Topic: How traditional societies deal with essential human problems in a changing context
Book: Diamond Jared - The world until yesterday (2012)
Summary (Rutger Bouwes, Chelsea Disseldorp & Sammy Odenhoven):
Traditional communities versus “WEIRD” societies
The book describes traditional communities in relation with WEIRD societies (Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). All aspects of human culture are studied for the last 11.000 years.
Traditional societies are far more diverse in many of their cultural practices than are modern
industrial societies.
Kinds of societies (Elmer Service): Elmer Service identified four kinds of societies; band, tribe,
chiefdom and state. A band is the smallest and simplest type of society and consists of just a few
dozen individuals, many of them belonging to one or several extended families. Bands grade into the
next larger and more complex type of society (a tribe), consisting of a local group of hundred of
individuals. Tribes grade into the next stage of organizational complexity, called chiefdom and
containing thousands of subjects. In a society of thousands of people it is impossible for everyone to
know everyone else or hold face-to-face discussions that include everybody. As a result, chiefdoms
confront two new problems that bands or tribes did not. First, strangers must be able to meet each
other, to recognize each other as fellow but individually unfamiliar members of the same chiefdom,
and to avoid bristling at territesorial trespass and getting into a fight. Second, there is now
recognized leader, the chief, who makes decisions, possesses recognized authority, claims a
monopoly on the right to use force against his members, and thereby ensures that strangers within
the same chiefdom do not fight each other. A state is the biggest form of a society with a population
ranging from tens of thousands up to millions. All states feed their citizens primarily by means of
food production rather than by hunting and gathering. Diamond describes most of the times
(traditional) bands and he compares these bands with the modern states. Most of the bands
were/are living in New Guinea. The cultural diversity of that country is very high.
Friends, enemies, strangers, and traders
Friends are the members of your own band or village, and of those neighboring bands and villages
with which your band happens to be on peaceful terms at the moment. Enemies are members of
neighboring bands and villages with which your band happens to be on hostile terms at the moment.
You probably know at least the names and relationships. Strangers are unknown individuals
belonging to distant bands with which your band has little or no contact. In a small-scale local
population (like a band) you will certainly know all members by name and face, the details of all their
relationships by blood and marriage and adoption, and how they are related to you, but you will not
know people that are living far away. In contrast, in modern large-scale societies whose citizens
travel widely around their own country and around the world, we accumulate many friendships
based on individual chemistry rather than on group affiliation. What counts in friendship is whether
people like each other and share interests, not whether one’s group is politically allied with the other
person’s group.
Territorial conflicts: A lot of conflicts in traditional communities deal with territory. Clans have
mutually exclusive territories. To protect their ground, people are on the look-out. Traditional
communities live isolated, while modern communities have unrestricted elbow-room. Territorial
conflicts are much rarer in modern societies; however there are a few examples, like the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.
First contact with modern people: The first contact of traditional communities with modern people
was contact with European colonists. On first seeing Europeans, New Guinea Highlanders (and other
bands) sought to fit these strange-looking creatures into known categories of their own world view.
Why Europeans were humans: They thought that blank people were dead black people, but two
discoveries convinced them that Europeans really were human people. Firstly, the feces scavenged
from their campsite latrines looked like typical human feces, secondly, young New Guinea girls
offered to Europeans as sex partners reported that Europeans had sex organs and practiced sex
much as did New Guinea men.
Difference traditions and way of trading: So, the people were equal, but this will not mean that their
traditions and way of trading were equal too. Traditional trade differed in several respects from our
modern equivalent method for acquiring goods from others, namely, by cash purchases at stores. For
example, it would be unthinkable today for a customer buying a television to leave the store without
paying or signing a contract, leaving the salesman just to trust that at some time in the future the
customer would decide to give him a gift of equal value.
Agreements: However, a few features of traditional trade would be familiar to modern shoppers,
especially the high proportion of our purchases devoted to functionally useless or unnecessarily
expensive status symbols, such as jewelry and designer clothes.
