The root of our health challenge: evolutionary mismatch

At Wellness Garage, we believe that good health comes from good habits and behaviors.

Specifically there are six core behaviors that are the pillars of vibrant health - if any one of these pillars collapse, your general health will suffer:

• Food
• Activity
• Sleep
• Stress Response
• Relationships 
• Purpose

It sounds so simple - master a set of habits for each behavior and you optimize your health.

So why does it feel so hard?

Two words explain it:  Evolutionary Mismatch

Simply put - our evolutionary design did not prepare us for the modern world.

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Evolution through natural selection adapts organisms to their past environments and has no ability to foresee the future.

Across the six core behaviors:

• Food - throughout human evolution food was scarce, times of abundance were followed by times of scarcity.  Our bodies are designed to be able to store calories when food is abundant as fat, to be used in the future when food is once again scarce.  Times of scarcity were also used by the body to clean up damaged cells and organelles and recycle proteins that have become dysfunctional. This clean-up processes called autophagy, is one of the keys for vibrant longevity.  Our modern challenge lies in the challenge of over-nutrition, excess calories.  Where fat storage is a one-way process and cellular clean-up never occurs.
• Activity - humans were designed to move, to run, to walk, to climb and to lift.  Evolution did not prepare us for desk jobs!  Without exercise our bones and muscles become weak, resulting in the frailty associated with osteoporosis and sarcopenia.
• Sleep - our bodies are designed a diurnal rhythm of light and dark.  30-40% of our genes are turned on or off by this rhythm.  The 24/7 nature of our lifestyles with artificial light and our now ubiquitous screens from morning to night, distorts our bodies natural processes, disturbs our sleep and deprives us of the built in repair cycle that we are programmed to have every day.
• Stress - this might be the most graphic mismatch.  Evolution prepared us to respond to threats through our "fight or flight" response:  our amygdala activates the HPA axis: the hypothalamus triggers the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) which then stimulates the adrenal glands to release adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream.  This response is exactly what you need to mobilize your energy and blood supply to the large muscles that can either fight off the threat or run away from it.  This makes sense when the threat is a tiger - not so much for an email or a rude driver!  In our modern world, we trigger our HPA axis constantly - with the resulting stress affecting our health.
• Relationships - humans evolved to live in relatively small groups where we all knew each other.  It is estimated that our brains are limited in ability to maintain stable social relationships to approximately 150 people.  This limit, also known as Dunbar's number, and is thought to be a direct function of the size of our neocortex.  The average number of Facebook friends is 338, and 20% of users have more than 500.  At the same time, familial relationships have broken down dramatically over the last 150 years.  We no longer have long and stable relationships with multiple generations of our own families.  Loneliness has become such a modern issue that the UK now has a minister of loneliness.  
• Purpose - for much of human existence our purpose was clear: to survive.  With the advances of modern civilization and the taming of famine, pestilence and war - purpose is less clear.  Traditionally, religion played a dominant role, but today many struggle with the notion of higher purpose.

Looked at this way - it is no wonder that the diseases of evolutionary mismatch are the chronic diseases that afflict us and imperil our vital longevity:

• obesity
• metabolic syndrome
• diabetes
• heart disease
• cancer
• dementia
• osteoporosis
• sarcopenia
• and most auto-immune disease

At Wellness Garage, we believe that everyone needs a strategy to address these mismatches. 
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Our programs systematically help people to find their own path to vibrant health by addressing the six core behaviors through the 18 principles we have outlined here.

The answer to evolutionary mismatch will be unique for each of us, but it will lie in our own behaviors.

If you need help with any of your core behaviors, please reach out and book a free consultation with us.