>> Living in harmony with your evolutionary past Part 1.
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As we all know, we are part of parcel of nature.
And it always reminds me when we look at our genetics and DNA.
Remember, genetically, we're -- And even to bananas, we are 60% genetically similar to a cow
about 80%, to a mouse 85, to a cat 90, to a chimpanzee 96% genetically similar.
And all modern humans are 99.9% genetically similar.
So in a way, we are almost controlled in a way or modulated by our evolutionary past.
And no -- And any variation of that may make life more challenging.
But anyway, it sometimes then helps to ask the question, on reflection, how did we evolve
and how did we live for those thousands of generations?
Go back 50,000 years ago, how did we live?
We were hunting, gatherers.
We ate all variety of foods.
We lived in small clans.
Yes, people died in childbirth, people died in accidents,
but some lived till the age 90 just as much.
There may have been a deduction in some of the illnesses we now so commonly have,
such as our inflammatory illnesses, you know.
And what kind of foods did people eat by which they allowed themselves
to survive, by which we survived?
How did we move?
How do we take rest?
What constitute our social systems which is probably a small claim.
All those factors still are seen in our behavior today.
We still react.
We still live and optimally when we accept and live in harmony with our evolutionary past.
So this presentation will focus more on this.
And part of it is that I look around and I'm also shocked of how many young children
and adults have now autoimmune illnesses, have cognitive disorders such as ADHD or, you know,
or how many have other illnesses is listed here.
And how come many of these -- Those diseases were mainly absent in rural Africa
and much more common in the industrialized first world.
And we see this kind of epidemic of autoimmune illnesses, of allergies increasing
and increasing all around the world.
And then how come one third of American children are now prediabetic,
which is really a horrible prediction for the future?
How come there's such an increase in nearsightedness?
How come cancer, Alzheimer's disease, appears to be occurring earlier than ever before?
And how come these diseases are occurring more frequently and were almost absent
in your grandparents' generation or in our non-industrialized people?
These are the interesting questions to me because they ask not just what can we do
to treat these disorders, what can we do to treat allergies.
And it's remarkable that we can do some of that.
But what is it that we need to do to potentially prevent it and optimize our health?
So that is really the sense of trying to understand,
living in harmony of our evolutionary past.
And statistically, as you can see very well on this slide, that many of the illnesses
which are infectious disease is either by viruses or by bacteria have now been reduced.
Look at hepatitis A going down.
TB has been going down, mumps and measles.
I know that looks like it's only due to vaccinations,
but many of these were already going down before vaccinations ever occurred.
And look how we have this epidemic, in a way, of these more autoimmune-like illnesses.
You know, whether it's Crohn's disease, that's a gastrointestinal disorder,
or type 1 diabetes, asthma, multiple sclerosis.
You know, it's really -- It's shocking when you think of that, you know, of this radical change.
You can also see that it's so interesting.
It says mainly those diseases,
those inflammatory diseases are those from the Western hemisphere.
If you look at the graph underneath and look at Western Europe and the Canada
and the United States, and you see it's almost totally absent in --
or much less in the other parts of the world.
You know, and then -- You can look at a rate of the increase
in autism from very low to now very high.
It's true that some of this is more powerful diagnostic ways of doing it.
We may recognize it when in the past it was not recognized as a disorder,
but it also looks like a real phenomenon.
OK? And then you look at many of the allergies we have, you know,
just think, -- I keep thinking of that.
You know, I used to remember flying, and when I flew people would be serving peanuts and nuts.
And the concept of having peanut allergy just wasn't part of my awareness.
And if you ask your grandparents, when they go back and think of their childhood and they were
in school, how many of them knew people who had allergies?
And many will say, maybe only one in 40.
Now our students, one third of us will say, gosh, I have some reactivity allergic.
And it may because we have been changing our world so much,
we are now living away from our evolutionary past.
You know, look at it, for example, about hay fever.
Hay fever was first described in 1819 by John Bostock.
And, you know -- And it occurred really among people of higher class and living in cities.
Part of it is that if you were a farm child or living in the farms,
you would be continually exposed to these, the materials from the hay,
and therefore you would not develop this allergy.
And similar phenomena seems to be has occurred for irritable bowel disease and Crohn's disease.
That was first described in 1932 by Burrill Crohn, you know,
in which he described this necrotizing inflammation scarring of the intestines.
However, this disease clearly is associated with social class and wealth and the more --
And being more and more removed from any part of nature.
It used to be one little per 10,000.
