I had just jumped in the boat with the old Moken man. The old man was standing in his boat as he rowed out to sea. Our conversation had ended and the ocean was quiet except for the splashing of his oars as they cut into the water. I looked at his sharp spear lying in the hull of his boat and thought about the purpose of his journey. His purpose is ancient and simple, he was looking for food. He was going to catch some fresh fish. I didn't catch fish with this man that day; I went back to my camp before he caught anything, but I later learned that a high percentage of their diet consists of fish and seafood in general. The Moken eat forest and ocean products in a diverse but natural diet. Their diet was pesticide-free, often raw in the case of fruits and vegetables, it was not processed, no preservatives were in these foods and it was always fresh. We all ate this way not too long ago.
The African pygmies that Allyette studied in the Congo Forest eat mushrooms as their staple food. They also eat the meat that the men catch, so generally they have an omnivorous diet that is also fresh, whole, and organic.
Another example is the diet of the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Again, 50 percent of their diet is the Mongongo nut. In general, vegetables are 70 percent of their diet, and wild lean meat consists of 30 percent of their diet. According to the anthropologist Richard Lee, who studied their way of life in the 1970's and their demographics and health statistics, they happen to live long and healthy lives.
Some say that we need to eat not only to live, but that food is the meaning of life. "Eat, drink, and be merry" is King Solomon's' advice in the Bible. The writer and medical doctor Andrew Weil said "Life lives at the expense of other life. Form is sacrificed to form. Everything is recycled."
Primates search for fruit in trees; they usually ate the food where they found it, unlike humans who sometimes brought food back to the community of foragers. For most of history we have been searching for food as hunters and gatherers. What kinds of food do modern gatherers find in their search on trees bushes and in the ground? Hunters and Gatherers today do not find things like cake, McDonald's French fries, and potato chips in the ground and bushes and trees. Our ancestor too did not find these things. They found something else. What we found is what our bodies evolved to eat, and learned to digest and transform into energy.
Many species of primates, including chimpanzees, are omnivorous. This is an adaptable trait that insures survival because if one were not able to eat anything he would have a less chance of finding food.
Our own ancestors' bodies had to adapt to many different kinds of climates, and foods and different diets within these climates. As we view the environments of our planet beginning from the north regions of the Arctic and then heading south to the warmer tropics there is greater biodiversity. There are simply greater amounts of food to eat in warmer climates. Because of differences in climate and environment in general there was great diversity in the diets of various hunters and gatherers.
Some, such as the Arctic foragers and the European foragers, were big game hunters. Today the Scandinavian "Lapps" eat deer meat. Eskimos still eat lots of whale meat. Tropical foragers have a more diverse diet with a greater variety of plant and animal species. The same may be true in temperate zones, such as the California Indians where they were greater varieties of food such as their salmon and other fish, berries, mountain goats, seals and sea mammals. Never the less, despite their differences, people ate the food fresh and at its original native source.
As omnivores we ate foods that were often fresh and unaltered. Tribes eat berries, roots, and nuts directly from plants. The current human body readily accepts the same types of food. In comparison, we couldn't find anything like potato chips on the trees nor could we dig them up instead of whole potatoes. This may be the reason why potato chips aren't healthy. Our bodies just did not get the time to adapt to them.
They are capable of eating other types of food though, and they do when they get the chance. The one universal characteristic that all of our ancestors had in their diets is that they all ate "natural" whole foods. They had limited ability to alter their foods; this is what our bodies are used to now. Our diet is at its best when we eat the natural foods that our ancestors evolved to eat. A Swiss man, by the name of Guy Claude Burger, invented a type of diet called Instinct therapy. This diet promotes that we, as foraging hunter/gatherers of natural foods, had to use our noses and tongues to interpret instinctively whether our food was good or whether it was not healthy. We had to taste the chemicals in the food. Our tongues evolved so that when we taste a sour poisonous taste we spit the poisonous vegetable out of our mouths. Our noses have also evolved so that it can interpret whether food smells healthy or not. This is the way we as a culture learned which food is healthy and which food is not healthy. Currently, we are losing our instinctual sense in industrial culture. In the context industrial food production and the instinct, therapists believe that our modern tongue has become desensitized and dull because of our modern, less conscientious, cooked and "junk food" diet. Our noses and mouths are also less sensitive and dulled by unnaturally too hot and too cold food. Foragers had a clear sense of what their food was. They understood that they needed to respect the sacrifice made to nourish their own bodies. This gave them a clearer understanding of food. Today, because of artificiality and packaging, it is hard to know exactly what food is. Sometimes food can be so altered that it may not actually be food.
Dr. S. Boyd Eaton explains that "the largely new dietary pattern adopted since the invention of agriculture, and especially within the last 100 years, appears to go beyond what our genes can tolerate...following a diet comparable to the ones humans were genetically adapted to should postpone, mitigate, and many cases prevent altogether a host of diseases that debilitate us--diseases almost unknown to hunters and gatherers." So if we are to follow the diet of hunter/gatherers we should be aware of the following aspects of their diet. Eaton says, "Hunters and gatherers of both past and present obtained all of their food from wild game and uncultivated plants." Their diet "was low in saturated fat and salt. Water was the major and usually the only beverage. Refined sugar-mainly honey- was available only seasonally. And roughage, or dietary fiber, was consumed in large quantities from wild non-cultivated plant foods- a major component of the diet. Although meat was prominent, wild game contains so much less fat-about one seventh of domesticated meat-that their total intake of fat, especially saturated fat was much lower than ours."
Dr Eaton has created what he calls "The Paleolithic Prescription", in which he teaches you to imitate the diet of hunter/gatherers. Generally, he explains that our diet should be 60% carbohydrates in vegetable form, 20% protein and 20% fat. Concerning carbohydrates, hunters and gatherers don't eat large amounts of cooked staple grains such as rice. Instead they eat a greater variety of raw vegetables as their source of carbohydrates. These plant foods in a typical hunter/gatherer community usually consisted of a "core group of staple vegetable foods-usually between ten and twenty" They often included "leaves, fruits, seeds, stalks, roots, flowers, nuts, beets, tubers, berries and melons." At the grocery store this all translates into carrots, beets, spinach, salad, blue berries, etc.
Obviously we were not designed by evolution to consume pesticides and artificial additives. So, if we can avoid these things in our diet we should. Just because they have no obvious short-term side effects doesn't mean that they don't have a long-term side effects.
The most natural way to experience Tribal diet is to forage for your diet directly from nature. Go fishing or try collecting berries in the mountains in a place that is relatively free of contaminants.

Natural Food or "Instinct Therapy"