Nutrition for Optimal Health Association, Inc.

Michael A. Crawford, PhD

NOHA Honorary Member Professor Michael A. Crawford, is currently Chairman of the The McCarrison Society, c/o Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition, London Metropolitan University, London, UK. Its aim is very similar to NOHA - to assemble scientific knowledge on nutrition and health that is free from economic and political pressures with the object of securing the physical and mental health of future generations. Their website address is also very similar to NOHA's. It's URL is: www.nutritionhealth.org

Dr. Crawford was formerly of the Zoological Society of London. He and his late wife, Sheilagh Crawford, published a book, What We Eat Today. They describe very interesting work with animals and what they eat culminating with material on human beings. The book primarily discusses the destruction of structural fats in our present day processed foods. The tremendous change in the ratio of structural fats to storage fats in meat animals resulting from cutting down their movements and their intensive feeding for weight gain is also given emphasis. Our modern diets have become highly deficient in structural fats, which are needed inside every cell in our bodies, especially in our brains and arteries. We have two quite different body fats – one essential to life and found in brain, liver, kidney, lung, heart, spleen, muscle, and other cells; and one found outside these organs and needed primarily by hibernating animals and by humans who eat well only during certain seasons.

In The Driving Force: Food, Evolution, and the Future, Professor Crawford and his co-author make an excellent case for the development of our ancient ancestors on the seashore, where they could eat a fine combination of the long-chain neural fatty acids, in other words, both the omega-3s (exceedingly deficient on the savannah) and the omega-6s, as well as a great abundance of other essential nutrients. On May 4, 2000, an article and commentary appeared in Nature, giving evidence of our tool-making ancestors living on the coast of the Red Sea 125,000 years ago in Paleolithic times.