Now it's even one per 200.
It's just shocking to think about it.
And then why is it that these have all increased?
I am not saying I know the answers at all, but I'm looking at possible causes.
I don't think we can say it's genetics.
I think genetics, in many cases, you look at that
and we can find a genetic, you know, link that is clear.
But in most cases, genetics, you know, only provides the possibility, you know,
and it's the environment that it pulls the trigger to expose it.
So you may have a genetic predisposition to gain weight
and thereby potentially get more type 2 diabetes.
But if you don't eat the foods that do this, you most likely won't get it.
OK? So look at it over the last 30 years, we have now increased in allergies.
Now, how come all this may occur?
Well, there are many factors.
I'm only listing a few.
I'm sure many of you can add many more.
And they are all probably correct.
It is very difficult to identify that because if you do animal studies, you know,
we're not totally the same as animals.
We sometimes can't eat the same foods.
And so, it is not totally the same.
There are hidden at least.
Well, let's just list a few.
One, it's during pregnancy, the fetus experience either a kind of alcohol malnutrition,
but it's affluent malnutrition in the Western world.
But it really means probably inappropriate amount of essential nutrients or an exposure
to endocrine dysregulating chemicals.
These are all the plastics.
The -- These are all the pesticides, herbicides, and the many things we ingest without knowing
which in fact act as endocrine there's, you know, systems dysregulation.
Then because of finance, in many cases socioeconomic inequality during the first year
of life, we don't allow babies to breastfeed and bond and possibly
to concurrent malnutrition by giving formula.
And by giving formula, you also miss the transmission of immune --
appropriate immune cells which you have gotten from the breast milk.
And then during early childhood and life, we get exposed to endocrine dysregulating substances,
the plastics, which you're all exposed to often act as estrogens, the pesticides,
the herbicides, they all may affect our immune system.
You know, then we have this massive exposure to antibiotics.
Antibiotics are great.
I mean, gosh, if you have a bacterial infection, you're going to die.
Please get the appropriate antibiotic.
However, in so many cases it's used inappropriately.
And what antibiotics do to you is they basically remove or kill whole groups of bacteria
which are essential for our health.
So in fact, we have an impoverished human biome.
And then we have excessive hygiene by which in many ways we are no longer exposed
to some viruses or bacteria which in the past would have immunized us.
And we see this now coming up in the post-pandemic
that many people have been separated from each other.
And now when we meet again, all of a sudden, we have an increase in flus.
There's nothing new to this.
This has been observed before in the expeditions to the Antarctica.
When people in the Antarctica would go a scientist, they would then be living there.
And then the Antarctica winter would occur they would no new people meeting them.
And first upon -- When they first got together, there were a number of flus and illnesses.
Now they were all exposed, no new bacteria came in.
And for the next six months or however much time it is, none of them got sick.
People did get sick of other diseases, but not of bacterial or viral infections, basically.
And then the first visitor came and all
of a sudden people would get their colds or flus again.
So by not being exposed, we put ourselves more at risk.
And that our lifestyle in a way has really shifted so much.
You know, we're so much -- We sit so much, we have so much lack of movement.
We have lights that interfere in fact with our health.
Light at night, for example, maybe -- may affect, not only may,
does affect our diurnal rhythms, our daily rhythms, because light,
especially blue component of light, tends to suppress melatonin.
And it's one of the factors people have hypothesized is why young girls are developing
earlier menarche immediately.
The first menstruation occurred because they have lights on at night
which disturbs their biological rhythms as well as increased weight and fat.
There are many other factors.
OK? But overall, you could argue that a number of this kind
of newer illnesses are the result of our lifestyle.
Namely, we have disrespected our evolutionary origins without realizing that we are part
of this intrinsic web that includes diet, movement, parasites,
biological rhythms, bacteria, you name it, viruses.
They're all part of us.
And in many cases, some are -- Or in many cases dysfunction can be reversed
or maybe even prevented by respecting and returning to our evolutionary origins.
The data is overwhelming.
You have people, for example, who get up and do significant amount of movement tend
to have less cardiovascular disease.
Notice that's a dysfunction which can be reversed.
Eating less sugar and simple carbohydrates, which is not part of our evolutionary past,
would mean that they would not develop type 2 diabetes or much less likely.
So in a way, it goes right back to the simple rules of health, but --
Which we described earlier by Nassim Taleb.
Anything that was not part of our evolutionary past is probably harmful.
