Friday, May 2, 2008

Our Diet Needs an Evolution

I wrote an article for my biological anthropology class earlier this week. We had to write about a biological problem of modern day homo sapiens. Honestly, the class was pretty boring because it just compared different kinds of monkeys and the similarities and differences of each monkey evolutions and cultures all over the world. I like to study people, not monkeys. So when we get to read and write about modern issues of humans, I get excited...

The evolution of our diets have evolved a little too much over the past 100 years. Ever since the dawn of mass producing agriculture and the industrial revolution, we (as humans) have made it easier to consume food on a daily basis. When was the last time you had to starve because you didn't have any food to eat. In America, probably never. We have evolved from hunter and gatherer society to a work and drive to the store society. This was a great step for man kind. It makes our lives easier so we don't have to worry about if we caught a wild pig in our traps today. We can enjoy a nice meal around our family table instead of around the fire pit.

Today, we have progressed a little farther from the drive to the store society to a drive-thru society. Faster is better. The problem is our society got used to the fast McDonalds drive in. We consume too much high calorie foods and do less physical activities. The the only reason we have is that McDonalds is cheap, easy, and we can get out in less than 10 minutes. We think McDonalds is tasty, but we dont know what it is! So we are constantly consuming all this high calorie fast food, and now we wonder why our bodies are so tired and developing cancer. Our bodies have not evolved enough to be able to process all this processed fast foods. So now we know someone who has cancer because our society has embraced this fast solution to our daily consumtion. Cancer is showing up more frequently because of years and years of eating fake sugars and over preserved package goods.

You are what you eat.
It took a long time for me to understand what this statement really meant. After years of consuming fast food and chips, I understood that a diet of fake foods and soda leads to fake health. The solution is to stay off of fast and packaged foods and start to eat the way our grandparents ate, at the table. They had less health problems because of the less processed food they ate.

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