This article on anti-ageing and life extension was prompted by what I consider to be a ridiculous concept of embracing a prescription pharmaceutical drug with its unwanted, undesirable effects which come with a few more benign 'benefits'. The author was convinced that an anti-diabetic drug, Metformin, might deliver positive outcomes with respect to ageing.

Click the image below to see the original story or read on for my comments.

It was only the poxy British invaders and the government of the day moving smallpox-infected blankets between Aboriginal campsites and direct, repeated massacres of men, women and children that finally reduced the indigenous population to 10% of what it was.

Yet some of the remaining people who can identify with their traditional lands and have existing links to Country are still able (and willing) to generously share their ancestral knowledge on wild foods and the land management practices that supported them.

In traditional times, pre-invasion by the British, there were 600 language groups reflecting the clans who were caretakers of their Country. Aborigines lived free of the diseases of nutrition and depending on the harshness of the environment, many Clan Elders lived well into their 60s and 70s while retaining full mental capacity and even being the repositories of detailed, intricate oral histories going back many generations. At the same time, only 20% of Europeans could expect to live as long.

Three independent studies in 1908, 1971 and 2016 into the paleoethnopathology of traditionally-living, Indigenous Australians, Africans and Americans revealed some enlightening facts:

The incidence of cancers was very rare to non-existent. There was no sign of ischemic heart disease, no evidence of symptoms of metabolic syndrome (including gout) and few conditions of most of the diseases of nutrition.

Mental diseases were rare and Elders were also polyglots, speaking their own language and that of their 3 or 4 neighbouring clans and clans across the Top End communicated with the Macassan traders who visited our shores for trepang and other foods. Then in the 1780s, Australia's First Nation People also added English from the invading British.

Their intimate knowledge of traditional survival stretched back 4 or 5 generations which allowed them to live through Ice Ages, extended droughts, widespread wildfires and expansive floods. Their skills embraced the plant and animal species on which they relied and acknowledged the carrying capacity of their specific Country, from arid lands to closed forests to wet tropical coasts.

Their in-depth oral traditions encompassed food calendars, the cycles of the seasons (some clans defined 5 seasons, not just the European 4), species protection, land management including ecological niche management, flood irrigation, riverine fish traps, fire suppression and fire-stick farming with mosaic burns and timing of fires regulating their intensity and impact. Traditional occupation of every micro-climate across Australia meant that there was no wilderness, in fact, none of the 600 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages had a word for wilderness.

Aborigines out-performed, out-lived and were in better health than Europeans in the 1700s when they were invaded by the British apart from a few coastal clans who were unfortunate enough to be ‘visited’ by the Dutch, Portuguese and French before this time. These tourists left the pox and other venereal diseases and no doubt were not welcomed to the shores.

However, as the evidence for their superior general health accumulates, it is plain that their foods were protective and supportive in ways that some people are rediscovering.

Australian wild foods can do everything that Metformin does but without the vast list of side effects (as with any drug). It does this naturally, biochemically and specifically, through the action of components that have been bred out of modern foods through agriculture and which appeal to our now-inappropriate taste drives rather than our ideal nutrition.

There is no such thing as a super-drug ... or a superfood

This certainly applies to replacing a range of whole foods from your diet with either a single food or a single drug. Either will pollute (over-dose or overwhelm) non-target biochemical pathways and do more harm than good in the long term.

You may know that Aborigines not only had a far more varied food resource (some 2500 foods across the continent varying between 150 and 650 different foods per clan per annum) but these foods were spectacular nutritionally.

Research is now demonstrating the type of foods we biologically need to live our best life. Wild foods are rich sources of antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, anti-allergens, anti-rogue cell (anti-proliferatives, pro-apopotics, anti-carcinogens, anti-mutagens), immune boosters, adaptogens, organic acids, organ protectants (brain, heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, lungs, blood vessels, lymphatics, skin, sexual organs), live enzymes and enzyme regulators, good sugars, bioavailable minerals and more.

And each of these component classes is encyclopedic.