I want to underline again, anything that was novel and not part
of our evolutionary past is probably harmful.
And probably we don't need evidence of harm to claim that a drug
or any unnatural procedure is dangerous, even if that harm does not yet exist.
Therefore, the easiest way to optimize health is to remove the,
what he would call via negativity, remove the unnatural, the unfamiliar.
You know, just think of reducing lung cancer
which is what people have demonstrated very clearly by stopping smoking
which is the function and the irritation of the airways.
All of a sudden, lung cancer is decreased and a number of other illnesses are increased.
Although right now we are seeing an increased epidemic of the use of e-cigarettes,
which will again lead to a future epidemic.
OK. Remember, from an evolutionary perspective, let me outline.
Genes survive and prosper if their reproductive fitness increases.
And the changes in our external environment continually impacts the natural selection
of genes named our reproductive fitness.
Novel and increased inputs reduces our reproductive fitness.
And you could say act as an allostatic load.
And nature and natural selection favors those mutations, those genes,
those behaviors that enhance the reproductive fitness with these novel stimuli.
Therefore, by -- Thereby you lose the allostatic load.
And you keep in mind that is especially true for younger people
and people, you know, in their 20s and 30s.
But once you have given birth or an older adult, remember, you're not going to reproduce anymore.
So then those illnesses have much -- are much less affected by this evolutionary perspective.
So I would not expect that Alzheimer's is impacted by this
because there's no natural selection.
We have already reproduced.
OK? But remember to underline this again, natural selections.
Individuals best adapted to their surroundings enjoy increased reproductive success.
They pass on the traits adaptive or sometimes even maladaptive or neutral
to their descendants, who gradually constitute a greater proportion of the population.
Remember, we carry this imprint of our biological heritage in us.
So, it's useful to say how and what were we doing earlier on that allowed us to be us now.
And now I want to underline this even more, but this is very important.
Let's have that selection.
We are wired for whatever habitat we are involved in.
Biologists who study animals in the wild describe this as habitat selection theory.
And the general rule is that animals who are in their natural habitat do much better.
They thrive both physically and psychologically and social behavior compared to animals
that are placed in unnatural habitat such as a zoo.
They most likely evolved in the forest of Africa without the presence of digital displays.
And so, by just sitting in front of digital displays the whole time,
or just sitting the whole time, we probably are reducing our health.
And people have called sitting the, you know, our -- The new epidemic of smoking, basically.
And what I've said many times before is that genetics only loads the gun, but our behavior
and environment pulls the trigger.
And I like that phrase a lot.
So let me look at it give an example how our environment may cause us to develop illness.
This is called -- The concept is evolutionary or ecological traps.
Evolutionary/ecological traps occur
when formerly adaptive habitat preference become maladaptive, meaning they become harmful.
Because the cues they individually preferentially use
in selecting habitat may now lead to lower fitness than other alternatives.
It means that whatever adaptive habits of preference we evolve for,
and now we allow that to happen too much, it may lead to illness.
But let me give a remarkable example of this.
This is with the birds in the Pacific called the albatross.
And when you go to Midway Island, it's just shocking.
In Midway -- On Midway Island, you see these many carcasses of these birds.
You can see the skeletons, you can see the feathers, and you see what was left
over in a gastrointestinal tract.
Look at all the pieces of plastic, how was that?
How come? And so many are dying.
Well, think of the albatross going over the ocean from Midway.
There -- That's an island which is 2,000 miles away from any other islands.
And the bird lives, you know -- Eats the fish.
So it goes -- It is flying over the ocean.
It sees some shimmering in the water.
It looks like a fish.
And those birds for evolution, who, you know, who have adopted
and could identify this the quickest and the most, they would then dive, they would eat it,
swallow it, and then possibly regurgitate it to their chicks.
Now, however, that same shimmering in the water now is our small piece of plastic
which are coated also by the algae.
So it has some of the similar outer taste initially.
So now what happens is the birds now take this plastic and swallow it as food.
Now, do we say these birds are stupid or are we at fault that we have created this world
where these birds, we made such a radical shift?
So, these birds were evolved to be able to see that shimmering,
they would then go at it and now they would die.
And that is a very, you know -- It looks really challenging.
And as Professor E.O. Wilson stated, organisms when housed in unfit habitats undergo social,
psychological, and physiological breakdown.
Here then you see that the habitat radically changed.
The animal cell is wired to find that shimmering object as food.
But now it's no longer food.
I want to keep this down because are we --
What other evolutionary or environmental traps are there for people today?
