Robert S. Barrett - Hardwired: How Our Instincts to Be Healthy are Making Us Sick

Your chances of surviving this day are far better than they have ever been in all of human history. Never before in our turbulent 2 million-year societal evolution have we understood so much about what it takes to live longer, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. Our ever-increasing medical knowledge, advanced management of disease processes, and our respect for personal and industrial safety are at an all-time high and improving rapidly.

Despite this vast knowledge, many of us feel more sluggish, fatigued, stressed, and rundown than ever before. In the USA, where there are more health clubs and gyms than anywhere else in the world, as well as more medical innovation than any other nation on the planet, ill-health is on the rise, with obesity rates quickly approaching 50%. Over one-third of Americans suffer from chronic pain, the highest reported level in the world, while consuming some 80% of the global opioid supply [1]. In the last 100 years average length of sleep has dropped by over 2 hours per night and has been linked to a host of disease processes, from Alzheimers to Diabetes [2].

If you have access to the Internet, you can peruse the abstracts of some 50 million peer-reviewed journal articles in more than 30,000 science journals. The problem is certainly not that we lack the knowledge to be healthier, rather it is understanding what the particular barriers are to health in todays modern world [3]. As such, its not necessarily a question of how do we become healthy. Its how do we address those things that are stopping us from being healthy. As much as we may like to theorize that more health information will yield better health outcomes, this relationship remains elusive at best, and at worst, entirely false. So, why is it that we suffer from such poor health and well-being when we are living in the safest, most secure, and most prosperous era in all of human history?

Theorist Buckminster Fuller famously proclaimed that it once took 1500 years for all of human knowledge to double. By the twentieth century, this period was shortened to about 100 years [4]. Today, varying estimates suggest that current human knowledge is doubling at a rate of about every 1318 months, and an oft-quoted IBM prediction claims that the doubling rate will soon shorten to an astounding rate of every 11 hours. This prophecy is as horrifying as it is exciting. The idea that what you knew yesterday could be obsolete today raises questions about not only what is real but how we even go about educating ourselves.

Medical knowledge too is growing at an exponential rate. In 1950, healthcare knowledge was doubling every 50 years, in 2010 it was less than 5 years, and now we are on track for a doubling of medical knowledge every 2 months [5]. Despite this deluge of data, our actual health standards are in freefall. In some sectors of the American population, lifespan is even reversing for the first time in a thousand years among wealthy nations. When our collective knowledge of how to stay healthy is increasing exponentially while real health is swiftly decreasing, something is terribly amiss.

The evidence suggests that we are rapidly entering a global public health emergency in which our physiological and psychological well-being are failing to keep pace with the positive rate of societal and technological change around us. Evolutionary psychologists and biologists hint at a sort of evolutionary mismatch, by which our evolution, having taken place over millions of years, can be suddenly out of step with our modern world [6]. This leads to a type of maladaptation, in which our behaviors, typically meant to quench our burning biological needs and desires, actually cause us harm. To be sure, its not that we have forgotten how to survive. In fact, our caveman within is superbly evolved to do just that. The problem arises when these survival instincts hardwired into our brains and bodies become immersed in an environment which is so rich in stimuli that we lack the biological fortitude to manage it.