My intention is to be a guide to help people find abundant health through the magic of indigenous Australian wild foods.

Every day, I get more passionate about them as I read of new research about components that are in large amounts in the wild foods of my health and wellness range.

A Guide to Abundant Health

My early work in pharmacology (way back in the 1970s - yep, I'm that old) delved into the dopaminergic neural pathways and while this was more specifically aimed at a solution to the loss of effects of L-dopa supplementation for Parkinson's Disease and why it stopped working after about 5 years, we also touched on schizophrenia and Huntington's Chorea. An early brush with fame was my meeting Arlo Guthrie's late Mum, Marjorie Guthrie, who funded the research for a few years.

Decades later, I still work with dopamine in helping people recognize why they might be less healthy than they would like or for some, why they are carrying so much excess weight around. Both of these tend to shorten our lives and reduce the quality of life we live. It comes down to the addictive nature of modern foods and why we are drawn to sugars and fats repeatedly.

Neuroscientists seem to delve into what they understand and so they talk about addiction and neuroplasticity and about the release of dopamine being pleasurable; This article identifies their misunderstanding. However, even here, the real reason for obesogenic foods (those that make us fat) being the principle problem, is wrong.

Dopamine release from consuming fat and sugar does not increase any level of pleasure which might induce us to eat more of these nutritionally poor foods. If fats and sugars were truly addictive, we would need more and more to feel any pleasure as we build a tolerance for their effects over time. We would also go through withdrawal symptoms whenever we went 'cold turkey'. I mean stopping with the sugar and fats, not switch to eating turkey.

OK. There might be some indirect pleasure effect as dopamine appears to stimulate opioid receptors which definitely respond as a feeling of which we want more and more.

Anyway. Moving right along.

The dopamine > addiction discussion is a case of focusing on the problem and not the outcomes that arise from the best solution(s).

Sure. We are eating more processed foods and a pastry crust in a ready-made pie is not just flour and salted butter anymore but a collection of stabilizers, thickeners, preservatives, emulsifiers, refined oils, possibly some refined sugar all mixed into semi-dwarf, gliadin-laden wheat flour - all of which no traditional culture ever ate through history. Most processed and ultra-processed food and quick-service outlet offerings are similar to the pastry example.

Even our produce is bred to be sweet, juicy, large, durable post-harvest, (flavourless) and phytonutrient-poor.

The real reason we over-consume sugars and fats is that our instinctive taste drives used to help us get quality nutrients and phytonutrients in the process of finding sweet foods and hunting animals.

Read more about all this here: Do Prehistoric Taste Drives Still Rule our Lives?

Just to remind you that the 3rd type of Hidden Hunger is for phytonutrients and this is the reason we crave sweet and fatty foods in a pointless hunt for these elusive micro-nutrients.

Your Mission, should your choose to accept it:

I have now worked with Indigenous Australians around the country for 4 and a half decades during my research into the nutritional values of wild foods and still work hand in hand with many remote communities for supplies and with individuals as customers. Additionally, AFI has a policy to employ Indigenous Australians and has been successful in doing so for well over a dozen years.

However, there is an urgency in preserving wild food resources because the 65,000 years of knowledge of Elders and our access to suitable functional wild foods is threatened.

I recently had my activities described not just as a range of functional foods but as a movement which is wholistic in approach. It combines food with other lifestyle factors including:

• evolutionary nutritional improvement to modern diets with wild food enhancement being critical
• regular aerobic and high intensity exercise with variable resistance
• high quality sleep of between 7 and 8 hours a night
• good stress management and community support of friends and family
• a future-self focus with outcomes being your authentic self and your life purpose
• moderate to no alcohol intake, no smoking and a risk:consequence decision framework
• an ecological focus on both, our own metabolic health and the health of our remaining natural environment
• an awareness that more humans means less of all other species and the existential threat to all life on Earth

We are dealing with

• unrelenting cultural disruption and loss of traditional knowledge and languages
• a lack of ecosystem management policies
• the Climate Crisis/Catastrophe, water scarcity, droughts, wildfires, continued land clearing for factory farming
• over-development and loss of biodiversity
• mining fossil fuel impacts and a slow transition to clean and green energy production from hydrogen fusion
• conventional farming and water ‘management’, chemical fertilizers and soil impoverishment with glyphosate
• land clearing, weed infestation and feral animals all out of control
• the growing over-population which is far and above the country’s carrying capacity
• useless career politicians and a vacuum of political leadership
• a 'green' party and Teals who are both more focused on gender, sportsgrounds and social issues than the environment

We cannot focus on the above problems or we just go deeper down the rabbit hole and never discover the solution to our problems.

The amazing thing to me is that we are still able to access a valuable portion of the unique but dwindling wild food resources in Australia. These are like an Aladdin’s lamp of health and wellness. These are a goldmine for the quality of life of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and we may be able to rehabilitate degraded and endangered ecosystems and save many of our threatened food species, if we act quickly.

But if we focus on our Most Wanted Outcome - now that's a far better way to go.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to embrace wild and near-wild foods, their sustainable wild harvesting and appropriate plantation production, as the keys to a better healthspan and lifespan for ourselves and the environment.

This opportunity will self-destruct within the next decade or less, if it is not more widely supported.

You have my thanks for your support of my Aussie Superfood range. It goes a long way in helping to sustain the wild resources and our network of Indigenous Australians and allows me to grow the number of people who benefit from my 5 decades of fascination with wild foods.

I hope to see you in our online store soon.

Kindest regards,

Vic Cherikoff