Why Our Ancestors Health Was Better Than Ours. We Can Regain It!

CollectiveEvolution

Part I: How Physical Activity Can Help Us Regain Our Ancestral Health 

Modern society has blessed us in many ways. Amazing technological advances have made us comfortable beyond the dreams of past generations. Paradoxically, we suffer from chronic, degenerative diseases virtually unknown a few generations ago. Rather than providing robust health, we see an onslaught of diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease, arthritis, allergies, asthma, and  so on. A vast amount of money is spent on a health care system that is overwhelmed with illnesses. Even the young are now nearly one-third over-weight and obese. (1)  Something is seriously wrong.

Why Is This So? 

To answer this question we need to look at the human body and discover what is making it turn against itself in a time of plenty. The human body evolved over millennia. It grew and changed within very specific environments very different than our own. Is modern society thwarting what nature designed? In his seminal book The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease, Daniel Lieberman, professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University, put it this way:

“The fundamental answer to why so many humans are now getting sick from previously rare illnesses is that many of the body’s features were adaptive in the environments for which we evolved but have become maladaptive in the modern environments we have now created.” (2) (loc. 344)

Can this explain why we now see a surge in degenerative diseases such as Type II Diabetes?  Lieberman asserts that “diabetes is a growing problem because human bodies…were adapted primarily for very different conditions that render us inadequately adapted to cope with modern diets and physical inactivity.” (2) (loc. 343) The society we have created, especially since the Industrial Revolution, is an environment that makes available to us vast amounts of high glycemic industrial foods and a radically sedentary lifestyle. Instead of working to grow our own food we can order it from McDonald’s. The human body did not evolve to metabolize large amounts of sugars and vegetable oils or to be inactive. Our sedentary lifestyles are diametrically opposed to how we were designed to live. It could be said that our culture, or civilization itself, is killing us.

Read More HERE