The Scots living like hunter gatherers on islands this summer - eating foraged plants, fish and deer

The health benefits of a wild food diet are being tested.

A study is underway to determine the impact a hunter gatherer diet - the kind that was eaten in Scotland around 10,000 years ago - has on modern health.

The Wildbiome Project is being led by Monica Wilde, of West Lothian, an ethnobotanist and forager, after small-scale experiments in 2020 and 2023 on a wild food-only diet resulted in changes to body mass, diabetic health and blood pressure.

Items eaten include foraged plants, roots and nuts, along with caught fish and hunted meat for some.

Now, around 120 people, mainly in the UK with 16 in Scotland, will take part in research that will measure the effects of a wild food diet on the gut microbiome and and key health markers.

Orache and fish head stock soup, deer liver pate and red clover crackers as foraged, fished and cooked by Virginia Hutchison, of the Isle of Lewis. | Virginia Hutchison

Researchers from the University of Bradford are supporting the research and will study hair samples from participants for markers of the Mesolithic-style diet, which could inform study of ancient human remains in the future.

Virginia Hutchison, 49, an artist of the Isle of Lewis, is taking part in the study for a month and has just completed her first week on the wild food diet.

She started preparing for the research last summer when brambles, rosehip and rowan berries were preserved. Dandelion roots were pickled and plums dropped in brine. A couple of deer were shot and seaweed collected, in large quantities, from the shore. She has fish and venison “coming out of her ears”.

Smoked venison fillet on a bed of orache, primrose leaves, sorrel , rowan blossom and toasted beech nuts for lunch. As foraged and photographed by Virginia Hutchison. | Virginia Hutchison

She said: “I am frying liver, I am frying deer fat. I have seaweed hanging on the indoor washing line next to the radiator. I said to my husband ‘this is what a hunter gatherer shelter must have been like’.

“Because you go into a supermarket and pull stuff off the shelf, I didn’t realise how little I thought about how much energy it takes to fuel the body. But now I know.

“I need to be out almost three hours of every day. Being out foraging is the beautiful bit. The cooking and the thinking and the preserving is the tricky bit.

She added: “My brother-in-law shot me a goose the other morning and my in-laws brought round lobster and crab and I almost cried with joy.”

READ MORE: Nut-eating hunter gatherers lived on Skye 8,000 years ago

Ms Hutchison has long had an interest in herbology and plants as medicine, with knowledge developed after a health diagnosis left her with the option of two fairly heavy types of medication. Seeking alternatives, she found natural solutions to help her treatment.

Ethnobotanist and forager Monica Wilde, of West Lothian, founder of the Wildbiome roject. PIC: Carlos Hernan. | Carlos Hernan

At the end of the first week of the study, a lack of carbohydrate is being felt and there are signs now her body is going into ketosis and taking energy from fat stores. More carb-heavy roots will be found next week. Meanwhile, her hair is less dry, her skin is clear, her senses heightened and head-state buoyed by her closest connection to nature.

Ms Hutchison said: “When I was preparing, it was a gorgeous experience. I felt like I totally merged with nature, like I totally became part of the canopy. You are not separate from it.

“If you are going for seaweed or going for fish, you are really reliant on watching the tides and watching the seasons and just being really canny.

“Getting mussels or seaweed is really dependent on the spring tides, so you are watching celestial cycles like a hawk. Also, you are watching plants as they are changing so rapidly depending on what the seasons are doing.

“I stopped dreaming about job security and started dreaming about food security. It was proper hunter-gatherer dreams. I was dreaming about tubers that would grow overnight.”

READ MORE: Saving the lost wild food flavours of Scotland from gorse to pignuts and penny bun

Monica Wilde has launched a large-scale study of the impact of wild food on health in light of disruption in traditional food supplies. PIC: Contributed. | Contributed

The island has been a rich resource of both food and knowledge. Her most recent addition to the kitchen is gunnera - an invasive species that is illegal to sell or plant in the Outer Hebrides. But Ms Hutchison has recently learned locally the plant is also edible and a source of carbs, protein and fats if very carefully prepared.

“Everybody has always got one or two or three little pearls of wisdom and that adds to my index of what is available,” she said.

She has also been introduced to orache - “like spinach, but better” - by a friend in her wild swimming group.

“She sent me to a spot and there is so much orache on the sea shore in the pebbles that I will never run out - it is a total gamechanger,” she said.

Virginia Hutchison with some of her foraged bounty. PIC: Charles Engebretsen. | Charles Engebretsen

While finding more sources of carbs is a priority, so is finding healthy fats,

“Other people on the mainland would get healthy fats from nuts - perfect, amazing. - but I don’t have any on the island,” she said.

Each participant will provide stool samples to measure bacteria in the gut, with bloods also given to check heart health, cholesterol, inflammation, diabetic health and thyroid function. Liver and kidneys will also be tested to ensure the safety of those taking part. Support is offered in foraging, with an online community set up around the study.

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Results from a 2023 trial of the Wildbiome Project, which had 24 participants for either one month or three, found the ratio of good to bad bacteria in the gut increased by 13 points against the control group, where only a one point change was noted.

Sixteen participants were classified as overweight or obese at the start of the study and all lost weight apart from one, whose weight remained constant. The obese participants on the three-month trial lost an average 5.6 kg.

At the start of the trial, only ten people had normal blood pressure. But at the end of the project, 20 people had blood pressure within a normal range.

Ms Wilde said the research had been scaled up to give a broader data set and came at a time when Brexit, Covid, climatic changes and cyber attacks had disrupted traditional routes of food supply.

She said: “I think wild food is really important. In the UK we tend to think of it as a fad thing. People tell me that the countryside couldn’t take much more foraging, but I have never seen a shortage of dandelions or nettles.

“Around 50 per cent of our world’s population relies on wild food and that rises up to 70 per cent where there is famine.

“We know about the gut microbiome of the Hadza in Tanzania or tribes in the equatorial areas and southern hemisphere, but we don’t know much about what would happen to us if we had to go back to living a wild food diet.”

Fundraising continues to support the project, which needs £68,000 to support the participants, the testing and the analysis.

To donate, visit monicawilde.com and follow the link to the fundraising page.