Modern Diseases: The Price of Modernization

By the time you read this post, it should be clear that humans evolved to be hunter gatherers. Our genes spent millions of years structuring our bodies into efficient mobility machines. Unfortunately for them (and us), the last ten thousand years have changed our environments amazingly fast. Now, our genes are having a hard time catching up, giving rise to modern diseases.

At this point in human evolution culture has become the most rapidly evolving unit of our lives. While diseases of the past no longer plague us due to medical advances, diseases of prosperity have begun to take center stage. These modern diseases, dubbed mismatch diseases in Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body, have become the menace of modern society.

These mismatch diseases are the result of our environments differing from what our bodies are adapted for. These diseases can be classified in three ways: too new an experience, too much of something, and too little of something. Each category has many illnesses associated with it. Let’s start with too little of something.