Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization - John Ratey, MD, and Richard Manning, David Perlmutter, M.D.

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Foreword by David Perlmutter, MD

planets actually deform the orbits of the very stars around which they revolve

genes and environment influence each other. It has become clear that our lifestyle choices—including food, sleep, exercise, relationships, and even acts of compassion—feed back a constant flow of information to our DNA and actually modify the expression of what had been considered an immutable code. As the science of epigenetics reconciles seemingly disparate theories about our health destiny, we are learning to embrace the notion of the dance and to accept that we must design our lives accordingly.

our current evolutionary discordance

Introduction

Think of wild versus tame, wolf versus dog, bison versus cow. We have the same sort of distinction in mind now when we ask you to expand this with the somewhat revolutionary notion of applying the idea to humans

by living tamely we make ourselves sick and unhappy

born to move with grace, born to embrace novelty and variety, born to crave wide-open spaces, and, above all, born to love

you are born to heal. Your body fixes itself. A big part of this is an idea called homeostasis

where homeostasis comes in. The task at hand is to get out of the way and let your body’s wonderfully evolved abilities for self-repair do their job

The chapters that follow will begin to assemble the case by breaking down our various topics into subcategories

you will also notice that each of these categories is a pathway, and each path leads eventually to the brain and the mind. Of course it does: the mind is the seat of well-being.

hormones, in this case oxytocin. Dogs have them. So do all animals, including humans, and oxytocin will figure in much of this book—even, in fact, in some surprising areas like business transactions, exercise, and violence

Hunter-gatherers are wild humans

our cleverness, recall, learning, and grasp of fact are not all that complex as brain functions go

some activities we take for granted (empathy, language, and everyday social skills) are exceedingly complex

there is a growing and necessary trend toward restoring wild systems via ecological restoration. The Europeans call this process “re-wilding.”

think of this book as instructions for re-wilding your life (cf deschooling)

We have long said that there is no reason to write a book unless the process of doing so changes the author’s life

1. Human 1.0: Why Evolution’s Design Endures

we don’t need someone else (or a book, for that matter) to define our happiness. Our brains do that

What we need most to understand from this is that our happiness is greatly dependent on our biological well-being

Darwin himself taking the view that evolution was and is built on gradual transition

The consensus now in human evolution is with the latter point—punctuated equilibrium—and we agree.

the consensus view says the package we call human, Homo sapiens, emerged as a whole in Africa on the order of about fifty thousand years ago. Not much has happened since. This is Human 1.0 and there have been no significant upgrades

The human family tree is not a towering pine with a dominant central trunk. It is more of a bush than a tree, with a series of side branches and dead ends. The most obvious example of this is the case of the Neanderthal

it is clear that something unprecedented took place about fifty thousand years ago. This creature called “human” appeared all of a sudden and almost as suddenly was a breakout species

The evolutionary changes that powered this breakout are the core strengths of our species and the very characteristics that we ought to pay attention to. What are these traits?

Start with bipedalism and running.

way-too-common experience: a runner consults a doctor to complain of some injury and then hears the doctor intone the sober advice, “You know, the human body is just not made for running.” Thanks to Carrier’s work, the runner can confidently answer, “Nonsense.” Humans are in fact the best endurance runners on the planet. The best

research detailed twenty-six adaptations of the human skeleton specific to running, not walking

All of these features we share with other running species, even though all of the others are quadrupeds like horses and dogs

We share none of these characteristics with other species of apes

not only are we adapted to run, but running defines us.

but it was Carrier who demonstrated why this sudden departure from the rest of the ape line was so important. His working hypothesis was something called persistence hunting. True enough, many mammals, especially mammals long recognized as important food sources for humans, are terribly fast runners

He says that the muscle in question, the butt muscle, plays almost no role in running but does show up in a host of other activities, and it is those other activities that have his attention now. He launches into a line of thought drawn from a concept pivotal in the original research—an enigma, really: a notion called cost of transport

Imagine a graph, with one axis showing speed and the other axis graphing energy expended by the creature in motion. For most species this graph forms a U-shaped curve, and the bottom of the U is a sweet spot

The very existence of the U shape says that most animals have bodies meant for a given speed

Humans match the rule, but only when walking

But running, at least for humans, does not produce a similar curve with a defined sweet spot; it yields a flat one. We have no optimum speed in terms of energy spent

the flat cost-of-transport curve for human running appears only when you summarize data for a number of humans. On the other hand, looking at data for each individual does indeed produce a U-shaped curve, but the sweet spot is in a different place for each human. That’s not true for other species

among individual muscles within a given body

the research on this shows no favoritism, no sweet spot according to any one activity, no real specialization, and this result is counter to what’s found with any other species. For other species, one can make a categorical statement like “born to gallop,” but for humans, no. Born to run? Yes indeed, but also born for doing other activities as well. Humans are the Swiss Army knives of motion.