Three surprises for traditional people: Traditional people would experience three surprises when the
Europeans entered their territory. The first surprise would have been to discover that our
overwhelmingly prevalent method of acquiring an item is not by barter, but by paying for it with
money. A second feature of our market economy that would surprise many traditional peoples is our
process of buying something is conceived explicitly as an exchange, in which the buyer’s handlingover of something else is considered as payment, not a gift. A third feature is that most of our market
transactions take place between the buyer and a specialist professional middleman in a specialist
professional facility, rather that between the buyer and the ultimate supplier near the house of
either one.
Law and justice
Traditional communities have two ways to solve conflicts: peaceful or a war. We, as a modern
community, can learn from this for solving conflicts between people that know each other well. The
western society is individualistic and egocentric. Every citizen of a traditional society is involved by
the conflict solving process. The problem solving process in modern societies is very different. The
government wants to discourage people to be violent. The goal is to maintain stability. The
government does not have any interest in the recovery of relations. Criminal law has three goals:
deterrence, retribution and rehabilitation.
Differences between law and compensation: A car accident is used as an example to illustrate the
differences between the compensation for the death of a child in traditional and modern societies.
Malo, a citizen of Papua New Guinea, killed a young schoolboy, Billy. Billy was riding home from
school in a public mini-bus, and his uncle was waiting to meet him on the other side of the road.
Malo, the driver for a local small business, was driving in the opposite direction. When Billy jumped
from the mini-bus, he saw his uncle and started running across the road. However, in crossing the
road, Billy did not walk in front of the mini-bus, which would have left him visible to Malo’s car. Malo
could not stop in time, and his car’s hood struck Billy; Billy died in the hospital.
In a modern society, a driver involved in a serious accident is expected to remain at the scene until
police arrive: if he leaves and does not report to the police, he is viewed as fleeing, and that itself is
considered a crime. In Papua New Guinea, though, as in some other countries, the law permits, and
police and common sense urge, the driver not to stay at the scene but to drive straight to the nearest
police station. That is because any bystanders are likely to drag the offending driver from his car and
beat him to death on the spot, even if the accident was the pedestrian’s fault. Malo had to
compensate for the death of Billy. A compensation ceremony was hold and Malo and his family/band
paid 1.000 kina (300 dollar) and gave some food. After all, Malo lost his job and became unemployed.
Even it was an accident, Malo is heavy punished. This would not happen in a modern society. Malo
would be acquitted because it was an accident.
Advantages of state-administered justice: What will be the advantages of state-administered justice
over do-it yourself traditional justice involves power relationships? First, a fundamental problem of
virtually all small-scale societies is that, because they lack a central political authority exerting a
monopoly of retaliatory force, they are unable to prevent recalcitrant members from injuring other
members, and also unable to prevent aggrieved members from taking matters into their own hands
and seeking to achieve their goals by violence. A second advantage involves power relationships.
Compensation negotiations in small-scale societies take place “in the shadow of war”, meaning that
both parties know that, if the negotiation is unsuccessful, the alternative is war or violence. A third
advantage of state justice involves its goal of establishing right and wrong, and punishing or assessing
civil penalties against wrong-doers.
Price for advantages: However, states pay a price for those three advantages. State criminal justice
systems exist primarily to promote goals of the state: to reduce private violence, to foster obedience
to the state’s laws, to protect the public as a whole, to rehabilitate criminals, and to punish and deter
crimes. The state’s focus on those goals tends to diminish the state’s attention to goals of individual
citizens involved in dispute resolution in small-scale societies: the restoration of relationships, and
reaching emotional closure.
War
Wars by traditional societies are often between groups of the same clan. The whole population is
involved and the military efficiency is low; weak leadership and a simple strategy. The absolute losses
are small, but the relative losses are big. War can happen by appointment. Another example of a
traditional war is a misleading banquet. Characteristics of a traditional war are: short distance
weapons, personal vengeance, eye contact with enemy, and farmers as soldiers. Characteristics of a
modern war are: self-sacrifice, professional soldiers, and long-distance weapons.
European colonists introduced weapons, diseases and trade opportunities. The introduction of the
potatoes caused a war, but mostly a war was ended as a consequence of European contacts. There
are a lot of reasons for a war in a traditional community: women, animals, magic, and social factors.
The reasons for a war in a modern society are different. Mostly, a war arises due to political
problems.
