![]() Rather than claiming to have found the secret to wellness or the latest trick to make our bodies shapelier and our minds less sluggish, Lieberman examines how the aforementioned mess came about via a combination of our evolutionary history and our culture. Instead, evolution has never stopped, and what’s more, evolution has never given us perfection. ![]() Note the present tense: he recognizes, as we all should, that evolution did not act long ago to produce our current minds and bodies as a finished product suited to a single point in time. Lieberman, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard and an expert on how humans run, among other things, provides a blessedly nuanced look at how evolution makes the body what it is. ![]() Into the chaos steps Daniel Lieberman and his book The Story of the Human Body. Behind many of these proscriptions is the implication that the human body simply isn’t “meant” to do the things we ask it to do every day, from driving a car to sleeping past dawn to eating food that comes from a factory. How did we get into this mess? And is there anything we can do to stop the catastrophe from getting even worse? Again, everyone seems to have a solution, often contradicting someone else’s – we should all be taking supplements, we should all stop taking supplements, we should run barefoot, we shouldn’t run at all, we should eat like cavemen, we should eat like rabbits, we should eat like rabbits from the time of the cavemen. On top of all that, rates of autism, autoimmune disorders, and food allergies are escalating, with the former alone costing us an estimated $137 billion per year. And a 2010 publication from Harvard Health frets that only one in six of us gets anywhere close to the recommended amount of exercise. Nearly one third of Americans have high blood pressure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which costs $47.5 billion annually in direct medical expenses and $3.5 billion each year in lost productivity. A 2008 paper in the aptly named journal Obesity predicted that within a decade and a half, virtually all Americans could be overweight or obese. The horrifying statistics are easy to come by. ![]() It’s enough to make one think we are on the brink of apocalypse, with apparently our only consolation being that said apocalypse will be the most, well, apocalyptic imaginable. There is no shortage of books, blogs and articles bemoaning our overweight, over-stressed and under-exercised society. WE ALL SEEM TO BE prone to excess, even in discussions of how prone to excess we really are. ![]()
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