Scotsman.com has an article about the fact that Glaswegians (people from Glasgow, and no, it doesn’t make sense) probably ate a much healthier diet in 1405 than they do today.  I think that’s probably pretty much true universally.  I think most pre-industrial societies world-wide probably ate a much healthier diet than we do today, although we have access to way more/better resources.  Which is pretty sad if you stop to think about it.

If you look at pre-industrial, and particularly aboriginal diets, they almost always work out to being a pretty well-balanced diet.  People ate a much wider variety of things in most places than we do today, thanks to foraging, local variations and lack of monoculture.  There are some exceptions to this, such as some of the earliest “city” societies who were way too dependent on grain, but I think on the whole diets were better. 

Why?  We are programmed to crave things that are rare in nature.  Like salt, fat, and sugar.  In pre-industrial societies, those were rare commodities, and our bodies are designed to take advantage of them when they are available.  The problem is that now those things aren’t rare anymore, and we still crave them.  Plus they all happen to be cheap now, so food companies want us to fill up on cheap crap instead of eating real, less processed, but more expensive ingredients. 

The bottom line?  Take back your diet (and your health) and eat like a Viking!