The Story of the Human Body

In his epic history of Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun identified multiple tendencies or impulses that tend to infiltrate the Western mind and Western culture with remarkable regularity. Such things as  individualism, self-consciousness, and emancipation. One of the most common is what Barzun calls Primitivism, the notion of some bygone day before everything got screwed up and how we ought to return to the wisdom of that period. We see this in multiple philosophers--prominently in the American scene Thoreau and Emerson and their Transcendentalist friends and heirs. It is alive and well today in the Paleo-diet and people who wish we could all churn our own butter and drink milk straight from the cow. Pasteur, I scoff at you.

What is interesting about the impulse toward primitivism is that we often see it in conjunction with the embrace of most other modern technologies. Think of the Paleo-eating Cross-fitter who listens to an iPod while working out and can't wait to blog about how totes great Paleo-eating and Cross-fitting is on the interweb. While it is easy to poke fun at little inconsistencies like this, in this case it is germane to the topic. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors really were so much healthier than us I imagine that we cannot abstract this fact to one root cause, i.e. diet. Plus, I don't know that bacon was a part of the average hunter-gatherer diet. (Sidebar: Seriously, what is with bacon these days? I get it; it tastes good. It always has, but now we can't seem to leave it off of cupcakes or out of mixed drinks. I was at a bar with a friend the other night and there was a whole pig's worth of bacon in a plastic bin behind the bar to add to drinks. Beer, please. No meat required in my drink. A pig still has to die for you to get bacon. Make his sacrifice worthwhile, folks. I would be super pissed if someone killed me and then put one of my ribs in a glass as an accoutrement, gotta have that rib flavor!, to a Bloody Mary.) The first time I see someone on a Paleo diet hunt a mastodon with a homemade spear I will tip my hat to that lad or lass. Until then, you can take your disgusting Paleo pizzas (!) and eat them in silence. No one wants to read your blog about them.

All of this is a very roundabout way to say that I just read a book by Harvard biologist and anthropologist Daniel Lieberman (he of Born to Run fame) called The Story of the Human Body which tackles issues of Paleo-living, human evolution and adaptation, and the way the modern world has pretty much wreaked havoc on our bodies (except for all the no longer dying from bad diarrhea or plagues transmitted by rat poop anymore).

I intend to blog through some various parts of the book that appealed to me. This is a true test of my devotion to writing. I got the book through interlibrary loan since I am trying to spend less money on books and therefore only have it for five more days. So, if this is my only post on the topic (I said above that I intend to write more) I will say a couple of things here that I found important.

One conclusion that Lieberman draws and which is terribly true of the human race is that we are super bad at taking the long view of things. A donut right now that is front of me and is a chocolate cake donut with peanut butter frosting or not getting diabetes or worse yet, eating a carrot instead. We always take the donut. Lieberman argues that is precisely because we are programmed to do so. Food used to be scarce and our freakishly huge brains want energy now and they want it fast. The donut gives more, quicker than a carrot can. 

Further, we always minimize future risk and at the same time we give ourselves way too much credit for self-control down the line. I will eat this donut today and then run 72 miles and do 6,000 push-ups tomorrow. No problem. Combine these two things and no amount of educating or raising awareness will keep people from drinking sugary soda, eating fried foods, sitting all evening in front of the television, taking the escalator, driving three blocks to the grocery store, or, God forbid, drinking a Bloody Mary with a piece of bacon in there. (Sidebar: Seriously, people, seriously. Did I miss the earthshattering study that said bacon makes you live to be 112 and poop rainbows and be able to compete in all of those adventure races with the live wires and mud pits? I must have missed that.)

Lieberman's argument is that cultural evolution got us into this mess, not some sort of rapid degeneration of human biology, and that it will have to be cultural evolution that gets us out. He therefore advocates what he calls a paternal libertarianism, with the aim of weaning people off of the sandwiches called the gutbuster and soda cups that could double as an aquarium. The libertarian part is that McDiabetes can sell the gutbuster; the paternalistic part is that junk like that starts getting taxed like cigarettes or booze. Really, this seems fine to me. People hem and haw about Bloomberg and the soda thing in New York and that was a dumb move, but what if instead of limiting the size (extremely paternalistic) he had raised the tax on all sodas. We spend 20% of our GDP on health care in this country. Which is a lot. And the reason we tax cigarettes and booze is because, on average, a habitual smoker and a habitual drinker cost more to the state. A higher tax, and one that is completely voluntary, helps offset those costs down the road, at least in principle. 

The same is almost entirely true for fatty fried things and drinks with bacon in them (can't get away from this, sorry). Now as a casual partaker in various spirits it does not bother me in the least that they are taxed higher than paper clips or funny t-shirts. Similarly, as a casual partaker in something called the Big Daddy Bacon Cheeseburger (with wild fries and a soda) it would not bother me in the least to pay an extra dollar or two for making the short-term excellent decision to eat this delicious monstrosity.

Another libertarian paternalistic suggestion is restricting the sales of fatty foods and sugar-bombs to children, in the same way we don't let them buy booze or guns. I remember in eighth grade we somehow got free of school for a bit (legitimately, I never ditched, mom) and we went to 7-11. Do you know what I bought? I still remember. I bought a full-size bag of Doritos, a hot dog, a Slurpee (of course the biggest they sold), and a bag of Skittles. Fortunately this was a rare, and in hindsight entirely abused freedom, but there are some kids that eat junk like that everyday. Increasingly, we are calling them diabetics. That is a problem. Foremost, for those kids. Then, for those of us who have to pay for that treatment for 60 years while modern medicine keeps them propped up. When we can't trust the kids to make good choices, and you can't trust kids, and increasingly you can't trust the parents, it seems right for the state to step in.

There is a lot more worth discussing in this book. Hopefully, I find the time and the inclination (evolution, after all, predisposes me to conservation of energy). If not, hopefully that functions to whet your appetite.