While in the shower this morning, I thought to myself, why am I still having skin problems, at my age? I mean, I don’t have big red flaring erupting pimples, just an overabundance of clogged pores and the little bumps they cause. I don’t have smooth skin, maybe never have (well, except that time I was on Accutane. Glorious, fetus-deforming Accutane).

Anyway, I wondered, as I often do, if it could be something in my diet. Relative to the “typical” American diet, mine is pretty healthy. No fast food, limited junk food, no sodas, extremely limited high fructose corn syrup (if any at all), lots of homemade food, whole foods, good ingredients, small portions, and so on. I am overall a healthy woman and if I am overweight at all, it’s only by 5 or 10 pounds, which I would only lose to make my clothing fit a little better, and I probably could lose if I had the time to work out 5 times a week.

So what is it about my diet that could be affecting my skin? I started thinking about the modern human diet and how totally different it is from the diet our bodies evolved over thousands of years to eat. Not very long ago, humans didn’t even have agriculture, so no grains, no dairy. In fact, people native to our continent lived on the natural human diet only five hundred years ago. Native Americans subsisted on meat, fish, eggs, and the plants they found in their environment — berries, nuts, wild fruit, mushrooms, root vegetables, and so on. No wheat, no rice, no milk.

I wonder how my Western European digestive system would do on this diet, the diet of my ancestors. Europe has had agriculture for much longer than North America, but even ten thousand years is hardly enough time for evolution to catch up to the human diet. Most African and Asian people have a hard time tolerating dairy because it wasn’t introduced very long ago into their diet. It is easiest for Western Europeans to digest it. But it’s still not a natural food for us to eat. Our bodies have done their best to adapt, something the human body is perhaps best at.

It then occurred to me that if I were to try to eat a natural human foods, that I would be eating some of the most expensive food available. Unfair. Meat, fish, whole nuts, berries… definitely not as cheap as cereal and pasta and diet pepsi.

I don’t know if this has anything to do with my skin, who knows it could just be dry winter air. But it is something to think about anyway.