Evolving Health

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 / Environmental poisons / Certain birth defects Single cell (bacteria and amoeba-like) / Viral infection / Colds/flu/HIV Morula (sponge-like) / Cellular stress / Cancer Chordate / Physical stress / Back pain Fish / Excess dietary salt / Hypertension/heart disease Amphibian / Tobacco smoke / Lung cancer/emphysema Lower primate / Excess dietary sugar / Diabetes mellitus Higher primate / Vitamin C deficiency / Scurvy Ape / Excess dietary protein / Gout Homo sapiens / Reduced dietary variety / Nutritionaldiseases/food allergies

List of Tables. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Achieving Adaptive Normality, Your EvolutionaryBirthright. 2. How Our Health Evolved. 3. An Evolutionary Child s Birthright:Perinatal and Pediatric Diseases. 4. The Virus War. 5. Cellular Stress: A General Model for Cancer. 6. Breast Cancer, Prostate Diseases, and Cancersof the Reproductive System. 7. Heart Disease and High Blood Pressure:A Story of Fish and Chips. 8. Why We Smoke. 9. Diabetes Mellitus and the Thrifty Genotype . 10. Gout, Liver Enzymes, and Global Climate Change. 11. Back Pain, Bad Knees, and Flatfeet. 12. Gut Diseases. 13. The Evolution of Psychiatric Disorders. 14. Uncivilized Solutions: ReestablishingAdaptive Normality in Your Life. Notes. Index.