Trump’s threat to cut off HIV aid might be the wake-up call we need

Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, South Africa’s Health Minister from 1999 to 2008, gained notoriety for promoting beetroot and other vegetables as treatments for HIV/AIDS. She was terribly misguided; millions suffered unnecessarily, but what if she’d advocated for a return to the traditional African diet? We might have witnessed a miracle.

“Mysterious” HIV first caught medical attention in 1981 among gay men in Los Angeles. It emerged that the virus was already spreading among heterosexual black African populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Modern travel explains the 16,000 km gap between LA and Central Africa but not, “Why these two specific populations?”

We need to go back 50 million years. As the earth began cooling again, primates migrated to the tropics. Those that chose Africa encountered the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)—HIV’s likely ancestor. While researchers date HIV’s emergence in humans to the 1930s in sub-Saharan Africa, they don’t answer the most important question: “Why the 1930s?”

We evolved in Africa; as “modern” humans, we’ve been around for 300,000 years. SIV must have reached some equilibrium with human hosts; otherwise, we wouldn’t have survived. It is clear that the humans of Africa in the last 20,000 years were remarkable specimens, certainly bigger, stronger, and more resilient than today’s top athletes. Early settlers in Zimbabwe (1900) described the indigenous people as physically impressive, with “tall, dark beauties” and “sculptured” men possessing remarkable energy. What went wrong in just 30 years?

The story of two Ndebele kings mirrors what was happening all over Africa, which was to change the continent forever.

Mzilikazi, the founder of the Ndebele Kingdom, chose modern-day Bulawayo to settle because there was nowhere else. Hemmed in by the Mashona, Manica, Zulu, and Afrikaner, only modern-day Botswana lay open, and it was desert. He knew, too, that all of them were as trapped as the next. So when this “maize” the Portuguese had introduced arrived, although he must have watched with trepidation as his women planted it, he couldn’t ban it. Only the Afrikaner Boer resisted—for now, and they could because they “farmed” their livestock. The black Africans didn’t—they only slaughtered their own livestock on special spiritual occasions, for they were the measure of a tribe’s standing with its gods. Livestock were their bank. No king wanted to see their animals converted into mobile larders; the slow acceptance of “agriculture” and the depletion of the stock of wild animals continued.

A striking and imposing figure to the end, Mzilikazi died of old age in 1868, aged 78. His son Lobengula embraced the new foods. He died at 48 in 1894, suffering from obesity and gout.

The revolution that occurred has never been acknowledged. The traditional African diet—meat-based, nutrient-dense—that fed stomachs especially evolved over maybe hundreds of millions of years was completely overthrown by a carbohydrate revolution. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, it was the same. The key component was maize, and the foundations were laid in just 30 years!

Speaking of my area of knowledge, Southern Africa, by 1910 there were widespread reports of blacks clearing lands and ripping up the earth with iron-ox-drawn ploughs. Increasingly, whites were engaging blacks to grow maize for them.

The 1930s has a special place in this HIV/AIDS story. Maize was eaten for breakfast, lunch, and supper by blacks everywhere. This generation of parents was the first to grow up thinking maize was normal, and they were feeding it to their children. Maize was becoming part of the culture. It was in the 1930s that white farmers began growing maize commercially. The “maize belt” was a reality. Southern Africa also experienced its first real black migration from rural homes to the cities. Though it was only to speed up after 1950, two parallel changes were occurring: those at home still treating livestock as their bank carbo-loaded, and those in the cities relied increasingly on packaged and processed foods, including fine-ground maize meal. Throughout, whites maintained a balanced diet of “meat and two veg,” but one change they didn’t escape. When I was growing up in the 1950s in Africa, it seemed that something new and sugar-based was promoted every month. Not only was the diet shift revolution complete, but now people were looking for sugar. In the 60s, a typical lunch for a labourer was “half a loaf and a big Coke.”

A feature of urbanization was the better you were paid, the more sugar and sugar-based whatnots you added to your diet. By 1980, SA, the industrial giant of Africa, was 45% urbanized, and their food came from the shops. In “Beautiful No More: Zimbabwe’s Hidden Crisis on Show,” I wrote that the decline in the health of the blacks of Central and Southern Africa was easily seen as the 70s turned into the 80s. And it was not surprising: the children of 1980 were the great-grandchildren of the Mzilikazi era. They were being fed non-human food by parents whose bodies were already compromised. What had then been external was, by 1980, internal: it was now okay to say a child was born craving. Even if that’s wrong, it is reasonable to say the cumulative effect of the diet change made immune systems more susceptible to infections, including HIV. The statistics show that the HIV virus took full advantage of a population with significant numbers of chronically ill people well able to host it.

While HIV drew the most attention, numerous other “diseases of civilization” emerged: diabetes, fatty liver, IBS, many other gut issues, ADHD, celiac disease, the spurt in autism, various cancers, respiratory issues, increased heart attacks, dementia, and becoming increasingly important because of the social side-effects, depression.

Why aren’t there more whites with HIV? We don’t know, but one thing is certain: the non-black population has never been this metabolically unhealthy. The pharmaceutical and health industries couldn’t have designed a better business model. Who needs to worry about GDP growth when more than half the world needs chronic medication?

Trump’s threat to cut off HIV aid might be the wake-up call we need. Instead of throwing money at treatments, we might finally ask the real questions: Why here? Why then? Why these people?

If only Dr. Beetroot had advocated for returning Africa’s ploughed lands to pasture..

Source:douglasschorr.com