BY LENORE PIPES

In print | Published November 16, 2006

Last week’s news article “Trans fats prevalent in Sharples, despite harmful effects” confirmed my view that humans aren’t designed to cope with the quality of the food we are consuming. The lack of nutrition labels makes us unaware of the amount of damage we are causing to our bodies. Trans fats are just one example of how our bodies are facing a man-made challenge that they have not encountered since the emergence of our species. Judging by how trans fats have been found to diminish mental performance by causing brain cell degeneration, it’s clear that we aren’t really winning the fight. Furthermore, the longer unbeneficial substances such as trans fats are kept in our diet, the more we will be exposed to the risk of suffering from a chronic condition like coronary heart disease.

Interestingly, even though diet-related chronic diseases are the largest cause of mortality and morbidity in the United States, they are rare or nonexistent in hunter-gatherer populations. How much of disease in modern societies is truly preventable? What aspects of modern life have medical consequences? Why do we keep craving fat and sugar if it is physiologically destined to make us chronically ill? The introduction of trans fatty acid into the contemporary human diet is representative of an evolutionary collision with our genetic makeup that is exacerbating and increasing the incidence of chronic disease. Darwinian medicine views the etiology of the diseases of civilization as a result of the discordance between genetically determined human biology and the environment (the nutritional and lifestyle patterns) of modernized populations.

Oftentimes, an illness emerges because we are paying for the benefits of civilization with our bodies. On an evolutionary time scale, this mismatch happened relatively recently about 10,000 years ago when Neolithic man invented agriculture and started to domesticate animals. All around the globe, humans invited these curses upon humanity simply because they were a more efficient way to obtain lots of cheap calories with less work. However, agriculture made us sick by greatly reducing the variety of our diets and creating denser and more sedentary populations that were swarming with parasites. Most people don’t realize that for most of our evolutionary history we successfully survived and migrated around Earth in small bands as hunter-gatherers. The fundamental changes that have taken place in our diet have occurred too recently on an evolutionary time scale for the human genome to adjust.

I’m not saying that we should all revert back to consuming a preagricultural hominin diet full of edible wild plants, foliage, tuberous roots and lean muscle meat. I’m just saying that in order to promote health and longevity, we need to consider the adaptations that were evolved for the environment in which our ancestors lived.

For example, many of our favorite processed foods (breakfast cereals, soft drinks, cookies, bagels, muffins and pizza) have little evolutionary experience. Humans have been bombarded with excessive consumption of trans fats within the last 100 years. Unlike the first agriculturalists (who were unaware of how some nutrients are essential for life), we ultimately make the choice to eat a modern diversified diet. This Darwinian approach helps us understand why so many diet-related health problems have emerged in the 21st century. For the first time in our species’ history, with evolutionary explanations at hand, we can finally begin to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of civilization.

Lenore is a junior. You can reach her at lpipes1@swarthmore.edu.

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