Our Bodies
(A PHYSIOLOGICAL LEGACY – THE HUNTER-GATHERER IN ALL OF US)

The human body is a fantastic piece of engineering that has taken millions of years for evolution to bring it to its current level of development. Unfortunately, the technology isn’t exactly cutting-edge, and in evolutionary terms our body’s physiological makeup is designed to fit a lifestyle that humans haven’t had for thousands of years.

Going back in history, before the discovery of agriculture and farming, man had to exist literally hand-to-mouth. Each meal had to be obtained by hunting and killing animals for meat, or by searching for and gathering nuts and berries or digging for edible roots. The effort expended in simply getting enough to eat kept our ancient ancestors in very good physical shape.

However, despite the small number of humans and the abundance of animals and other nutritious food, knowing what the next meal would be, or more importantly when the next meal might be available could never be known for sure. Evolution provided the answer and provided our bodies with a mechanism to store as much of some foods we consume as possible to help protect us from famine or other times when food might be in extremely short supply.

This mechanism for storing food in our bodies hasn’t really changed since those times and 6,000 years after we began to farm, our bodies still function as hunter gatherers. If we wished to do it, this mechanism would allow us to consume 10kg of sugar in one day and store what part of that sugar we didn’t immediately need! It’s an astonishing fact and of course was hugely beneficial to our hunter-gatherer ancestors who led a life far more active than ours in the pursuit of food and who burned many calories in the process.

Nature has given us another great gift, diversity. A huge abundance of food can be found through the different seasons, ensuring that there is always something nutritious to eat.

The two main points to note from this section are:

- Our bodies will absorb and store excesses of whatever we eat, regardless of whether it be good or bad.
- In order to make the body’s storage mechanism work to proper effect, there must be a balance between calories consumed and calories burned.