Evolving Health The Origins of Il and How the Modern World is Making Us Sick
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Contents:
And we must reassess the paleodietary proscription against eating dairy products as dietary components too recently evolved to be good for us because clinical experience has shown that people whose herding ancestors evolved lactase genes in order to effectively digest milk do just fine eating dairy products chapter Evolutionary medicine is built of hypotheses that can be disproved by scientific data 4 Introduction that contradict them or by clinical experience not consistent with predicted outcomes.
Evolutionary medicine promises not only a revolutionary new approach to the science of medicine, but a powerful way for people to integrate a new understanding of health and lifestyle to prevent disease. The most common and debilitating modern diseases can be prevented—by knowledge, and action based on that knowledge.
Patients can assume more responsibility for themselves, and as prevention becomes more and more a part of standard medical practice, they can become full partners with their doctors in maintaining their health. By following the suggestions in this book, your quality of life, especially as you age, will stay high, and your life span may actually be lengthened. In medical parlance, the lifestyle changes advocated here will decrease morbidity, likely delaying mortality until older ages than now generally seen.
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Nothing advocated in the book will hurt you, not even adding insects to your diet chapter 14 , but as you regain your evolutionary birthright and evolve back to health, consult your physician. In nature, animals are adapted to live in a particular way, and they almost certainly derive pleasure from doing the things that they do. Dogs, for example, adapted to hunting in packs, get a kick out of chasing large moving things.
In the past these were always elks, moose, wildebeests, and even the odd infirm mammoth. Today, however, if a suburban dog chases down and takes a bite out of the only large prey available to him, the rolling rubber tire of a garbage truck, it could be fatal. What the dog has evolved to like to do is injurious to its health and longevity. Sometimes even severe object lessons cannot teach the dog otherwise.
A dog I had when I was six, Blackie, loved to chase cars.
The vet thought that Blackie should be put to sleep, but we had a cast put on the leg and it eventually healed. Only a few months later Blackie was found smashed in the road 5 6 Evolving Health and was taken away by the sanitation workers when I was at school.
I wondered for years what deep-seated desire it was that made dogs chase moving motor vehicles. After losing two more dogs, otherwise well trained, to similar highway accidents, I eventually concluded that this behavior was hardwired in them—left over from some Pleistocene adaptation that had benefited their species in the past but now was killing them.
Unlike dogs, human beings are omnivorous—scavenging, gathering, and hunting primates who can eat just about anything that crawls, walks, swims, or flies. Especially tasty to us are food items that are full of fatty acids—energy-rich molecules that become stored around our midsections in fat cells and substances craved by our voracious lipid-rich brains.
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We also love sugar, a predilection developed by our fruit-eating ancestors who, when they found a tree with ripe, sweet fruit, gorged on it to excess. The realities of our evolutionary past were that fats and sugars were in short supply and famine might hit tomorrow. These evolved tastes were adaptive, and it made evolutionary sense for our hominid ancestors to store up energy reserves for lean times ahead. Today, we store up dessert, eating it even after our stomachs are full, simply because it tastes so good, and building up fat cells that famine will never diminish. Human evolution is both history and current reality.
The Evolution of Diet
Its twists and turns have bequeathed to us inborn responses and anatomical traits that serve to adapt us admirably to our many activities and undertakings. But we also obey obviated evolutionary commands. We fear the dark, for example, not because this is a rational decision on our part, but because we are descended from millions of generations of visually oriented, day-living primates systematically preyed upon by nocturnal predators. Amazonian snakes are major predators of New World monkeys still today, and ancient leopards left bite marks on South African australopithecine fossils 3 million years ago.
Over the long course of our evolution things that went bump in the night really could kill us. Fear of the dark was an evolutionary outgrowth of natural selection—the more fearful, more vigilant, and thus most quickly reacting individuals avoided being eaten by the snakes, large raptorial birds, and cats that preyed on Achieving Adaptive Normality, Your Evolutionary Birthright 7 small-bodied, tree-living primates. Today, innate fear of the dark can still be of survival advantage to us, as when we become nervous and suspicious when walking down a poorly lit urban street at night.
But irrational fear of the dark seems to be primarily a characteristic of children, whose small size and experience would have made them most vulnerable to predation in the past. In fact, the habitats in which we find ourselves today have changed so drastically and so rapidly from the conditions in which we evolved that it is surprising that we live in them as well as we do. The ultimate irony is that the biggest agent of change in our environment—the architect of our various habitats on Earth—is none other than Homo sapiens.
The Cultural Econiche Every species has its own econiche—a place in nature where it is at home. An econiche includes not only a physical location on Earth, but the dietary adaptations, daily activity patterns, mating behaviors, and physical attributes that adapt a species to a particular way of life. Hominids, those two-legged creatures that evolved from apes in the African Miocene about 7 million years ago, used to know their place.
Their ancestral biological econiche was in the savannas and woodlands of Africa. As a species, we have lost sight of home. For this reason anthropologists consider that humans have now evolved to live in a new econiche, a cultural econiche. Humans thus are somewhat unique among animal species in having a cultural econiche within their biological econiche.
