Of course, there are many people who pursue health and beauty. Fitness experts are highly respected, and sports methods and fitness catering are very popular in various channels. People who go to the gym to sweat like rain will be more concerned about whether their muscles are symmetrical and whether their movements in front of the mirror are standard.
Whether pursuing "thin beauty" or "healthy beauty", people's greatest enemy is "fat". In public places, overweight people account for the majority. It is an indisputable fact that the number of obese people in current society is much higher than that of decades ago. The increase in obesity has brought more diseases, even new diseases that are rare in history. This is why modern people often turn pale at the mention of fat.
Why do modern people suffer from so many diseases that are rare in history?
In the final analysis, if it comes down to modern people eating more and moving less, it is too simplistic. Daniel Lieberman, professor and director of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, traced the imbalance of human health back to the historical process of human evolution.
Daniel Lieberman holds a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard University, and his research fields span paleontology, anatomy, physiology and experimental biomechanics. He has made great achievements in the field of human brain evolution. On 20 1 1 year, the authoritative book "The Evolution of the Human Brain" was published. At the same time, he is also an advocate and practitioner of "barefoot running" and is called "barefoot professor". In his book The Story of the Human Body, he focuses on the influence of evolution on human health and diseases.
Daniel Lieberman put forward a "mismatch hypothesis" in The Story of the Human Body, the core point of which is that "many characteristics of the human body are adapted to the environment experienced by evolution, not to the modern environment we created", and "the increase of modern diseases is due to the slow evolution of the body and the influence of cultural evolution". This is the core view of the emerging field of evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine applies evolutionary biology to the study of health and disease.
Looking back at the five stages of human evolution, Homo erectus-Australopithecus Australopithecus-the earliest hunter-gatherer-Homo sapiens with cultural creativity, in the long process of natural selection, human body structure and lifestyle constantly adapted to the changes of the environment, and gradually evolved into a stable and powerful biological group on the earth.
Most importantly, Homo sapiens has unprecedented wisdom, which transcends the limitations of biological power itself. When this cultural creativity is released, the progress of human society is obviously accelerated, and it is getting faster and faster.
Human biological evolution has never stopped, but it is a very long process. Daniel Lieberman believes that our current human characteristics are still in a state of adapting to the Paleolithic Age. The slow biological evolution of human body can't keep up with the rapid progress of human society.
Compared with the Paleolithic Age, our living environment and lifestyle have been very different. Daniel Lieberman believes that the driving force of this great change is cultural evolution. He pointed out that "culture itself is not a biological trait, but human cultural behavior and the ability to use and change culture are the basic biological adaptations that especially appear in modern humans." This is the most powerful force of change on the earth now, and it is fundamentally changing our own bodies.
After entering the era of agricultural revolution and industrial revolution, the problem of evolutionary mismatch gradually emerged. The lack of adaptation of human body to the rapidly changing environment has produced many adverse reactions, which may lead to mismatched diseases. For example, dental caries are very rare among apes and hunter-gatherers, but they began to increase after the emergence of agriculture, and the scope of 19-20 century was further expanded. Today, nearly 2.5 billion people in the world suffer from dental caries.
Nowadays, high-energy foods occupy the refrigerators of supermarkets, shopping malls and ordinary families, and the total amount of manual labor carried out by human beings has decreased significantly compared with history, and the problem of mismatch has become more prominent. Mismatch has become diverse and more common. Diabetes, heart disease and more and more cancers are eroding human health.
Daniel Lieberman made us realize that the human body can't adapt to the challenges brought by the speed and intensity of cultural evolution only by slow biological evolution. Of course, there is no need to be too pessimistic. The research from these evolutionary perspectives is very enlightening. What we have to do is to adjust our lifestyle and diet structure from the perspective of cultural evolution and protect our health to the maximum extent.
More and more people realize the importance of "keeping your mouth shut and keeping your legs open" and pay attention to personal health. Emerging evolutionary medicine is also studying the prevention and treatment of mismatch diseases and actively seeking medical countermeasures. In the process of cultural progress, human beings can not only passively accept, but also actively improve. I believe that the initiative of mankind is still in our own hands.
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