Environments, Adaptation, and Evolutionary Medicine Should We Be Eating a Stone Age Diet?

Abstract

A central tenet of evolutionary or Darwinian medicine is that many chronic diseases and degenerative conditions evident in modern Western populations have arisen because of a mismatch between ‘Stone Age’ genes and recently-adopted lifestyles [1 – 5]. In a nutshell, genes or traits that may have been selectively advantageous or neutral in the past are argued to be potentially deleterious within the context of industrialisation and modernization. Some suggest that this mismatch can be extended even further back in time, to the widespread adoption of agriculture [5]. It is believed that chronic and degenerative conditions persist at such high levels in many populations because the rate at which selection operates is not sufficient to respond to the current pace of cultural and environmental change [1, 5]. In other words, it is thought by many advocates of evolutionary medicine that our environments are evolving faster than we are.