Modern Bodies old system

CEBU, Philippines -  DNA also contains every characteristic that makes us, each one of us, who we are, every trait that we will pass on to future generations, and, most important, the accumulated wisdom of millions of years of human evolution. You may already know that on an intellectual level, but here's something to change your awareness. The ancient blueprint that controls every cell of your body hasn't changed at all - not by the tiniest bit - in more than 20 thousand years.

Of course, everything else has changed. And those changes have occurred relatively only very recently.  To understand this, picture recent human evolution laid out on a timeline the length of a football field.

You're standing at the end that represents today. At the other end stands a fellow who differs radically from the stereotypical "ape-man." He's standing quite straight, he has a brain almost as large as yours, and he knows how to make tools and use fire. He is "Home sapiens," and the point where he is standing represents 300,000 years ago.

Now looking down the field, you have to understand that during the majority of that time nothing changed at all. The seasons changed, eons came and went, and humankind gradually accumulated more survival skills. Finally, at a point just past your three-yard line, we learned to grow food. At about the two-and-a-half yard line we domesticated animals. But the industrial revolution is only eight inches from your foot. Imagine the changes that have occurred in that incredibly short period of time. All the rest, 97 percent of the football field, represents the time humans spent as hunters and gatherers, the tail end of an era that actually lasted 1.6 million years.

There is no way our bodies could possibly have adapted to the astounding changes that have occurred in the last five thousand years, let alone the last 500 years. We are in fact still tuned to the foods, conditions, activities, and behaviors of the ancient past, but we live in a time warp where everything is different.

Our gastrointestinal tract is designed for grazing, whereas today we gorge. For 1.6 million years, whenever we became hungry, we simply picked something and ate it, and we stopped eating as soon as our hunger was satisfied. Today we postpone hunger satisfaction to pre-set times called meals, during which we consume enormous amounts of food. Few of us stop when our hunger is gone; we eat until we're "full."

For 1.6 million years, when the sun went down we went to sleep. Then, in 1879, the electric light bulb was invented and all that changed. In many places today people can wash their clothes, go grocery shopping, go banking, and watch TV anytime, 24 hours a day. 

We seem to think that sleep is a waste of time when in reality it is incredibly important "down time" when the body is restored and repaired. And it's not just the body but the mind as well. Sleep keeps us sane, and the lack of sleep causes a great deal of mental and emotional dysfunction. Sleep research has shown that you can produce classic signs of psychosis in a person simply by disrupting his or her sleep three nights in a row. Mood, mind and behavior are powerfully linked not only to the amount of sleep but to the quality of sleep.

For a very, very long time in the past, we rested in the sounds of nature - a running stream, chirping crickets, singing birds - what are called primordial sounds. They are literally encoded in our genes, so it's no surprise that listening to these sounds today will lower your heart rate and blood pressure and put you at ease. By contrast, listening to police sirens, traffic noise, and television violence produces anxiety and contributes to illness.

Anyone who has been around chimps will tell you that they're just like children. And since fathering children of my own, I have come to formulate what I call the habitat dysfunction syndrome. You see, I don't have a habitat manual for my kids. When they get sick or upset, my wife and I do the best we can, and sometimes we take them to the doctor. But I always wonder what children would be like if they were living in their natural habitat, eating purely natural foods, exposed only to the full-spectrum light of the sun and the verdant green, earthy browns and bright blue colors of nature.

We all suffer to some degree from habitat dysfunction syndrome, depending on how we live. I try to live as close to what I know that 98.4 percent of my genes are exactly the same as those chimps. That's right: The difference between you and a chimpanzee is 1.6 percent of your DNA. Makes you think, because we are so far removed from our natural habitat that it is impossible to evaluate the harm we suffer as a result.

Those who have had the experience of walking through a dense tropical forest would attest to how good they felt: relaxed, incredibly alive, and free. Research data show that the incidence of cancer increases the farther one lives from the equator. The crime rate in our crowded cities and the occurrence of mental illness increase in direct proportion to population density. It's habitat dysfunction syndrome. Our technology has outstripped our biology.

The point is that awareness of our modern predicament, the fact that we are literally out of sync with our genes, opens the door to understanding how to use technology and the vast amounts of information conveniently available to us today to adjust our ways accordingly - to our greatest benefit.

--- From the book The DHEA Breakthrough