Our lives have changed profoundly. Our genes have not.
For those of us who don’t feel we are as healthy as we’d like to be, or who seek optimal brain health…
Recognize that we’ve been in a state of health before, in our individual lives (starting in our mother’s womb) and as a species. We can find our way there again.
Human beings are marvelously adaptive and can thrive under varied conditions, from Amazonian jungles to African savannas to Arctic tundras.
We began as hunter-gatherers, in small groups bound together by mutual need and trust.
We learned what was nourishing and safe to eat. We lived outside. We were physically active through the day. The sun shaped the rhythm of our work and our rest and sleep. Stress and inflammation played essential roles in our existence but subsided when the need passed; they didn’t linger (become chronic) and cause trouble.
Over thousands of years the structure of our societies changed, civilizations evolved, technologies emerged, and industries developed.
Artificial lights and electronic media have changed how we sleep.
Too many of us experience isolation and loneliness, and many live in a chronically stressed state.
We are bombarded by toxins, most of which our predecessors never encountered.
For most of us now, when we hunt and gather, we are in a supermarket. We find sweetened breakfast cereals, sweetened beverages, sugared doughnuts, etc, designed to tempt us.
Once upon a time, the instinct toward eating something sweet served us well. In a western world where abundance is the norm, that instinct is getting us into trouble.
Many of these tempting processed foods have been manufactured by profit-driven industries enhanced by technology and by marketing techniques strengthened by the science of psychology. The online and television advertising industries have learned how to grab our attention in ways that we barely recognize.
These processed foods are often unhealthy and not created with our health and well-being in mind.
We are at sea in a world of questionable diet and lifestyle choices and trends.
Brains living in bodies that have been eating the standard American diet and sleeping too little and being exercised too little and stressed too much aren’t in a good place to be making difficult decisions like avoiding addictive foods and other dangerous substances.
However, we can become more aware of what is going on and choose a different way. We can choose to craft our own diet and lifestyle to better match the needs of our bodies and minds; to better match our genes.
We can ask ourselves: “is this what my body would have been doing or ingesting thousands of years ago?”
Eating and sleeping and moving (etc) closer to the way that our ancient ancestors did, could help us avoid the modern chronic ‘diseases of civilization’ like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and even dementia.
That is the essence of the Ancestral Health movement.