Bringing up children
Comparisons of child rearing: Some traditional societies have a passive approach to child-rearing
practices. Many hunter-gatherer societies consider young children to be autonomous individuals
whose desires should not be thwarted. Why are we interested in this comparison? There is an
academic reason: Children account for half a society’s population & every feature of adult life has a
developmental compound. This isn’t researched much because many researchers are young without
children. Studies of child development are mostly performed in cultures with a centralized
government, economic specialization and socioeconomic inequality. (WEIRD, western, educated,
industrial, rich, democratic). The practical reason to be interested in researching child-rearing
practices is that small-scale societies offer us a vast database on child-rearing with thousands of
natural experiments.
Childbirth: Some traditional societies have the cultural ideal to have the mother give birth alone and
unassisted. Some have the belief that people must be strong and get through difficulties on their
own. More commonly childbirth takes place with the assistance of other women. Sometimes birth is
a very public event.
Infanticide: In many traditional societies infanticide is acceptable under certain circumstances. For
example when the infant is born deformed or weak. This is related to the amount of food available.
Non-productive people are considered a burden. Another circumstance is when birth intervals are
short. In this case the mother can’t produce enough milk for 2 children. Twin births can also cause
infanticide.
An absent father can also cause infanticide. Single mothers can hardly provide for their child. When
the mother is giving birth alone she has the right to control infanticide. Benign neglect contributes
more to infant death (stop nursing or cleaning the infant).
Weaning and birth interval: Hunter gatherers wean their children for a long time compared to our
society. The longer they wean the more likely it is for a child to survive. Farmers wean children for a
shorter time, because they have livestock, milk and soft cereal gruels to feed the children. This also
reduces the birth interval. High birth interval in hunter-gather societies can be attributed to the
mother being responsible for carrying the child. It is not feasible to carry two children.
On demand nursing: There are two mechanism of caring for children. Neglect and on-demand
nursing, where the child is in constant contact with the mother. Mothers who perform on-demand
nursing are usually hunter-gatherers, and have a higher birth-interval. There are two explanations
for this: suckling releases maternal hormones that inhibit ovulation. Or there is a required fat-level
for ovulating, and having limited access to food and having to nurse an infant causes a fat-level too
low for ovulation.
Fathers and allo-parents: Fathers involvement in the care of infants is less than that of the mother in
all known human societies. Their role is more related to provisioning, protection and education.
Paternal involvement is highest in societies in which women spend time obtaining most of the food.
In hunter-gatherer bands there is a large degree of allo-parenting. These allo-parents are either tribemembers or family-members. The presence of allo-parents improves a child’s chances for survival.
They also improve social skills among children.
Responses to crying infants: In hunter-gatherer societies parents respond immediately to infants
crying. From this we can conclude immediate response to infants children does not consistently lead
to children who are lacking in autonomy and self-reliance.
Physical punishment: There have always been large differences between societies on the opinion of
physical punishment. There is a trend that hunter-gatherers do minimal physical punishment of
young children, while farming societies do some punishment and herders are especially likely to
punish. The proposed reason for this is that mistakes in farming societies can have more impact.
Child autonomy: Child autonomy is more cherished in hunter-gatherer bands. Most traditional
societies have a larger degree of child autonomy. How much freedom the children enjoy seems to
depend on how dangerous the environment is or perceived to be.
Child-play and education: Children imitate what they see adults do, this is called educational play
when they play while using skills they will use when they are adults. Bow and arrow for huntergatherer, cattle games in herding societies.
The treatment of old people: Cherish abandon or kill?
The elderly: There is no universal definition of the age at which one becomes old, this varies among
societies.
Why abandon or kill?: Two circumstances to kill elderly. Hunter-gathers shift from camp to camp,
thus elderly are a burden. When food is scarce unproductive people (elderly) are a burden. There are
five methods to jettison old people. Neglect until death, abandon them, encouraging suicide, assisted
suicide and violent murder.
Usefulness of old people: Old people can focus on what they can do to contribute, like gathering fruit
or setting up animal traps. They can also babysit and create tools. Most important function is
transferring knowledge. There are no books, maps or internet in traditional societies. These societies
must rely on human memories.
Society’s values: The values of the society also impact the treatment of elderly. Respect for elderly
reduces abandonment.
Society’s rules: In some societies certain foods are reserved for the elderly. In some societies old men
monopolize younger women. In other societies the elderly retain property right. In some societies
the power of the old generation is so large that they are described as a gerontocracy, tyranny by the
elderly.
