the story of the human body evolution health and disease sparknotes

no sleep = weak immune system and cravings for carb-rich foods. During sleep the body produces growth hormones that stimulate cell repair, as well as the hormone leptin, which suppresses appetite. For us, prolonged sleep deprivation causes our bodies to be in a state of constant stress (with very high cortisol levels), which can weaken our immune system.

They also napped regularly during the day. It was also considered normal to wake during the night before having a “second sleep”. Pre-modern humans slept in communal environments with lots of sensory stimulus, e.g. This method of sleep is a relatively recent phenomenon, perhaps explaining the prevalence of insomnia today. Humans are NOT adapted to sleep continuously for 7-8 hours in silent, dark bedrooms.Exercise can help cause fat uptake in your muscles rather than your belly. This causes the liver to work overtime and store up the excess sugars as belly fat. Junk foods contribute the most to excess visceral fat because they deliver too much sugar too quickly into the bloodstream.

Belly fat is incredibly bad for you as they tend to dump fatty acids straight into your liver, which impairs the liver’s ability to regulate blood sugar levels. There are two kinds of fat, subcutaneous fat (spread around the body in muscles and organs) and visceral fat (belly fat). growing fat), which was good news back on the savannah, but bad news when we consume too much sugary starchy food. The brain is only 2% of our body weight, yet consumes 20-25% of our resting energy budget. Our bodies are adapted to be extremely proficient at storing energy (i.e. Humans are unusually fat compared to most mammals. We store lots of surplus energy as fat, because our brains guzzle up so much energy.This seems intuitive, but I am obviously not a medical expert and I have not confirmed the authenticity of the 60 pages of notes and references at the back of the book. obesity, diabetes) as an issue of evolutionary mismatch. Therefore, we can view the root cause of common modern diseases (e.g. Our bodies are adapted to be big-brained hunter-gatherers living in (relative) scarcity, not city dwellers living in industrialized food systems. The key theme of the book is “evolutionary mismatch”.

The story of the human body evolution health and disease sparknotes