You know, just if you took out a piece of paper, think of things that may --
you may be doing which you automatically do, but basically are triggered by the environment
because you have evolved for that to respond?
Pause. I'll pause.
I won't pause.
Pause the computer for write them down and let's check it out.
Let me just think a few.
One, we react to cues of food automatically.
We see food, we may become hungry.
We smell it, we become hungry.
We, you know -- automatically.
Well, why?
Because we need food for survival.
You know, for millions of years probably, you know, food was only challenging.
We always had to hunt for food.
Therefore, we have really no mechanisms easily to stop eating.
And this is especially true for sugars.
Almost all foods that are sweet are usually not poisonous.
Yes, I knew that -- know that the paint, you know, lead paint is sweet
when you chew it, the pieca it is called.
However, that's not the rare things.
Most other things in nature that are sweet are -- represent calories.
Therefore, we want to eat them because we need the calories for survival.
And we don't have an off switch easily.
The same thing will be true for fats.
So we -- When the cue of food is shown to us, we react to eat or want to eat or hunger.
And I'll show that in a moment.
OK? And the similar part is I think for reproduction, you know, we, you know --
That's probably the drive by pornography is such --
is probably the biggest bandwidth on the Internet because there are cues
which said survival that leads to -- maybe because we want for reproduction.
And then we have all the cues around us for protection.
We remember are -- we're historically prey.
There were other animals that saw us for food.
So we always had to be very careful.
We had to look around and be vigilant.
We still all are.
And now however all those cues which of sounds, of changing objects around cause us
to react all the time and where -- which captures our attention.
You know, no wonder we tend to get addicted to computer games.
Once we sit and we watch one next, you know --
We start to watch a Netflix series automatically we keep sitting there,
and then the next sequence pops up and we don't change because we're captured by it.
And then for survival in small groups, for --
In clans, we need to know who the power structure was.
Because as we, you know, mature, we want to be part of the power structure.
We don't really exclude.
We need to know what's going on.
So in some sense, you could say that's our social media addiction.
You know, it's basic and it's triggered that way.
And then our bodies really want to rest.
Why expend energy when there's not enough energy you have or calories?
So anytime you could rest, you would do it.
So that quickly leads to excess sitting and lack of movement.
In the past, we didn't have to go to the gym, we didn't have to go jogging.
Our whole world included that physicalness.
And so now, however, it doesn't.
And then there are many other things that occur.
Light, we want to be active, we want to be involved.
However, light, artificial light which keeps us awake, keeps us active, also reduces our rest,
interferes with melatonin, affects our circadian rhythms, et cetera.
And then the final pieces, from my perspective, the brain cannot, I would say,
discriminate between actual and visual auditory images.
So when we watch a film in front of us for our brain this is really real.
I know you, we all would say, yes, I know it's a -- It is a drama, it's a play, it isn't real.
And yet for our body, this is the first time in our evolutionary past, well, really,
since cameras were, you know -- since you could do film in late 19th century,
then we could have a picture which was not real in the past, everything we saw was always real.
We could touch.
And so, when things go into our eyes, our brains say, that's real, and we react this way.
And even though we may want to argue that, I think most of you, if not all,
have had the experience that if you watch a horror movie or horrible scenes
where the horrible things happened in a series and then you go outside,
all of a sudden that little noise behind you triggers a massive autonomic response.
In the past, that would not have done that.
Because we are -- Our bodies saw what we saw on the film react as real.
And I think we have really underestimated that how powerful that phenomenon is.
And part of the reason we have these economic we are --
We react all the time is because our commercial industry uses these cues which are really traps
for us to capture our eyeballs and that's the whole basis
of our social media, of all the many of the Internet.
It's really people don't get paid for the content.
They get paid for our attention, hijacking our attention.
And equally for many industries, it is the profit margin that doesn't ask, is it healthy?
It just asks can be, can you, will you buy the object?
Just think of the, all the cereals with high laden with sugar, all the candies in front
of the counters, you know, and do we then blame children that they have no control?
So in a child who is wired from an evolutionary perspective for survival to eat more calories,
when it sees the sweets, it wants those.
Do we blame the child?
Or should we blaming the corporate culture, the world around us?
And maybe we really need to be careful with this and say, oops, you may need to define that
and we may need to set, you know, social constraints
that we don't trigger these dysfunctional behaviors.
And remember, even watching pictures of food and smelling it will activate your brain.
You know, it is most interesting.