Constructive Paranoia
Attitudes towards danger: Constructive paranoia is paranoia that makes sense (small chance of
danger, but frequent in that situation).
A night visit: In this chapter the author describes an encounter with an apparent sorcerer in order to
illustrate constructive paranoia. One night while out camping, a strange person stood outside the
tent of the author. He later found out this person was apparently a sorcerer. The traditional society
believed in sorcery, thus the nightly appearance of a sorcerer caused panic for the tribe members.
This can be considered constructive paranoia.
The boat accident: In the next part of the chapter the author describes a boating accident on his trip.
While travelling to the mainland in a small and fast boat, the boat filled up with water and capsized.
The cause of this capsizing was that the captain was going too fast for the high waves. The author
recounts the panic of clinging to the boat, and the way he was rescued. After returning to share
safely he strikes up a conversation with an old man. The author told him what happened, after which
the old men explained he also needed to go to the mainland, but decided to not go with that boat
because it seemed too fast and the crew too reckless. The author uses this as an example of
constructive paranoia. The old man saw the inherent danger of the boat, while the author figured
everything would be fine. Constructive paranoia could have prevented this life-threatening
experience.
Just a stick in the ground: The final example of constructive paranoia the author gives is in a retelling
of a story where he went to an isolated mountain peak in order to study birds. There was no sign of
any on the mountain peak. But ownership of territory is very important in New Guinea. If someone is
found trespassing on claimed territory they might be attacked. The author took many precautions,
but travelled to the mountain peak anyway with a helicopter. He spent 19 days on the peak, and saw
no sign of life. Until one day the author and his New Guinean guide saw a broken off branch stuck in
the ground. His guide panicked and figured the branch was placed there by people who claimed
ownership of the territory. The entire expedition, no sign of any humans was found. The authors uses
this as an example where constructive paranoia was not justified but understandable. With territory
ownership being a very important concept in this particular traditional society, and knowing the
dangers of trespassing it made sense to be very wary of trespassing.
Lions and other dangers
In this chapter the author explores the dangers inherent to traditional societies. It starts with an
explanation of the difference in dangers between modern and traditional societies. One important
distinction the author makes is the inherent danger with accidents in traditional societies. While in
modern societies many injuries can be easily healed with modern healthcare, these resources are not
available for traditional societies, which can make minor injuries life threatening.
Dangers in traditional societies are more related to nature. Wildlife can be dangerous, falling trees or
falling in sinkholes are one of the most mentioned dangers in traditional societies. There is also
danger of death by cold or wet weather. It can also be fatal to get lost. Even when an member of a
traditional society survives the initial injury, the lack of proper healthcare can cause paralysis,
crippling or force the member to amputate the affected body part.
In order to mitigate this danger of injury the concept of constructive paranoia is reintroduced. People
must remain vigilant in order to survive. This includes examining tracks and listening for noises, but
can go as far as moving an entire village of foragers when dangerous snakes are spotted. It’s very
important to have the knowledge to avoid dangerous situations.
The most important danger for most traditional societies is disease. Food shortage is a contributing
factor to death by infectious disease. Infants and young children are most susceptible to disease.
Later in life degenerative disease like arthritis, osteoporosis and tooth wear become more important.
Because of the active lifestyle these degenerative diseases, people in traditional societies are very
susceptible. Improvements in hygiene and installing public water reduce the susceptibility to
infectious diseases. Epidemic diseases are less relevant to traditional societies, because infectious
diseases require large human populations in order to spread.
Traditional societies suffer heavy tolls from disease, but some measures are taken to prevent
disease. Some tribes understand there is a connection between feces and diseases such as dysentery
is one of the many examples. Traditional societies also use a trial and error method in order to
identify plants which they help cure particular ailments.
Starvation is also an inherent danger to people in traditional societies. Since people in small-scale
societies share food, starvation involves mass deaths. Since hunger also makes a person weaker, they
are also more susceptible to accidents and illness. The amount of food in traditional societies varies
day-by-day. Especially hunters are dependent on the success of the hunt. The weather can also be a
large influence on the food supply. This danger it mitigated through food sharing with other
societies, and by spreading out the land from which the society gets its food supply.
