Healthy Living and Eating

 Don't get me wrong.  I prefer to eat "healthy" foods.  Lots of fruits and vegetables every day and a minimum amount of the kind of packaged foods where they have to print the ingredients very tiny because there are so many of them that otherwise they wouldn't all fit on the label.  When all you could buy in the store was "WonderTop" bread, we made our own.  It's been years since I had an Oreo (TM).

 

But there's a reason that a lot of food has all those ingredients, as food companies have sought to make their products taste better, to last longer, be more attractive in appearance, and in many cases even include nutritious additions.  Medieval people did not eat processed foods at all in the way we think of processed food, and yet most who survived the ills of childhood did not make it out of their 50s (see more here on medieval life expectancy).

A few years back I had to have eye surgery for a detached retina.  Joking with the surgeon beforehand, I said, "You mean I couldn't clear this up with healthful exercise and a vegan diet?"  Quite disturbed by the question (and probably not realizing I was joking, surgeons are serious people), he told me this wouldn't do the trick.  And yet these days some people at least seem convinced that if we lived and ate like medieval peasants, we would have a long and healthy life.

(Fun fact:  I would have been blind as a bat in the Middle Ages.)

Medieval peasants certainly ate a plant-based diet.  During the summer, they had plenty of fruits and vegetables, though without refrigeration or trucks bringing fresh food from Mexico or California's Central Valley, in the winter vegetables were mostly limited to root crops like onions or turnips and dried beans and peas.  Bread constituted the principal source of calories.  Eggs and cheese were the principal source of protein, along with an occasional fish if one lived along the sea or a river.

Interestingly, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, it seemed appropriate to give them red meat.  Monks, who normally ate a peasant diet, were fed beef broth in the infirmary.  A common accusation against a monastery considered decadent was that most of the monks became "sick" every week.  (Whee! Time for beef broth!)

How about the healthful exercise?  Everybody got far more exercise than most of us do, even those who work out at the gym for an hour every day.  Aristocrats were fairly constantly on the move, and that meant riding.  As anyone who has been on horseback will tell you, riding is a lot more energetic an activity than sitting in a car, even though the horse is doing most of the work.  If you didn't have a horse, you walked, often miles a day.  Peasants would wrestle their animals or their plows around all day.  A little exercise is great, but 12 hours a day is going to wear your body out fast.

I'm still not going to start eating Oreos, but I like having milk (full of calcium) available year round, fortified with vitamin D, and I like being able to get fresh fruits and vegetables all the time.  I exercise a half hour to an hour a day, but it's more likely to be walking than heaving hay bales up into the loft.  I've already made it out of my 50s.  Don't want to take any chances.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.