Evolution

Darwin is our Homeboy!

Given the psychedelic makeover we’ve given him, you’d be forgiven for not recognizing the bearded dude at the top of our web-site.  It is of course, the Father of Evolution; Charles Darwin.

OK, but what has Charles Darwin got to do with health & fitness?

Good question!  Well, without Darwin, we’d be trying out every new fitness trend and celebrity diet going, but with him, we can quickly sort the *wheat from the chaff!

Let us explain…

“…Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps.” Charles Darwin; 1859.

If Darwin is correct and it takes a long time and ‘slow steps’ for a species to adjust to changes in its’ environment, what would happen if an animals environment was radically altered in a short space of time?  It may well be that Dinosaurs became extinct because they weren’t able to adjust in time to a Great climate change.  It might also be that much of the chronic health issues humans observe today is the result of another speedy and unprecedented change; one which happened 10,000 years ago.

Today only Professional Athletes resemble yesteryears average Hunter-Gatherer

It was around this time that homosapiens took a radical departure away from their hunter-gatherer (HG) existence, towards a lifestyle of agriculture, industry, and technology.  Although our physiology has remained the same over these years, our activities, diet, and environment couldn’t be anymore different.  You could say that in the space of a few thousand years, we have gone from cavemen to spacemen!  Technology has made our lives more comfortable and rid us of many infectious diseases, but at what cost?

“departures from the nutrition and activity patterns of our hunter-gatherer ancestors have contributed greatly and in specifically definable ways to the endemic chronic diseases of modern civilization.” (Melvin Konner, MD, PhD & S. Boyd Eaton, MD).

Esteemed Scientist, **Jared Diamond, went as far as to say that the switch to agriculture was ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’.  On the surface, this can’t possibly be true; Supermarkets bursting with food, every conceivable gadget for any imaginable task, and some of us are living the longest lives ever witnessed by history.  Yet, Diamond lays out in his Pulitzer prize-winning book ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies’, how agriculture has set the scene for starvation, warfare, and tyranny.  This is beyond the scope of this article, but well worth a read if you’re interested.  From our point of view, what we’re interested in, is how has this change affected health and what we can do redress the balance.

“Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that average height at the end of the last ice age was around 5’9″. With the adoption of agriculture the figure crashed, and by 3000 BC had reached a low of 5’3″. (Jared Diamond, 1987)

The main impact has been diet (no surprise) and what we see is a diet shifting from very varied wild plants and quality animal proteins, to a diet fixated on high-carbohydrate crops (starch).  I’m going to go all Derren Brown and predict you’ve eaten some form of rice, corn, or wheat in the last 24hrs?  Unfortunately although these are cheap calories, they’re also deficient in certain vitamins and amino acids vital to support life.

Perhaps less well understood is how the changes in exercise/activity levels between HG and modern man has affected our health. In a bid to increase our activity, the most common advice is ’20-60mins of continuous aerobic activity, 3-5 days per week’, with a big focus simply on expending calories.  Needless to say, this does not reflect the activity patterns of our common ancestors.

Throwing, Sprinting, Swinging; Caveman Exercise Prescription

Not only is it difficult to keep an eye on your calorie expenditure when you’re being chased by a bear, why would you want to when you’re already lean and muscular.  The best way to describe their approach (and indeed our approach) to exercise is ‘movement with purpose’.  This involves  activities that require the whole body in coordinated, and balanced movements, demanding concentration and effort.  Short intense sprints and violent struggles as opposed to mindless treadmill hours.

And when they weren’t sprinting and wrestling with wildlife, their activity was much more sedate.  A 1953 study published in The Lancet found that the low-level activity of bus ticket-collectors made them 30% less likely  to suffer a heart attack than their more languid bus-driving colleagues. Some anthroplogists suggest an average of 10km per day was spent walking to and from watering holes and hunting grounds.  What they didn’t seem to do, and what we all consider the mainstay of exercise, is the middle-ground; not walking, but not sprinting either, we are advised to exercise at a moderate to moderately high intensity.  ***With this in mind is it really any surprise that marathons have been linked to so many deaths?

Finally, much like our 2 dogs, HG actually spent a great of time sleeping and generally resting.   Although we have a great deal of free time at our disposal, little of this is truly rest & recuperation as our senses are reacting to stimulation from the TV, Internet, emails, texts, and even just artificial lights in general.  Imagine how different your day would be if, when the sun went down, your World was pitch black…boring maybe, restful definitely!

We are not suggesting that we abandon technology and return to our cave-dwelling ways, but simply that there are lessons to be learnt from our past that could benefit our health today; prioritise sleep, eating more protein and less (preferably zero) processed industrial foods, get a dog (or walk a neighbours!), and when you train, train hard and with a purpose!

Welcome to Evolutionary Fitness.

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*Chaff is the protective casing surrounding grain and is inedible to humans.  The grain, once processed, can be eaten by humans, thus this expression refers to separating something of value from something with none.  We use this expression here somewhat tounge-in-cheek because we’d argue there is no value in either the chaff or the grain.  Incidentally, ancient wild grains bare little resemblance to modern domesticated grains; wheat for instance has been bred to have chaff which is easily removed.

**Jared Diamond Awards and honors

• 1961–1965 Prize Fellowship in Physiology, Trinity College, Cambridge, England
• 1968–1971 Lederle Medical Faculty Award
• 1972 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
• 1973 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
• 1975 Distinguished Achievement Award, American Gastroenterological Association
• 1976 Kaiser Permanente/Golden Apple Teaching Award
• 1976 Nathaniel Bowditch Prize, American Physiological Society
• 1978 American Ornithologists Union, elected fellow
• 1979 Franklin L. Burr Award, National Geographic Society
• 1985 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant
• 1989 Archie Carr Medal
• 1990 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
• 1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah and many other endowed lectureships
• 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books for The Third chimpanzee^[9]
• 1992 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize^[10]
• 1993 Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal
• 1994 Skeptics Society, Randi Award
• 1995 Honorary doctor of literature, Sejong University, Korea
• 1996 Faculty Research Lecturer, UCLA
• 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Elliott Coues Award, American Ornithologists’ Union
• 1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Aventis Prize for Science Books for Guns, Germs and Steel^[9]
• 1998 International Cosmos Prize^[1]
• 1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
• 1999 National Medal of Science
• 2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
• 2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
• 2006 Royal Society Prize for Science Books for Collapse^[9]
• 2006 Dickson Prize in Science
• 2008 Ph.D. Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

***See this Runners World Special Report  Are marathons bad for your health. Not an objective analysis as it’s written by runners for runners but even they aknowledge there is an alarming link.