Thinking, creating, scheming, mating, coordinating—all those activities also require big brains, but locomotion alone is enough to seal the deal. The evolution of our unique brains was locked into the evolution of our wide range of movement

we are truly lousy at digestion, which is limited and puny

if we are going to be able to move around rapidly upright, we need small guts, and small guts mean short intestines, less real estate for digestion.

we have a significant vertical gap between the bottom of our ribs and the top of our pelvis, the territory of the abdominal muscles. These muscles effect the leverage necessary to keep us reliably upright and control the twist of running, so we need a light, tight abdomen, or tight abs, which restricts room for intestines

our short guts mean we can’t eat grass, and this is no small thing

Grasslands are enormously productive in biological terms; that is, they efficiently convert solar energy into carbohydrates. But that energy is wrapped in the building block of all grasses, cellulose, and humans cannot digest it, not at all

Our primary method for overcoming our inability to digest is to outsource the job. Our prey animals, the ungulates—grazers and browsers, largely—happen to be very good at digesting cellulose.

There is no such thing as a vegetarian society in all the record. Eating meat is a fundamental and defining fact of the human condition, at the gut level and bred in the bones.

The basic energetics of an animal diet involve not just protein but also and especially fat and micronutrients and minerals, a matter of bioaccumulation.

fat, in and of itself a dense, rich source of calories to fuel our demanding bodies; but in doing so, they bioaccumulate a rich storehouse of elements like magnesium, iron, and iodine

Yet our need for variety and diversity in diet also shows up in our omnivorous habit. Humans have for all human time eaten a wide array of plants and wandered far and wide to gather them, and this, too, is more than a simple matter of energetics. Diversity ensures the range of micronutrients to support the complexity of the human body. (omnivore)

our basic question is why the single species of humans, modern humans, beat out people like the Neanderthals. Neanderthals were indeed hunters—in fact, highly skilled hunters

What they did not have, compared with the Homo sapiens of their day, was fish. More to the point, they had not learned how to tap this source of nutrition that was all around them.

we can prove that those ancient Homo sapiens ate fish because of chemical signatures, which is to say that some elements not present in terrestrial species were present in fish, and those elements accumulate in human bones, the fossil record

each of those salmon, one of the world’s most peripatetic species, has ranged thousands on thousands of miles across diverse marine and aquatic environments during its short life cycle. That is, each fish has sampled and bioaccumulated a diverse collection of micronutrients lacking in a terrestrial diet

list of traits they believe defined us as humans

the British scholar of humanity’s roots Chris Stringer offered one such list, as good as any

Clearly this list is telling us that something important and unprecedented has happened in our brains, something well beyond bipedalism, tight guts, voracious appetites, salmon

since the 1920s, we’ve known about spindle neurons—a uniquely shaped set of cells that first showed up in ape brains, and to a lesser extent in dolphins, whales, and elephants, all animals known for having unique abilities. Humans have many more of them in very specific areas of the brain, and they are involved in complex reactions like trust, empathy, and guilt, but also in practical matters like planning

mirror neurons,” first discovered in the 1980s and ’90s

This is a major part of the circuitry of empathy, which is defined as a notch up from sympathy

It would be hard to overstate the importance of this in social cohesion, but a bit of reflection shows how far this extends

This consciousness of another’s point of view is exactly what enables the more elegant and refined form of lying so valuable to all humans: storytelling

It allows abstraction and conceptualization, which in turn allows language

All of this, on the other hand, comes at a great cost

These, unlike many of our more mundane tasks, are whole-brain activities, heavy calculation loads. This load translates into a requirement for even more calories to support it.

D3444

He needed help, and he got it, because hominids take care of those who can’t take care of themselves and have done so since before they were humans. This generosity has real biological costs in terms of energy spent

The biological term that we need now to move this discussion forward is “altricial,” meaning simply “helpless young.”

Our young are more or less helpless for a very long time, longer than any other species—fourteen, fifteen years

it is not happenstance but a predictable, derivative trait, given our big brains

It takes a ratio of four adults to one child to allow humans to go on. This is the real cost of our big brains.

This is why we must cooperate, and why tools like empathy and language evolved to enable that cooperation. All else of human nature is derivative of this single human condition

The paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall offers a good summary. “To put this at its most elementary, humans care at least to some extent about each other’s welfare; and chimpanzees—as well as probably all of our other primate relatives—do not.”

