Modern Diseases: Deviations from Nature

Novelty and Modern Diseases: Good Comes With the Bad

The final cause of common modern diseases is a stimuli that are too new. Our bodies simply did not evolve to handle these new conditions. There are two examples that are affecting the majority of civilized individuals:

1. Shoes: The arches of our feet are one of the key adaptations that make us human. However, nature did not expect us to go and invent luxury padding for this precious tool. By creating arch support shoes, we don’t let our feet muscles get stronger. Over the course of our childhood, constantly wearing shoes makes our feet weaken and eventually we lose our arches, making walking much less efficient. This condition is known as flat feet, and is the cause of pain for many adults.

Sadly, when adults feel the foot pain that signals as warning, they go buy shoes with better arch support, weakening the foot even more. This is like changing a neck brace for an even stronger neck brace because your muscles were aching when you took the first brace off. The only way to reverse this issue is by training your feet to handle less cushioning.

1. Reading: We obviously did not evolve to read. However, modern society depends on transmitting knowledge through pages of literature. This forces our eyes to focus on letters close to our faces for extended periods of time. In order to do this, our lens muscles must constantly contract to pull the lense into the proper shape. This is the equivalent of holding your arms out in front of you for an hour, it is a gradually tiring process.

This constant contraction increases pressure in the internal eye fluid, changing the shape of the eye. As we develop, this pressure changes how our eyeballs develop, making us nearsighted and we get glasses.

Reading generates an opposite effect than is intended by nature. Our eyes evolved to look into the distance in order to spot prey and identify threats. Looking at things close to us was only used occasionally in the wild. In fact, studies show that eye development is enhanced in children that spend more time outside. This makes sense when thinking about what our bodies were designed to thrive in. In fact, the reason dyslexia is so common is because there is no region of the brain that evolved to understand written symbols. When we read, we are “hijacking” visual and audio nervous circuits, something everyone is not good at.