Why do I do this?

Dave, a long reply to your short comment...

Dave, I think that I can appreciate your opinion that the piece is a “load of crap”. It takes quite an effort, it requires a huge stretch of the imagination, but it is possible.

The other side of the debate (at least on my part) is not, as you have implied, a return to the stone age. To get a better idea of the true point of this, perhaps you might consider –

How many times have you (do you) or your wife tell your children to stop doing something “because it is dirty”?

How much adverse impact might that “dirt” really have on the health of your child?

How much disinfectant do you use in your toilet?

How much disinfectant would you use if you followed the ads on tv?

How many times do you think your “standard” of disinfectant use or more is repeated around the US? BTW this is not picking on the US here, from the attitude of my son and his partner I suspect that the same applies in NZ…



This leads to the crux of what this article is saying. To put it in my own words…

Every organism on this little space rock evolves to ensure its own survival.

If one considers a bacteria or similar simple organism, it adapts and evolves over time in response to environmental threats. That is not a “conscious” response. It is at its most fundamental a chemical change, nothing more. It is enough to ensure the survival. If the change is not made, or if the change is wrong, the “branch” dies out.

In that way, over time, we are now experiencing the result of the Tuberculum bacteria evolving to the extent that the Salk type vaccines are less effective; we now have mutated forms of Staphlococcus that are unaffected by penicillin, and in some cases even the more powerful man-made chemical antibacterial agents are ineffective giving the MRSA infections; the ultimate is, of course, the HIV virus which - if the reports I see are correct - is mutating at a rate of hundreds of “new strains” every day. Many of those strains are “duplicates” or arrive at the same “end”, but the problem lies in the fact that this is such a simple organism most mutations survive.

The very big difficulty is that all higher animal species are (obviously) many millions of times more complex that single cell beasties. That is not a DNA measure that I am using – it is a matter of thinking about all of the different cell types in our body and how they must change in response to a threat and at the same time maintain the ”cooperation” needed for a body to function.

So that is the physical aspect of survival – not just for the human species but for every form of life. The greater the complexity of the organism, the greater it has difficulty in responding to environmental changes. That, BTW, does not automatically imply global warming or the like. The progression of animal life from sea to land might have been the consequence of a series of adaptations across a wide range of species in response to quite different threats; those might include climate change, predation patterns, food source adaptation or evolution…


The other part, one which I flicked to in my haste, is the mental aspects of survival. It is well documented that if you take an animal from its “natural” environment and place it in a different surrounding, the level of stress that is created is directly related (in the mathematical sense) to the degree of change. Given the opportunity to adapt, the time to adapt, the stress can be completely overcome. But this adaptation is not genetic, it is more immediate than that.

This reflects a good part of what the linked article is speaking of… If you change the immediate environment of living thing – plant or animal – the change creates stresses that can affect the physical viability of the organism. Think of transplanting a flower, compared with a tree. Think of taking an animal from a zoo to be released into the wild, or vice versa.

I do not question that ADHD or anorexia existed 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 years ago. The difference from then to now is not that we are able to “diagnose” it. (My honest feeling on ADHD is that it is “manufactured” in part - there are some individuals that might have such a syndrome). The difference is that having recognized it we are now aware of where and when it can occur.

I suspect (and I say that because this is entirely speculative) that if one were to research the incidence of ADHD in the Masai peoples (the example from the article) one would find that there was a much lower, probably unmeasurable, level in that community.


I have another example, this is not on the mental adaptations required, but on the physical. There are a series now of well documented research studies into the incidence of Type 2 Diabetes (adult onset, non-pancreatic) in the Polynesian peoples. This is a major on-going problem for NZ’s health services, hence the detailed studies that are continuing.

What these studies are finding is that the problem is being caused not by “bad diet” as such. The problem is far more fundamental than that. The Polynesian / Micronesian peoples have adapted over some 10,000 years to specific diet and lifestyle parameters. Those adaptations involve (if I understand this correctly) the ability to store energy foods for long periods, and to then metabolise that very rapidly when required. The source of the adaptation has been the low fat, medium sugar, high protein and high fibre diets that these people lived on over that period combined with the physical stresses created by long sea voyages (from days to weeks and perhaps even months) on very low diets…

Their diet has changed, overnight when you compare 100 years to 10,000. It has now become high fat, high sugar, low fibre high protein. That change, so the research indicates, has brought about stresses which which the Polynesian metabolism has been (statistically) unable to cope. The comparatively very high availability of diet sugars in particular has created stresses evidenced by high blood sugar levels and the obvious consequence of Type 2 diabetes.

So, if I use this example to illustrate the conclusion that the article reaches by a different route –

There is an artificially created (that means “man-made”) environmental change that has made drastic changes to the diet of the Polynesian peoples. That change has been traced as the probable cause of the high rates of Type 2 Diabetes.

The article’s conclusions if applied to this situation DO NOT predicate that we “send” the Polynesian peoples “back to where or when” they came from”. That, I think, is the implication of your comment regarding the stone age.

The article says (as I read it) that we should be using science to find better ways of easing the adaptations required to overcome the problem.