Traditional Laplander reindeer herders in Finland, for example, have a cultural econiche in the Far North that allows their biological selves underneath to maintain a constant 70 degree Fahrenheit tropical microhabitat inside their warm furlined boots and parkas. Nomads in the Negev Desert, on the other hand, wear open-necked, loose-fitting, dark woolen cloaks that shield them from the blistering sun, blowing sand, and cold nighttime temperatures.
The cloaks absorb heat, creating a vertical circulation of air that keeps skin temperature at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and body temperature normal. The problem is, culture can adapt us to such a wide variety of conditions that there is a danger that we can diverge so much from our origins that we are in conflict with our biological econiche.
Unlike the Laplanders and Negev nomads, whose cultural attributes adapt them admirably to their environments, many of our modern-day cultural adaptations may be killing us. We have to adapt culture to suit our biological needs. For example, we know that as early as 2. We must figure out how to replace this important biological component of our lives—physical exercise—if we want to stay healthy and live long, productive lives. Learning how to shape our cultural behavior to maximize our biological existence is the major goal of this book.
The Pursuit of Adaptive Normality: Average Is Good Because natural selection has formed them within an ecological niche, species of animals have optimal ranges of structure and function anatomy and physiology for all life systems. Most of the Achieving Adaptive Normality, Your Evolutionary Birthright 9 individuals within a population will cluster near the mean, average, or norm used here synonymously of whatever measure that one looks at.
For example, a population of African black-andwhite colobus monkeys has an average length of tail, an average coloration pattern, and an average daily metabolic rate.
But what they actually live on is plant foods. Retrieved 7 March Access to expensive and extensive care is a complex issue confounding families and professionals alike. Federal Register. TABLE 1. The largest of these is Medibank Private Limited , which was, until , a government-owned entity, when it was privatized and listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Data on rising costs indicate the need for some type of action.
Individual traits of individual colobus monkeys will vary around the mean. But why are these values normal? Natural selection tends to maintain an optimal average for a population. Human babies, for example, tend to weigh on average approximately seven pounds.
If they are much less or much more than this weight, they have significantly more medical problems associated with their development. In a classic study in on English sparrows that were caught in a snowstorm, ornithologist Herman Bumpus discovered that the birds which survived were nearest the mean in terms of wing length and body size.
There were disproportionate numbers of big birds and small birds killed compared to average-sized birds, a gruesome illustration of how natural selection culls individuals too far from the optimum. Any number of natural disasters befalling a population— drought, floods, freezing temperatures, fire, or, of particular interest to us in this book, disease—may serve as the agents of natural selection. Individuals near the norm for the population tend to survive all of these onslaughts better than the outliers.
Why exactly it is optimally beneficial for a human baby to weigh seven pounds or for an English sparrow to have a certain wingspan is a hard question to answer. They are not specialized in any one direction and thus tend statistically to survive well. Only if conditions change permanently and in one direction will stabilizing selection be replaced by directional selection, moving the average for the population to a new point.
But extending this concept of evolutionary biology to contemporary philosophy, especially American popular culture, encounters some difficulty. No one would be interested. The unfortunate truth is that many of us operate outside this zone, and we have, by this definition, abnormal lifestyles. To achieve adaptive normality, then, should we emulate Neandertals, early hominids, and our ape relatives? In certain important respects, yes.
But this does not mean donning a leopard skin and swinging through the trees. Adaptive normality does not imply a reversion to prehistoric cultural conditions, just a simulation of the essentially important conditions within which we evolved.
Our occupations and professions are specialized jobs within culture that deprive us of much of our evolutionary birthright. We do a small number of tasks over and over, and we become very good at them. But despite our competence we become bored with our jobs.
Psychobiotics, immunology, and the theory of all chronic disease.
We have evolved a complex brain, with matching physiology and anatomy, to deal with a kaleidoscope of changing conditions—threats to our survival—and the mundane sameness of our everyday modern lives creates a chronic discontent. Our Achieving Adaptive Normality, Your Evolutionary Birthright 11 psychology tells us that something is wrong, but our intellect fails to analyze how to correct it.
We are, in fact, operating at one of the edges of our adaptive zone—in one small place where chance, economic forces, our own interests, and culture have placed us. If we stay there, eventually our health deteriorates. Our cultural econiche adaptation is significantly off the biological norm, and, like a bird that is too big or too small, we will likely die early.
Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick: Medicine & Health Science Books @ giuliettasprint.konfer.eu Evolving Health and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Evolving Health The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us SickNoel T. BoazJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Take Sonya Haskins,6 for example. Sonya works in a chicken processing plant in Georgia. She works eight hours a day—ten sometimes, if she can do the overtime. She hates the work, but she has to support her two small sons. Her back, shoulders, and feet always ache after a day of this work, but she considered herself young and strong when she started and has kept at it. She was diagnosed with bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome, underwent surgery on both wrists, and is now recuperating. Her doctor advises her to find another line of work after she gets off disability.
What about the thousands of other Sonyas out there in similar situations? Sonya is just being asked to move from one abnormal margin of her adaptive zone to another edge—a sort of slash-and-burn approach to life and health in the modern world. Should Sonya have other options? Will she get other options?
The unfortunate answer is probably no, unless she takes a longer view and moves herself to a more normal and well-balanced position in her work and life.