Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick

by Noel T. Boaz

Book Overview

Human illnesses can be understood as damage to those adaptations that we took on at various stages in our evolution from pre-life molecules to modern Homo sapiens. Preventing these illnesses entails avoiding what causes the damage-- which too frequently are the everyday hazards of twenty-first-century life, as the chart below shows:

Level of Evolution

Cause of adaptive failure

resulting disease or problem

Pre-life
...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471352616
• ISBN13: 9780471352617
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating and enjoyable

The book describes the quite natural idea of developing an evolutionarily-informed medicine in order to better understand diseases and health, the causes, origins and possible treatment/prevention of diseases. It is an interesting example of "applied biology" in which theoretical concepts from evolution, biochemistry, molecular biology and philogeny come together in order to help our understanding the processes of sickness.

This book should be required reading in all the schools

This is one of the four or five best books I have ever read. It explains our most important health problems in their evolutionary context, and it explains why diet and lifestyle changes are far superior to pills and surgery. Everyone should read this book in their youth, so that they can prevent the health problems that come with a lifetime of bad choices and bad medical care. Buy this book, and buy more copies for all your relatives and friends --- and buy one for your doctor so that she can do a better job for you.

Evolution in Health and Disease

This is a fascinating book, written in clear, lucid, and descriptive prose, and written for the non-specialist and specialist alike, exploring the impact of evolution on health and disease. The book introduces "evolutionary medicine" to help the reader make informed choices about his or her own health. No one who wants to live a long, healthy life can afford to ignore the important insights gleaned from evolution in this book. What worked when we were hunter-gatherers on the African savannas no longer works in modern society, and the changes in our modern environments have caused Homo sapiens to adapt poorly. One of the key evolutionary concepts is an entity's adaptation to its environment: When all the body's organs and systems are operating optimally under the ideal evolutionary environments, both internally and externally, our bodies are concordant. When our bodies are out of sync with either environment, they begin to fail, and our bodies become discordant. The former is homeostasis and health, the latter is disease and dysfunction. After a very short introduction to the essential Darwinian concepts, excellently and easily recapitulated, the author turns to the seventeen stages of human evolutionary development, beginning with prokaryotes as stage one and ending with Homo sapiens as stage seventeen millions of years later, and describing all the intermediary stages in between. Although not difficult, it's the only place where the reader might become pensive, if not impatient, thinking the author is off course. But the key to understanding the rest of the book depends on understanding the material presented in Chapter Two. Here are some of the insights in columnar outline: LEVEL OF EVOLUTION, ADAPTIVE FAILURE, CONSEQUENCE Pre-life, Environmental poisons, Birth defects Single cell, Viral infection, Cold/Flu/HIV Morula (sponge-like), Cellular stress, Cancer Chordate, Physical stress, Back pain Fish, Excess dietary salt, Heart disease Amphibian, Tobacco smoke, Lung disease Lower primate, Excess dietary sugar, Diabetes mellitus Higher primate, Vitamin C deficiency, Scurvy Ape, Excess dietary protein, Gout Homo sapiens, Reduced dietary variety, Allergies This is a partial list. Each of the seventeen stages co-exist in humans; this complexity is both to our advantage, and can be our downfall. Understanding how each stage of evolution works within us unlocks a wealth of information. Obviously, the emphasis is on prevention, not treatment, although there are constructive, non-medical, non-surgical options discussed. Some of the ideas are extremely valuable and helpful, others are highly speculative and dubious. For example, one particularly difficult concept advocated by Boaz is a return to a Paleo Diet that is high in animal products (especially gamey meats), while avoiding indigestible beans, grains, and dairy. It might be the "ideal" diet, but it's an impossible one to follow, and even more difficult to find. Still, the insights can help gu

Excellent introduction to the ideas of evolutionary medicine

This works as a general introduction to the nascent field of evolutionary medicine. Note well the word "health" in the title. One of the central ideas in evolutionary medicine is preserving health, and in general looking at medicine from the point of view of the healthy instead of from an overweening concentration on the sick. An ounce of prevention in evolutionary medicine is worth a whole ton of cure.Another important idea is to look, in so far as possible, to our adaptations as evolutionary beings to see what we might be doing wrong today. For example, grasses with plump seeds of carbohydrates were in short supply before the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. There were wheats and ryes, wild oats and such, but their seeds were relatively small and required a lot of labor to harvest. Consequently, our ancestors on the savannahs and in the woodlands ate grain carbohydrates in small amounts. Now, of course, grains--especially rice, wheat and corn--are the staple foods everywhere in the world and we eat massive amounts of them.Is this a problem? As Professor Boaz points out, evolutionary medicine suggests that it is. We are "carbohydrate intolerant" (Boaz uses the term "glucotoxicity," page 133) and cannot shut down our appetite for all the carbohydrates so tantalizingly available to us. They are especially enthralling when served up with salt and fats.In the prehistory there were no supermarkets open 24-hours a day. Instead there were freezing winters and droughts that might last for months or more, sure to visit almost every human eventually. So when there was a bountifulness in the land we chowed down big time. And those of us who had the ability to put on fat could live out the times of famine better than any prehistoric runway model. And so our chubby guy- or chubby gal-genes were favored. Boaz calls this the "thrifty genotype."However that virtue has become a fault. What to do? Boaz recommends exercise, for one thing. In the pre-history our ancestors managed to walk all the way around the world. They had no cars or easy chairs. That we can solve our fat problem by looking at the way our ancestors lived and emulate them, is the somewhat bitter pill of this book. And, by the way, this "medicine" (hard to take, as we all know) also works against heart attacks, gout and other modern diseases.Boaz has gone to some considerable trouble to associate various "diseases" with 17 evolutionary levels of human structure and function. (There's a table on pages 19-25.) These levels are like the idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in that some of the levels are similar to those stages in the embryo's development from single cell through bony fish and amphibian to mammal, all the way to us. What Boaz is adding here is the idea that certain diseases are associated with each level of development. For example, emphysema is associated with the amphibian level of adaptation while viral infections go all the way back t