I think I have a slide in that later.
OK? So the solutions really are that the society may need to protect its own population
from the commercial exploitation of these evolutionary ecological traps.
Now this is a great difficult discussion because we think
of the freedom of speech in a very broad sense.
But yes, I think it is a critical issue.
We cannot depend upon self-regulation to reduce our sugar content in our Coke,
in our foods around us or anything else.
And you can already see the effect in human physiology
by having been exposed to these environmental traps.
If you look at the brainwave activity, the quantitative electroencephalography,
the brain activity, the brains of normal students today look more
like an ADHD student than 20 years ago.
If you look at the spine of young people today, as colleagues of mine in Canada observed
in the athletics department that compared to 20 years ago, the spine just --
The upper spine, these people are slightly more curved forward
because our whole world is looking down at our cell phone or looking at our screens.
The pandemic only, you know, accelerated this trend that was already going on.
And then there's so many other qualities, things that we have, increase of pesticides,
of plastics, of BPA, all of that which may lead to pathology.
So we may need to control our -- By the --
With our legal system, be exposure to protect ourselves.
It's a challenge.
OK? But just for fun, let me go back for a moment what I said
about what you see and smell affects your body.
The brain and visual system, remember, are intimately linked to the acquisition of food.
It is necessary for survival.
And when we get an image of food and the smell of food,
our physiological neurological changes respond.
And it may even be a danger in our growing exposure.
These beautiful presented images of foods, which we do each time I go to Facebook or Instagram
or TikTok and I make a short video on TikTok about the delicious food I'm eating,
or I take a picture and post it on Facebook or Instagram on the food.
What happens is it will induce this in the person.
Here, I take the picture and then I can look at the brain,
what happens to the person does this is work.
And you can see by weighing it all, and you can see that if you show the food inside a,
you know, PFT [inaudible] imaging where you can see how the blood flow goes through the brain,
basically, or metabolism, then you see all of a sudden that there's a 24 increase
in the brain metabolism by just showing the images of foods while lying in a scanner.
Now, this is a very complicated study where you don't only saw the image,
they brought the smell in, they put it on your tongue as well.
So it's a very -- It's -- It is a complex one.
However, imagine -- Imagination and seeing it affects physiology.
And so next time you send that great meal to your friend, you may be helping them to want
to eat more and increase their obesity.
So really, you know, our diet and exercise do change it.
You've been sitting here for a little while now, so just for a moment, once again, just get up.
Just get up and move.
I know it's so hard, but get up.
Just wiggle and move.
Just move.
I'm swinging, I'm swinging.
I reach up and then I look up.
I look up again and I look up again.
I take a big breath and then -- and I let my sit myself down again.
And just note again, when you have done that, note two things.
One, how hard it was to get up and do it, how much we want to just keep sitting.
And two, that after you did it, how your energy slightly went up.
OK. So really remember, what I want to point out is health is living your evolutionary roots
and whatever increases reproductive fitness predominates.
And then remember our past that we are wired to be preyed.
And finally, we start regenerating when we feel safe.
And if you look at that more, it means you may look at diet.
We'll look at that much later in the semester but have a lot
of greens, tubers, nuts, organic foods.
And then we can see that the absence of some of the vitamins may lead to significant illnesses.
And I'll talk about this in a moment.
The lack of Omega 3, which we now have massively up because we mainly have Omega 6s
because of the massive amount of corn products we eat, you know,
may inhibit embryological development, increase eczema, others, the folic acid,
which is part of food -- of healthy eating a lot
of veggies may increase the risk of spina bifida.
And then we have all the cases where people are no longer doing breastfeeding.
I'll talk about that in a moment.
That increase the risk of celiac disease and asthma.
And then we have the whole light night melatonin suppression by light.
And then our relationship of our body's bacteria, parasites.
And I'll talk about that in a moment about Crohn's disease, et cetera.
OK, let me just see in detail a little bit what happens
when you disregard your evolutionary background.
And I'll go through the following fairly quickly.
Living in isolation constantly formula, versus breastfeeding or breastfeeding versus formula,
eating processed foods or really being having affluent malnutrition.
Feeding an animal a carnivore a herbivore diet, feeding a herbivore a carnivore diet,
feeding rats milk protein casein that we have never been used to,
possibly how come we can get food poisoning, et cetera, et cetera.
OK. So let me first go back to isolation.
It's most interesting.
This was the study at Kaiser which I really liked where they looked at the adults
without children who contract COVID 19 versus those who had children.
