“Our land abounds in nature’s gifts…” That was Peter Dodds McCormick’s observation when he penned the lyrics to Advance Australia Fair in 1878. Australian scientist Vic Cherikoff is a pioneer of the Australian wild food industry and enthusiastically affirms McCormick’s words. For the past 30 years he has been studying and promoting the tremendous health benefits of wild foods and encouraging people to incorporate as many as possible into our diets. He is a research scientist of more than 40 years, with a Bachelor of Applied Science and the equivalent of three degrees in Biochemistry, Industrial Microbiology and Environmental Biology.

His first position in clinical pharmacology included work on the neuropharmacology of Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases as well as schizophrenia. He then assessed the nutritional composition of Australian Aboriginal bushfoods and shared his results with the remote regional communities rich with wild foods.

In a paper published in Nature in 1984, he presented three analytical methods that proved – for the first time – that the Kakadu plum (as we now know it) is the world’s highest ‘fruit’ source of Vitamin C. Since then he’s been dedicated to commercialising a select range of approximately three dozen native foods. His book, Wild Foods: Looking back 60,000 years for clues to our future survival is his most recent of five books and it is the one on which he most prides himself.

Australia’s Aborigines are the world’s longest living culture, a fact confirmed by a 2011 DNA study led by Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen along with experts from the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University. This study proved that ‘Aboriginal Australians were the first modern humans to traverse unknown territory in Asia and Australia’. And, according to an article published in 2011 in Science magazine, further studies prove that ‘present-day Australian Aboriginals descend from the earliest humans to occupy Australia, likely representing one of the oldest continuous populations outside of Africa’.

In regards to the nutritional quality of traditional wild foods, Vic frequently references articles from 1908, 1971 and 2016 that examined the diets of traditionally-living, Indigenous populations in Australia, Africa and America. Surprisingly, cancers were extremely rare in these populations, as was heart disease and most of the diseases of nutrition common today. This was also at a time when Indigenous Australians lived well into their 70s, 80s and even 90s, with amazing health and memory recall. In comparison, the lifespan of Europeans at that time was less than 40 years.

Mounting evidence shows that our modern Western diet is the cause of many diseases and that factory farming is breeding out the nutrition from food in favour of superficial benefits such as sweetness, juiciness, appearance and, most importantly, enduring shelf life.

“Look at blueberries, for example,” says Vic. “Wild blueberries are not pumped up with water, which reduces the nutrient value. They are rich, almost plum-like in flavour, and tart, with half the amount of bad sugars (sucrose and fructose) of farmed, store-bought blueberries.” Like most of today’s store-bought foods, modern blueberries have less dietary fibre, more bad sugars, are more diluted overall and contain significantly fewer micronutrients than wild foods.

Not only is the Western diet responsible for our general poor health, it is specifically responsible for growing waistbands and obesity. “We over-eat because we suffer from ‘hidden hunger’, which is a deficiency of micronutrients. If we can’t find the phytonutrients we need for our health, our brain and also our gut flora drive us to keep eating in a vain attempt to find the missing elements,” says Vic.

He will also tell you that long-term weight loss can be easily and permanently achieved by eating the right kind of foods; for example, wild foods, which are rich in micronutrients. “Their effect on our instinctive taste drives is in contrast to the many restrictive diets that hope our limited willpower and hours of exercise will make us thin and keep us that way when all we have to eat is effectively rubbish food.”

Of course, exercise is also a key part of weight loss and Vic’s weight-loss method, which helped him lose 35 kilograms five years ago, is inspired by Aboriginal hunters as well as research from the School of Medicine at the University of NSW.

Vic says he can deliver a healthy outcome with three minutes of short-but-intense bursts of activity (high-intensity interval training) three times a week. He also recommends age-appropriate weight training for bone health – all of which is underpinned by eating wild foods to gain the benefits of “strength, stamina and recovery.”

“The ideal strategy,” says Vic, “is to eat as many wild and near-wild foods that we might forage or grow for ourselves.” However, he recognises that this is not that easy to do and so he markets a wild food nutritional called LIFE (Lyophilized Indigenous Food Essentials). He stresses that LIFE is not medicine. It is a whole food product made from 14 different Australian wild foods and more than 21 other superfoods.

Vic initially created LIFE to reintroduce urban Aborigines to some of the healthy foods their ancestors consumed. Most Aboriginal communities only have access to the worst features of the Western diet and could be considered a part of Australia’s Third World population – a fact he believes should be a national embarrassment to all Australians.

In essence, LIFE “puts back what agriculture has stripped out.” It is a rich source of essential micronutrients including antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, anti-allergens, anti-rogue cells (anti-proliferatives, pro-apopotics, anti-carcinogens, anti-mutagens), immune boosters, adaptogens, organic acids, organ protectants (brain, heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, lungs, blood vessels, lymphatics, skin, reproductive organs), live enzymes and enzyme regulators, good sugars and bioavailable minerals.

While he can’t legally claim that his supplement cures any disease or health problem, he can say that wild foods are rich sources of phytonutrients (plant micronutrients) including the macronutrients and dietary fibre we lack today. LIFE is a good source of wild foods and is more than half its weight in freeze-dried, minimally processed, unpasteurised form.

Despite what food marketers would like you to believe, mainstream, mass-produced foods are not the answer to better health. One day they promote kale, the next day chia seeds, then turmeric, or acai. Individually, these are all great foods but they need to be presented as part of a whole-food diet, which is 10 times more varied than now. “The important point,” says Vic, “is that there is not just one food that is a silver bullet. Rather, we need to consume a wide range of whole foods, including many wild or near wild foods in order to get the phytonutrients missing from farmed foods.”

Indigenous Australians had access to up to 750 different foods, whereas today, on average, we base our yearly diet on less than 70 foods. “We need micronutrients and the only way to get them is from whole foods – and wild foods are what we evolved on,” says Vic. “It has been calculated that a wild foods diet and the right exercise can eliminate the need for about 70 per cent of visits to a doctor.”

His book Wild Food: Looking back 60,000 years for clues to our future survival explores the consequences of eating a modern diet. It also explains how wild foods can help ‘strengthen our immunity and resilience due to their nutritional density’. If you frequently enjoy the Australian bush, this book may be of interest. After reading chapters entitled: ‘A Wild Food Menu’ and ‘Health Attributes of Indigenous Australian Plants’, you may even be lucky enough to source a few of your ‘groceries’ on your next bush walk.

A visit to Vic Cherikoff’s website cherikoff.net reveals his passion for and knowledge of wild food and health. There you can purchase LIFE and a wide range of freeze-dried wild fruits, herbs and spices, Fresher4Longer food rinse and even beauty products. You’ll find plenty of information on how you can benefit from Australia’s abundant wild foods.

For those of us who find it challenging to access what nature has to offer, Vic Cherikoff can help. He’s done the research, has the science to back it up and has created products that bring nature’s true gifts to you.