Religion
For individuals and for societies, religion often involves a huge investment of time and resources. If
religion didn’t bring some big real benefits to offset those costs, the world would become atheistic.
What are the “functions” of religion?
Possible proposed definition of religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices
relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which
unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (Émile
Durkheim)
The components commonly attributed to religions fall into five sets: belief in the supernatural,
shared membership in a social movement, costly and visible proofs of commitment, practical rules
for one’s behavior (i.e., “morality”), and belief that supernatural beings and forces can be induced
(e.g., by prayer) to intervene in worldly life.
What human problems did the invention of religion solve? A brief summary of the functional
approach might be to assert something like this: religion was invented in order to carry out certain
functions and solve certain problems, such as maintaining social order, comforting anxious people,
and teaching political obedience. Another approach states that hope religion instead probably arose
as a by-product of some other capacities of our ancestors and of their own animal ancestors, and
those capacities had unforeseen consequences and gradually acquired new functions as they
developed. From which human attributes might religion similarly have arisen as a by-product? A
plausible view is that it was a by-product of our brain’s increasingly sophisticated ability to deduce
cause, agency, and intent, to anticipate dangers, and thereby to formulate causal explanations of
predictive value that helped us survive. Our brain’s ability to discover such causal explanations is the
major reason for our success as a species. What we now term religion may have arisen as a byproduct of the human brain’s increasing sophistication at identifying causal explanations and at
making predictions.
Why are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions? One suggested answer is that
supernatural religious beliefs are just ignorant superstitions similar to supernatural non-religious
beliefs, illustrating only that the human brain is capable of deceiving itself into believing anything. A
recent interpretation among some scholars of religion is that belief in religious superstitions serves to
display one’s commitment to one’s religion.
7 functions of religion: 1) explanation: has increasingly become usurped by science in modern
Western society. 2) defusing our anxiety over problems and dangers beyond our control: religious
(and also non-religious) rituals are still with us to help us deal with anxiety in the face of uncertainty
and danger. However, this function of religion was much more important in traditional societies
facing greater uncertainty and danger. 3) providing comfort: in the prospect of death, explain a
suffering. The comforting function of religion has increased in more populous and recent societies:
it’s simply that those societies inflict on us more bad things for which we crave comfort. 4)
standardized organization 5) preaching political obedience. 6) moral code of behavior towards
strangers 7) justifying wars.
Measures of religious success: Wilson’s approach: realizing that a religion’s success in increasing its
number of adherents does not depend on whether its tenets happen to be true, but instead on
whether those tenets and associated practices motivate the religion’s adherents to conceive and
successfully rear children, win converts, constitute a smoothly functioning society, or do all of those
things.
Languages
Languages are now vanishing more rapidly than at any previous time in human history. If current
trends continue, 95% of the languages handed down to us from the tens of thousands of years of
history of behaviorally modern humans will be extinct or moribund by the year 2100. Why are
languages vanishing at such a catastrophic rate? Does it really matter? The known number of distinct
languages still spoken or recently spoken in the modern world is around 7,000. Of those 7,000
languages, 9 “giants,” each the primary language of 100 million or more people, account for over
one-third of the world’s population. In undoubted first place is
Mandarin, the primary language of at least 700 million Chinese, followed by Spanish, English, Arabic,
Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese in approximately that sequence. If neighboring
populations with different ways of speaking can understand over 70% of each other’s speech, then
they’re considered just to speak different dialects of the same language. Languages change steadily.
After a few centuries of such independent changes in two geographically separate speech
communities derived from the same original speech community, the communities develop dialects
that may pose difficulties for each other to understand. After about 10,000 years, the differences are
so great that most linguists would assign the languages to unrelated language families without any
detectable relationships.
Your language serves as an instantly recognizable badge of your group identity. Languages are
distributed unevenly around the world: about 10% of the world’s area contains half of its languages.
Factors contributing to this enormous geographic variation in language diversity are ecological
(latitude, climate variability, biological productivity, and local ecological diversity), socio-economic
and historic.
The widespread multilingualism in Europe is a recent phenomenon that has resulted from mass
higher education, post–World War II economic and political integration, and the spread of Englishlanguage mass media. In contrast, multilingualism is widespread or routine in traditional small-scale
non-state societies (for trade, to negotiate alliances and access to resources).
