What is it about?
During the course of evolution, up until the agricultural revolution, environmental fluctuations forced the human species to develop a flexible metabolism in order to adapt its energy needs to various climate, seasonal and vegetation conditions. Metabolic flexibility safeguarded human survival independent of food availability. In modern times, humans switched their primal lifestyle towards a constant availability of energy-dense, yet often nutrient-deficient, foods, persistent psycho-emotional stressors and a lack of exercise. As a result, humans progressively gain metabolic disorders, such as the metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, certain types of cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer´s disease, wherever the sedentary lifestyle spreads in the world.
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Why is it important?
This article offers a new approach in the light of metabolic diseases by contrasting modern lifestyle with our primal hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Perspectives
Although there are numerous concepts of weight management, modern lifestyle exponentially produces more and more overweight and associated diseases, which are not published by anthropologists in primal living hunter gatherer communities. As a consequence, behavior patterns of hunter gatherer societies should be recultivated in our modern lifestyle, which made us metabolically flexible independent of food consumption in the paleolithic past. I hope this approach offers a new way of thinking about a field with mounting economic relevance.
Jens Freese
Deutsche Sporthochschule Koln
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The sedentary (r)evolution: Have we lost our metabolic flexibility?, F1000Research, October 2017, Faculty of 1000, Ltd.,
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.12724.1.
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