Evolutionof Our Diets
Y
Martin Huecker, MD
ou are feeling pretty good about yourself. You have a diverse diet: 35-40% as carbohydrates (mostly fiber),
20-35% as fat, 15-30% as protein. You have no vitamin deficiencies and no constipation with your 100
grams of fiber daily. You are not at risk of famine and hardly think about infectious diseases. You have
never heard of cancer or heart disease, have no family history of type 2 diabetes. You gather fruits and vegetables and hunt meat with as much fat as you can find. The biggest treat is smoking out bees from a hive
to bring a honeycomb back to camp. You walk about seven miles per day, sometimes chasing animals
and climbing mountains. This hunter-gatherer lifestyle is the culmination of millions of years of
evolution on the human body.
Then comes farming, possibly the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Add the
industrial revolution and now in the last 300 generations we have roughly one million new
mutations, 86% of which are believed to have negative effects. Now humans are getting shorter,
fatter, lazier; getting cancer and diabetes; and we are now full of plaque (in our mouths
and arteries). We have transitioned to the wrong kind of cabbage.
This is not propaganda for the Paleo diet, but we cannot ignore our genetics. We
may be creating a dysevolution of our species by challenging our biology with foods
we did not evolve to eat. Daniel Lieberman, Professor of Human Evolutionary
Biology at Harvard, proposes these and many other concepts in “The Story of
the Human Body.” He makes a strong case for the perversion of the human
diet (and lifestyle) by the industrialization of populations and nutrition.
A dangerous epidemic of “mismatch diseases” faces the human race.
Lieberman uses the example of a Zebra transplanted from the African savanna to New England. The zebra would no longer have to
run from lions, but he would be mismatched for life in his new
habitat, likely starving for lack of grass to eat and freezing in
the cold winter.
The human body we all possess evolved for a different
habitat and diet than the one we find so convenient now.
Many changes in what we consume are likely harming us. We spray pesticides, eat meat from corn-fed
livestock, pollute our waters, inhale smoke and
smog, and breed our produce to be higher in
sugar and starch.
The biggest challenge to our physiologic
balance could be in macronutrient ratios. Our carbohydrate / fat / protein
proportions are far different from
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