Too Much of a Good Thing summary

We can’t live without the right amount of food. These days it’s easy to go to the supermarket and get a frozen pizza for dinner, but 10,000 years ago food worked pretty differently.

Food wasn’t always available back then, so it was advantageous to stock up on fat when it was available. Early pioneers who visited Native American tribes wrote that they would eat up to nine pounds of meat – about 12,000 calories – in just one day if there was a lot of food available.

People from arid climates are often confused when they visit northern countries and see people jogging in the streets. That’s a healthy habit in some environments but it’s deadly in places where fresh water is hard to access.

From the hunter-gatherer period to the Middle Ages, extreme exertion could lead to death by dehydration because there wasn’t enough clean water and sodium available.

A lot of people overreact to relatively small, everyday problems as if they are serious threats. That’s another holdover from our past.

In prehistoric times, people really were constantly in danger. They were threatened by dangerous predators and violence was prevalent in early human societies, leading to a lot of deaths. This is still true in some communities, such as the Aché hunter-gatherer tribe in Paraguay. There is so much strife between different Aché factions that more people die in battle than from illness.

When you were a kid, did you ever scrape your knee and watch in fascination as your blood clotted around the graze? Our bodies evolved to do this so we wouldn’t lose too much blood from wounds.

Until the advent of modern medicine, severe wounds typically resulted in death as there was no way to artificially stop blood loss. Childbirth and injuries incurred from hunting or attacks caused many more deaths than they do today. This meant that people whose blood clotted quickly had a better chance of survival.

Imagine if there was a gene that made you immune to chronic diseases like heart conditions, cancer or diabetes. Genetic engineers may dream of producing such a gene, but natural selection is unlikely to weed those chronic diseases out for us.

In natural selection, genes are gradually weeded out when they hamper someone’s ability to survive and reproduce. However, modern chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes usually don’t affect the number of children a person has.

Oprah Winfrey famously lost 67 pounds in 1988. Her weight has fluctuated since then but she was back around the 200-pound mark in 2008. Oprah is one of the most formidable and hard-working people in the entertainment industry, so why wasn’t she able to control her weight?

The most likely answer is that Oprah’s weight is about more than just her willpower. Willpower alone won’t fundamentally change dietary habits. Even very determined people, like Oprah and former US president William Howard Taft, struggle to overcome their weight problems. Taft weighed 354 pounds when he became president in 1909, despite his many prior efforts to lose weight. Determination alone isn’t enough when it comes to your health.

The modern health situation isn’t all bad news, however! Many people are surviving serious diseases despite the odds. Bill Clinton, for example, lived through two heart attacks thanks to surgery and good medication.

Pharmaceutical companies have come up with a number of pioneering solutions to medical problems. In the film Dallas Buyers Club, for example, pharma companies are criticized for failing to provide adequate treatment in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s but since then, they’ve discovered an HIV-resistant gene mutation in about 1 percent of the human population.