Benefits of bilingualism: bilingual or multilingual people have constant unconscious practice in using
executive control. Reduced Alzheimer’s symptoms of bilinguals suggest that bilingualism itself
protects against Alzheimer’s symptoms.
How do languages disappear: The most direct way is to kill almost all of its speakers. Forbid speakers
to use their language, and to punish them if they are caught doing so. Moving from villages to big
cities, where a different language is spoken. Among the languages with the most secure futures are
the official national languages of the world’s sovereign states, which now number about 192.
Languages with over a million speakers as secure, regardless of their official status. Many people
have a belief that multiple languages cause wars and strife, but its implicit assumption of a
monolingual utopia is wrong: language differences aren’t the most important cause of strife. People
furthermore belief that different people need some common language in order to communicate with
each other. But that doesn’t require eliminating minority languages; it just requires that speakers of
minority languages become bilingual themselves in a majority language.
Are there any positive advantages of preserving linguistic diversity? First, with two or more
languages, we as individuals can be bilingual or multilingual (cognitive advantages of bilingual
individuals). Second: Literature, culture, and much knowledge are encoded in languages: lose the
language, and you lose much of the literature, culture, and knowledge. Third: languages serve as
group identity. By losing a language, groups can feel worthless and start to disintegrate culturally.
Health
We Westerners, despite having traded our set of traditional human illnesses for a new set of modern
illnesses, enjoy on the average better health and longer lives: epidemics of noncommunicable
diseases (NDCs). When societies westernize, waves of NCDs are caused. Our noncommunicable
diseases of civilization arise from a mismatch between our bodies’ genetic constitution, still largely
adapted to our Paleolithic diet and lifestyle, and our current diet and lifestyle. Non-communicable
diseases associated with the Western lifestyle offer perhaps this book’s most immediately practical
example of the lessons that can be extracted from traditional lifestyles.
NCD epidemic: consequences of high salt intake: The average daily salt consumption around the
world is about 9 to 12 grams, with a range mostly between 6 and 20 grams (higher in Asia than
elsewhere). As a result of the relatively recent adoption of a high-salt diet by our still largely
traditional bodies adapted to a low-salt diet, high salt intake is a risk factor for almost all of our
modern non-communicable diseases. Many of these damaging effects of salt are mediated by its role
in raising blood pressure (strokes, heart diseases, Type-2 diabetes, kidney disease, etc.) calm. 120
over 80 is an average reading for Americans. A pressure reading higher than 140 over 90 is arbitrarily
defined as constituting hypertension.
NCD epidemic: diabetes: Western diets that are high in sugar and in sugar-yielding carbohydrates are
to diabetes as salt is to hypertension. Around the year 1700 sugar intake was only about 4 pounds
per year per person in England and the U.S. (then still a colony), but it is over 150 pounds per year
per person today. Diabetes is the commonest disease of carbohydrate metabolism. The ultimate
cause of the many types of damage that diabetes wreaks on our bodies is high blood concentrations
of the sugar glucose. They cause the spilling-over of glucose into the urine: a manifestation from
which stems the disease’s full name, diabetes mellitus, meaning “running-through of honey.”. There
are two types of diabetes: Type-1, which is insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (also known as
“juvenile-onset diabetes”), an autoimmune disease and Type-2 or non-insulin-dependent diabetes
mellitus (also known as “adult-onset diabetes”). Evidence for a role of genes includes the 10-timeshigher risk of getting diabetes if you have a diabetic first-degree relative (a parent or a sibling) than if
you don’t. The prevalence of diabetes is 5 to 10 times higher in obese people than in those of normal
weight, so that diabetes patients can often regain health by dieting, exercising, and losing weight,
and those same measures can protect people predisposed to diabetes against getting the disease.
The current epidemic of NCDs will get much worse before it gets better. We ourselves are the only
ones who created our new lifestyles, so it’s completely in our power to change them. Those changes
include: not smoking; exercising regularly; limiting our intake of total calories, alcohol, salt and salty
foods, sugar and sugared soft drinks, saturated and trans fats, processed foods, butter, cream, and
red meat; and increasing our intake of fiber, fruits and vegetables, calcium, and complex
carbohydrates.