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Zusammenfassung von Too Much of a Good Thing

Name: Too Much of a Good Thing
Rating: 3.9 (15 reviews)
Author: Lee Goldman

Lee Goldman

How Four Key Survival Traits Are Now Killing Us

3.9 (15 Bewertungen)

15 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Too Much of a Good Thing by Lee Goldman dives into the surprising risks of consuming vitamins and supplements.
It explores the potential dangers of excess intake, and warns against the common practices that can lead to serious health problems.

Themen

Der Körper Erkrankungen Wandel & Evolution Biowissenschaften

Inhaltsübersicht

Too Much of a Good Thing
in 8 Kernaussagen verstehen

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Kernaussage 1 von 8

What’s in it for me? The struggles of the human body in a fast-changing modern world.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, our world has constantly been changing, and at a pace that gets faster every day. Yet, our bodies seem unwilling to adapt to the speed of modern life. In fact, they haven’t changed much since the Stone Age.

Our “outdated” bodies are confused about the eating, drinking and working habits that a luxurious Western lifestyle involves today. They are also confused about the massive and constant information flow to which our TV screens and smartphones expose us.

In these blinks you will find out why our human bodies struggle to adapt to modern life, you will learn how this struggle results in chronic diseases and, finally, what we can do to counter them.

You’ll also learn

why our ancestors ate nine pounds of meat on one day;
why, in earlier times, a small wound could mean death; and
why Japanese adults must have their waistline measured every year.

The human body isn’t suited to the modern world.

Older people often struggle when first learning how to use a computer. It takes time to adapt to the digital world. In the same way, the human body is confused by the modern world.

The human body is very slow to adapt to changes in the environment. Our ancestors were all dark-skinned and lived in Africa until only about 60,000 years ago. Because we need sunlight to stimulate our vitamin D production, the humans who migrated to less sunny areas suffered from deficiencies.

Vitamin D is important for developing robust bones, so people who could take in more sunlight had a better chance of survival. So, over thousands of generations, random genetic mutations that resulted in lighter skin gave people an advantage, and were passed on to new generations.

After thousands of years, our ancestors’ bodies gradually adapted to the less sunny environments and the people in them developed lighter skin.

However, since the industrial revolution, our environment has been changing at a much faster rate than we can keep up with.

The Industrial Revolution has changed a lot about the way we live. Whereas food used to be scarce, we now have an overabundance of it. Many more people have lives based around intellectual pursuits rather than physical work, and our societies are much safer and less violent. As a result, our bodies are pretty confused.

Human bodies have adapted to food scarcity, but we now have food overabundance.

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.

We were once threatened by having too little water and sodium, but too much is also dangerous.

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.

Our tendency to panic once helped us survive but it’s now causing anxiety and depression.

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.

Blood-clotting mechanisms that once protected us from bleeding to death are now causing heart attacks.

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.

Our genes are unlikely to evolve fast enough to challenge modern chronic diseases on their own.

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.

Collective action is more powerful than individual willpower when it comes to changing dietary habits.

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.

Pharmaceutical companies are backing high-tech medical research.

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.

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Worum geht es in Too Much of a Good Thing?

The human body evolved to allow us to survive in a world very different from the one we inhabit today. These blinks explain why we’re not suited to the modern world, and the health complications we’re suffering as a result.

Bestes Zitat aus Too Much of a Good Thing

To invert a well-known aphorism, weve won the war of human survival, but were losing a battle with adaptation.

—Lee Goldman

Wer Too Much of a Good Thing lesen sollte

People suffering from obesity, high blood pressure, depression or coronary illnesses
Medical professionals
Anyone interested in genetics or evolution

Über den Autor

Famed cardiologist and public health specialist Lee Goldman is a professor at the Columbia University Medical Center. He is best known for having developed the Goldman Criteria, a tool for determining which cardiac patients should get priority treatment.

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