Kudus to you

The question came up today, "So what are we going to do to get well?" This was from another semi old fart who has medical issues similar to my own. The answer: live and eat like a hunter-gatherer. As my sage counterpart so keenly observed, that does not mean hunting down the closest Twinkie® factory and gathering up all the sale items in their "day old" bakery.

Human physiology evolved over three or four million years into people known as hunter-gatherers. A contemporary example of a hunter-gather society is the Bushmen of Namibia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmen). Hunter-gatherers are so named because they make their living by, well, hunting and gathering.

The women and children in these small nomadic groups typically go out every day and wander around for several hours digging up tubers, picking fruits, nuts, legumes, and harvesting any wild grain they can find. Then they go back to camp and cook a meal for their group. Men will get together in small hunting parties every few days and go out hunting for whatever meat they can find.

Not having access to a Mossberg Ulti-Mag® pump action 12 gauge shotgun, this activity involves a lots of walking and stalking, followed by a short, intense burst of energy, and then a prolonged jog while slowly running down some dying animal such as a lesser kudu. The group cuts up the meat, drags it back to camp, and gives it to the women to sauté along with whatever tubers and nuts they had gathered.

Men being men, whether hunter-gatherers or not, the males will expend no more energy until the last of the kudu been consumed or is to gamy for even a guy to eat. Until then the men lie around, play with the little kids, channel surf, and ogle the women when they start out on their daily gathering rounds. Sound familiar, ladies?

The diet of this type of society is rich in complex carbohydrates, fruits, vegetable, and legumes with small amounts of protein at irregular intervals. It also involves a bit of fasting from time to time. Believe it nor not, the human stomach was not intented to be constantly topped off like the oil in a leaking Camaro. The hunter-gatherer also lifestyle involves regular, moderate exercise that is sustained for several hours, then followed by lots of rest (at least for us guys.)

As I said, the human body evolved over millions of years to accommodate this way of life. By contrast, our culture has evolved in just 10,000 years. That’s when people invented agriculture which resulted in major changes to both diet and lifestyle. The industrial age of the past few hundred years hasn't helped any.

Biological evolution works much more slowly than cultural evolution, so there is no way our bodies could have adapted enough to accommodate the way we modern folk eat. We simply were not designed to consume white bread, fast foods, pounds of abnormally fatty meat, genetically modified sugar cookies, and chemicals that would probably be better used for dipping radiators or dissolving unwanted steel.

So, once again, how do we get healthy? Eat lots of fruits, vegetables, beans, complex carbohydrates, and a little bit of meat every few days. Give your digestive system a rest from time to time by doing a partial fast for all or part of a day. And be sure to get lots of regular, moderate exercise. [Note to my accountability partners: Yes, I know; and I am trying to listen to my own advice.]

One other thing we need to do is to learn a stress reduction technique. Hunter-gatherers were sometimes exposed to very stressful situations such as being attacked by a vicious springbok. The bodies of early humans learned to produce large amounts of cortisol and adrenaline to facilitate the fight or flight syndrome when confronted by one of these beasts.

Once again our culture has evolved much faster than our bodies. Few of us ever have to face down a springbok, but thanks to 60-hour workweeks, superhighways, and nightly super delegate counts we are constantly exposed to stress. The cortisol and adrenaline that helps for brief periods of stress will kill you when secreted too often and for too long. Next time I’ll describe a stress reduction technique that can add years to you life and life to your years. It’s something even you will have time to do.