The purpose of evfit.com

This website is not about diet, nor is it about exercise (though both figure prominently). It’s not even about the effects of diet-and-exercise on the human metabolism.

It’s about exploring the 200,000 years our Homo sapiens ancestors adapted physically, mentally and socially/culturally to changing Pleistocene environments. We also also take into account the influence of the two million years and beyond that our earlier ancestors adapted to their environments - over 100,000 generations.

Evfit.com is also about how our bodies (that’s our total genome, including our brains) today are largely unchanged since humans transitioned from the Palaeolithic through the Neolithic to today, while our culture has changed radically over the same period.

Evfit.com’s purpose is to identify aspects of behaviour that are influenced most strongly by our cultures, particularly those that are most dangerously at odds with our Pleistocene genome. We explain and demonstrate how, in the 21st century, we can have a lifestyle that is most in tune with our genome. We also consider how, from the many possibilities carried in our genome (our nature), we have choice (nurture) in how our genomic potential is expressed - that is, we can control the application of some epigenetic influences on our health.

The premise

Darwinian natural selection.

Simple as that. 

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" – title of a 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky.

Assumptions

•   Human evolution has been a progressive adaptation to a dynamic environment

•   Over the 5m years since humans split from the chimpanzees, this adaptation has given us our present anatomy, physiology and some psychological characteristics

•   Human physiological adaptation proceeds far more slowly - over thousands of generations - than social, cultural or technological adaptation

•   For all but the last 10,000 years, human physiological adaptation followed a broadly consistent direction. 

•   About 10,000 years ago the transition to agriculture began, piecemeal taking over the hunter-gatherers societies of the Palaeolithic period; thus began a radical divergence from our evolutionary past

•   Agriculture and settlement transformed the course of human evolution: humans began modifying the environment rather than adapting to it; our Palaeolithic minds and bodies began creating the modern era

•   Human modification of the environment has increased exponentially over the past 10,000 years, from local, temporary and superficial to global, permanent and systemic.

The assumptions lead to these observations

•   We are Pleistocene beings in a post-industrial world

•   Our environment is no longer Pleistocene

pollution, greater solar radiation, new chemicals, new diseases affect our Pleistocene bodies

 

•   Our Pleistocene bodies and Paleolithic minds have activity levels, activity types and stresses that are far from Paleolithic

we are not as active as the hunter-gatherers were; modern fitness activity is different in nature from the activity that drove human evolution.  Sleep patterns, stress, mass society and technology assault our minds and bodies in ways for which we have no natural defences (the epidemics of modern non-communicable diseases are symptoms of these changes)

 

•   Our diet is no longer Pleistocene.

for 5m years we ate fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and fish and drank water; now we eat processed grains, milk and primarily manufactured, processed and treated foods.  Even fresh fruit, vegetables and meat have been altered by pollution, chemicals, soil depletion and farming practices.  Our physiology has had no time to adapt to these features of the modern diet.

 

Fonte: EVFIT.