Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - What Evolutionary Biology Can Teach Us About Diet, Exercise, and Staying Alive

This is just a snippet from a portion of an interview:

Quote:

Could you please help us define the mismatch hypothesis?

Lieberman: Sure. All organisms are adapted to a particular environment. Think about a zebra out there on the savanna eating grass. It’s adapted to that particular environment. And evolution often occurs when the environment changes around animals. If you take a zebra and you put it in the Arctic, that zebra is going to struggle, be mismatched to that environment. We’ve also changed our environments recently. There’s all kinds of reasons for environmental change, but one of the biggest causes of environmental change is culture. We’ve evolved all kinds of new foods to eat. We’ve created new technologies like shoes and chairs and elevators and shopping carts and television and iPhones, and the list goes on. Sometimes those things bring benefits, or in many ways they bring benefits, but in some ways they are what we call mismatches. So mismatches are when you are inadequately or imperfectly adapted to a novel environmental condition, and that’s the essence of a mismatch.

That zebra in the Arctic is clearly mismatched to its novel environmental condition. In some ways, we are mismatched to, say, eating too much sugar. I don’t think that’s a very controversial statement. Or mismatched to, I don’t know, McDonald’s or, I don’t know, lawyers. There’s many kinds of mismatches out there, and they’re complex because most of them are environmental changes that bring some benefits, but they also, at the same time, bring some costs. The costs in terms of health, we call them mismatch conditions. I’ll give you a trivial one. We evolved to eat all kinds of food, but we never evolved to eat a lot of food with a lot of starch and sugar. When we do that, the bacteria on our teeth go crazy, and if they get caught on our plaque as they digest those sugars, they produce a lot of acid, which causes cavities, and so we get cavities.

We’re basically mismatched to eating a high-sugar, high-starch diet, so we have to go to the dentist to have our cavities filled, and we have to brush our teeth and all that kind of stuff. Other mismatches, of course, are much more serious. We’re mismatched to the same high-sugar diet. It can cause diabetes, type 2 diabetes, for example. Or a wide range of dietary issues can cause obesity, which can cause some health concerns. So there’s lots and lots of mismatches that occur basically, again, from our bodies being imperfectly or inadequately adapted to novel conditions.

I only pulled out this snippet because of the mention about how mismatched we are to a diet high in sugars and starches. He focuses mainly on dental cavities from that mismatched diet, but actually mentions other health concerns such as diabetes and obesity.

There's a larger excerpt of the interview, plus a link to a podcast of the full interview at this link:

https://www.theringer.com/2024/4/2/...d-staying-alive

I have not listened to the interview - but he makes it clear in the except that he really hates the paleo diet or the idea of any diet being referred to as optimal.