2. What Ails Us: Not Disease but Afflictions

Disease of civilization” is an old term that nonetheless has the power to unravel the most important questions of our time

“The Global Burden of Disease,” it looks at causes of death but also debilitation and loss of quality of life for people suffering 291 diseases in 187 countries around the world. Further, it looks at changes in those patterns from 1990 to 2010, a snapshot of change

the world’s top health problems today are, in order...

the same study also details the top twelve risk factors for death and debilitation worldwide. Again, in order

Note the absence of cancer on the first list. Note that the list does not include, as we might expect, a litany of infectious diseases associated with poverty

This list suggests that “disease” is the wrong word. What we really mean to say is “injury.” Maybe it’s time to abandon the time-honored phrase and begin calling diseases “afflictions of civilization.”

These injuries are a direct result of ignoring evolution’s design of our body

We can trace the concept of diseases of civilization to Stanislas Tanchou, a French physician who served with Napoleon—specifically, to some lectures he gave in the 1840s

What the adventuring doctors noticed on virtually every one of those frontiers was that the so-called primitive people were in many ways healthier and more robust than Europeans

A host of studies looked at populations of these same people as they adopted Western diets and ways of living and found a coincident rise in diseases of civilization.

some researchers signal their bias in this matter by preferring the term “diseases of longevity” to “diseases of civilization.” Their argument is that the blessings of Western civilization, especially controlling communicable diseases, made people live longer and so gave them more time to develop heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. This argument stands despite a compelling counterargument: type 2 diabetes is emerging today in teenagers

it is not at all complicated. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease that results from eating sugar and refined carbohydrates. It appeared among the earliest recorded diseases of civilization, coincident with sugar and flour appearing in people’s diets in places as distinct as Africa and Arizona

A generation ago, doctors training in the United States would welcome the arrival of a case of type 2 diabetes, simply because it was so rare

Today, the disease is epidemic among American teenagers, especially poor American teenagers whose diet is dominated by nothing so much as sugar

the average life expectancy of many hunter-gatherers was probably lower than ours

skewed by a number of factors, especially high mortality among infants and young people

The general notion of pre-Columbian Native Americans is that all of them were hunter-gatherers like the archetypal bison hunters of the Great Plains. Yet by the time Columbus arrived in the New World, hunter-gatherers were as rare in North America as they were in, say, Eastern Europe at the same time. By and large, Native Americans of 1492 were farmers, settled agricultural people, but there were, at the same time, pockets of hunter-gatherers across the landscape

Native Americans showed evidence of suffering diseases of civilization long before Western civilization arrived, which is why we need to define civilization as the arrival of domestication, of agriculture.

despite the costs, civilization came with considerable benefits

the one central development that gets us to maybe 80 percent of what ails us, is simple: it is glucose and glucose alone, in all its permutations

these all began millennia ago, when humans first domesticated grain.

early farming was far more integrated with hunting and gathering for several thousand years and did not do much to reorganize the human endeavor until maybe six thousand years ago in the areas that are now Iraq and Turkey

Civilization is starch, and by extension, diseases of civilization are diseases of starch, either directly or indirectly, and most of it is indeed direct: starches are complex carbohydrates, and they quickly break down, often even in a person’s mouth, into simple carbohydrates, which are sugars.

It is not that glucose is unprecedented or even that starch is new to us; hunter-gatherers have and had both. But not in abundance, not as a sole source, not in the tidal wave of starches that agriculture would begin yielding ten thousand years ago

those three wild grasses—rice, wheat, and corn—are the three most dominant forms of human nutrition, and the potatoes domesticated in South America are the fourth. About 75 percent of all human nutrition derives from those four sources alone

Dense packages of storable starch allowed sedentary lives

Domestication allowed cities

Evidence of disparate wealth is abundantly clear in the archaeological record in the very first agricultural cities, yet it’s unknown in hunter-gatherer societies

The normal time of onset of a first menstrual period for a hunter-gatherer girl is about seventeen years old, which is somewhat surprising for anyone following the corresponding number among modern girls in postindustrial societies. Menarche for this latter group is more like twelve years old.

simpler and well-researched explanation: body weight. The fatter a population, the more likely a girl is to menstruate early

The real downside of this (other than rampant teenage pregnancy, and we hope that you see in our reasoning that we think the coincidence of the epidemic of obesity and teen pregnancy among impoverished girls is more than a coincidence) comes at the end of life, though. Menarche launches girls into a regular cycle of hormones

This is how both breast and ovarian cancer appear as diseases of civilization. Researchers have examined this and suggested an interesting intervention for both forms of cancer: an exercise program for girls. We agree.

AUTOIMMUNE

The Tsimané people are a surviving population of hunter-gatherers in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest

Run-of-the-mill infectious diseases like rheumatic fever, hepatitis A, tuberculosis, mumps, and measles are all in decline worldwide

In that same period, autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, type 1 diabetes, and asthma have at least doubled, in some cases quadrupled.