The Case for Ancestral Health Intervention and Paleo Medicine
The Case for Ancestral Health Intervention and Paleo Medicine
This article highlights the core foundational tenet of my consulting practice. Public health, health education, and medicine have fallen short in their responsibility to promote positive health outcomes through their failure to capitalize on the only analogy that makes scientific and practical sense for attaining ultimate wellness. We’ve failed to fully understand, learn, and apply lifestyle lessons from our ancestors. The world in which they evolved was harsh and unyielding. The dire hardship endured over long periods of time required them to adapt or cease to continue as a species. Successful adaptation resulted in a near-perfect human genetic profile designed to promote health and control aging in a challenging environment. The physiological advantages that we inherited from them are the greatest gifts ever passed on to humankind. Unfortunately, we have assumed lifestyles that are in direct conflict with our Paleolithic past, squandering the very advantages that the lifestyles of our ancestors indelibly stamped into our genetic code. Don’t despair, the “fix” is relatively easy, and anybody can do it.
Paleo peoples couldn’t choose to frequent polluted environments, be sedentary, or consume refined sugars or unhealthy fats, even if they wanted to. The diet that our ancestors evolved on is the very nutrient dense diet that our bodies expect for optimal function. Food in today’s Standard American Diet (SAD) in nothing like food in our traditional ancestral diet. As a result, we are not designed to tolerate those assaults on our bodies. Chronic disease was virtually unknown to our ancestors living before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago [1]. Now it plagues us and this as true in Charlotte, NC as it is in any other corner of the United States.
DNA evidence suggests that there has been relatively little change in the human genome during the past 10,000 years [2]. We share a nearly identical genetic makeup with our Paleolithic ancestors but live radically different lifestyles, in a drastically dissimilar environment. According to O’Keefe and Cordain [3], “the mismatch between our modern diet and lifestyle and our Paleolithic genome is playing a substantial role in the ongoing epidemics of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”
Three major lifestyle factors figured prominently in the success of human evolution. They are nutrition, physical activity/exercise, and avoidance of chemical “toxic” contamination. Paleo-centric food consumption is paramount to health. The most effective way to mimic the nutrition habits of our ancestors is to consume organic, grass-fed, free-range, pasture-raised, and wild caught foods as that is the very diet they consumed. They did not have the ability to run to a grocery store or use an online grocery delivery service. We must treat our bodies the same way, utilizing the same lifestyle characteristics as they evolved with or suffer the consequences.
1. Eaton SB, Konner M, Shostak M. Stone agers in the fast lane: chronic degenerative diseases in evolutionary perspective. Am J Med. 1988;84(4):739–749.
2. Macaulay V, Richards M, Hickey E, et al. The emerging tree of West Eurasian mtDNAs: a synthesis of control-region sequences and RFLPs. Am J Hum Genet. 1999;64(1):232–249.
3. O'Keefe JH Jr., Cordain L. Cardiovascular disease resulting from a diet and lifestyle at odds with our Paleolithic genome: how to become a 21st-century hunter-gatherer. Mayo Clin Proc. 2004;79(1):101–108.
Wayne Coolidge Jr., M.Ed., CHES is a scholar-practitioner, author, and speaker. He owns Healthy Dynamic Living, an innovative health promotion consulting firm.