. 

Dr. Miller began researching the relationship between diet and health, wanting to go beyond the usual ideas promulgated in the US.  Thinking about hot spots for diseases such as the northern NJ hot spot for cancer, she developed the idea of a cold spot, a place where a particular disease is virtually unknown.  The Copper Canyon became her quintessential cold spot for diabetes.  The Tarahumara seem immune to it even though close cousins of theirs, a tribe in the US southwest, represent a hot spot for it.  With such a close genetic relationship, it seemed clear that the problem was not in the genes.  She compared their diets and concluded that the difference lay there.  The Brazilian patient, who enjoyed her best health while living with cousins in a primitive Amazon village, seemed to bear out the hypothesis. 

Miller deepened her research, interviewing medical and nutritional anthropologists and epidemiologists, searching for clues to the remarkable good health of such far-flung Native American groups.  Eventually, she traveled to explore for herself the dietary and lifestyle secrets of five of the world's healthiest people groups and related their diets to their complete freedom from five of the most prevalent modern killer diseases. 

Miller's newly published book, The Jungle Effect, discusses her journey of discovery in the form of the most entertaining of well-written narratives.  Miller introduces to some of her patients in her San Francisco practice, and to people she met producing, preparing and serving food around the globe.  Her conclusion is that diet very much affects our health and that modern plagues are a direct result of the modern western diet.  She condemns convenience foods, packaged foods, industrially farmed foods, meats from factory farms and genetically manipulated foods, and lavishes her praise on fresh, while natural produce from the fields, wild seafood, meat and poultry that freely roam and eat the wild diet of ancient animals and foods prepared without the lavish load of fat and meat and especially refined oils and grains of all kinds that are central to the western diet. 

Mexico's Copper Canyon is a cold spot for diabetes.  Crete is a cold spot for heart disease.  There, Miller discovers traditionally produced, non-refined extra virgin olive oil, no longer a luxury of flavor, but essential to heart health.  Iceland is a cold spot for depression.  The people there eat fish, with their omega-3 fatty acids, several times a week.  She contrasts this with people in the US who rarely or never eat fish, and who suffer epidemic depression.  Cameroon, West Africa, with its diet rich in dark leafy greens, is a cold spot for bowel disorders and other digestive diseases.  TV commercials for milk of magnesia, Dulcolax and other stool softeners and bowel control drugs would find no audience in isolated African villages because there is no need for them.  Finally, Okinawa, Japan is a cold spot for breast and prostate cancers.  Again, she finds a diet rich in fish and seafood, including sea vegetables, high in fruit and vegetables but low in meat. 

The reader enjoys Miller's thoroughly entertaining visits with troubled patients and trips around the globe.  Her writing is clear and sharp, holding one's attention.  She writes of medical minutiae in such a way as to make her point clear to the medically unsophisticated without making a well educated reader feel that she is talking down to him or her.  Her vocabulary is vivid; her sentence structure is varied enough to keep the reader turning pages. 

During her travels, Miller was privileged to receive recipes for traditional local dishes from the good cooks of each region.  At home, she worked on reproducing them for people shopping in US supermarkets.  The final section of the book is a cookbook containing a full range of recipes from each of the cold spots.  A reader in the US will find enough variety here to cook for an entire month.  In addition, Miller provides enough in-depth nutritional information to enable the reader who loves to cook and create recipes to do so effectively for good health.  This reviewer was inspired to create a dish using her own beloved flavors of Spain along with the secrets of Crete for heart health,  (Recipe here.)  Recipes already in the reviewer's repertoire can be tweaked with the information Miller provides to make this tiny kitchen in Delaware a cold spot; any reader can easily do the same with Miller's clearly laid out information.  The information includes charts and tables for easy reference as well as expository passages. 

Sunday after church, a favorite niece and I went out for a brunch of sushi.  Kristen is 18 and has just finished her freshman year in college.  Seated at the sushi bar, we got into conversation about her taking care to choose only the low sodium soy sauce.  Kristen is as slender and beautiful as any girl of her age, but she is conscious of the family tendency to apple figures and heavy bellies, and of her own tendency to gain weight there (although to this admiring aunt, her belly looks wondrously flat).  She is already concerned about protecting herself from the heart disease that comes from too much belly fat and that her maternal grandparents may have passed on to her, and the diabetes her paternal family seems routinely condemned to.  She has begun to eschew the McDonald's beloved of her parents and of her own childhood and look upon sushi (keeping the sodium of soy sauce at bay) as a deliciously better choice. 

The Jungle Effect is a book I have promised to lend her now that this review is written and published.  I expect her to enjoy reading it and find it valuable in her journey to remake her personal diet to prevent heart disease in her future. 

The Jungle Effect is squarely in the whole foods movement.  Andrew Weil, M. D. wrote an excellent foreword.  Miller cites Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions, beloved of whole foodies.  I predict that Miller will join Weil and Fallon on the bookshelves and in the hearts of whole foods proponents.  Miller even joins whole foodies in questioning the value of the much-touted canola oil because it is overly refined and the plant is genetically modified. 

I strongly encourage you to get your own copy of the book and do what I will do with mine when Kristen returns it.  Its pages are already dog-eared to passages of special interest.  It will live in the precious space of my tiny kitchen and most assuredly end up stained as I reference it while preparing my own food. 

Since Kristen could barely reach the tabletop, I have been teaching her how to cook, and to enjoy the foods I discovered during my international travels.  We have decided to cook together from Miller's book this summer.  Even if we do not make her exact recipes (and we certainly shall sometimes), we will examine the recipes we are exploring in the light of cold spot cooking. 

Daphne Miller has been presenting an article a week on her thoughts about nutrition and good cooking here at Gather.  You can start with her articles. 

*  You're probably wondering why a book about food ended up with such an odd title.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977359498&nav=Namespace 

*  The biggest shocker
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977366611&nav=Namespace 

*  Olive oil is olive oil: some valuable lessons in food enjoyment.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977374835&nav=Namespace 


I strongly encourage you to cash in some points for a $25.00 Borders gift card and hurry over there for your own copy.  You'll even get a bit of change back. 


The Jungle Effect
By Daphne Miller, M. D.
(c) 2008 
Published by HarperCollins, NY
ISBN 978-0-06-153565-9