And notice that for equivalent ages, this is before you're vaccinated,
that adults who had no -- who are not around little children were 49% were likely
to be hospitalized and 76% more likely to have intensive care unit admissions
than infected adults of similar ages and health histories who had young children at home.
This really is a very impressive data.
It suggests both social isolation is harmful or it really says, gosh, for all our evolution,
we lived in little clans that included grandparents, great grandparents,
parents, children and even babies.
And all together and what the -- And you could possibly argue is that little babies
and toddlers continually have snotty noses, they have flus, and these are --
They are all by different most cases by viruses.
And by being exposed to that continuously or episodically,
we're getting a kind of natural vaccination.
And that may then protect us from the COVID virus because 30% of flus are coronavirus
which is in a similar family as the COVID.
So that's possibly.
And when we have looked at what happened with COVID is that the greatest deaths occurred
with elderly who were in locations where there were no little kids
around and had comorbidities.
OK. But, you know, let me shift to different ones.
Reflect on the statement.
Think of the risk and benefits of feeding a baby.
Formula is better because it allows the mother to sleep and regenerate.
It involves the partner in the baby's care, right, pros and cons on that.
Just stop it and think about it.
Now I'll just argue a few reasons why maybe breastfeeding is normal, natural, and healthier.
And this data I'll talk about can be very much criticized because you could argue
that by definition people who can breastfeed may be more affluent
and different socioeconomic factors.
And when you control from those the risk -- these data may slightly disappear.
OK? But there's no way I can be persuaded from an evolutionary perspective
and Polyp's perspective as well that a formula can better than breast milk,
unless there's some specific cases of sickness or others.
OK? But basically, the data is overwhelming from this perspective that children,
babies who are breastfed have a reduced risk of asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes,
ear and respiratory infections, and sudden infant death syndrome.
It also -- It lowers the mother's risk
of hypertension type 2 diabetes, ovarian and breast cancer.
You know, what is so sad is that this is mainly the challenge of economic disparity.
And in the US, it's our public health policies or public policies which basically do not allow
or give women time to breastfeed.
Namely in some European countries, you can have a year off or two years off
where after you give birth you can be at home and get your salary paid.
And I think we need to do that.
Basically.
in the US what we want to do is we want to not have costs at the beginning,
and then we're stuck with these very high costs as we get older.
I would recommend we should do the cost up front and support the women
so their jobs are kept being that they have equality
and they can go back to their job afterwards.
But if you look at the data, the data I think is clear.
Most children, most mothers -- If they can, in some cases you can't.
There's no harm in that.
You do the best one can do.
But in those cases, you can.
Most mothers want to breastfeed and try to continue to.
However, it's very difficult.
If you go to work and then you have to pump the breast
and do other things, the system is just against it.
It's too much work.
And notice by, you know, after three months,
only half the babies were exclusively breastfeeding.
And by 12 months, only one third, you know, and most supplemented with formula.
The key is you don't want to supplement this with formula.
At best, what you do is you want to breastfeed continuously
and keep supplementing other foods enter --
other foods continually to it than you also reduce a massive rate of any allergies to.
The data is clear that if you do both at the same time,
then there's very low allergy rates to foods.
However, in the United States this is really an issue
of economic disparity and to me it's immoral.
But the quick summaries and I'll give some data on these for the mother,
it distinctly reduces the breast cancer risk, reduces stress, enhance bonding.
For the baby enhanced bonding, reduces allergy, reduces obesity,
probably enhances immune function.
But look for the mother in detail if you study breast cancer for 10 years after pregnancy,
then you see those who had 34 more weeks
of breastfeeding had a cancer risk drop by 13%, you know.
There is distinct, and this is probably much higher than that if the --
One gives birth in your early 20s.
There's a consensus at early first birth an increased number
of full-time births shows you a significantly long term reduction of breast cancer risks.
OK? And I think this is really something we don't talk about
and for the benefits for the baby as a group.
And again, like I said, the data is very difficult because this is
so confusing by socioeconomic inequalities.
Babies who are breastfed have higher IQs as adults than formula fed.
You know, the people born in 1920s and '30s who were breastfed
as babies achieved significantly upward mobility when they were in the 60s
and 70s compared to formula-fed babies.
Men and women who were part of this study in 1937,
'39 had a 50% reduction developing celiac disease.
That seems to be very common.
So as if by being breastfed and then slowly adding food to it, you don't --
You can continue to be able to eat glutens
and not develop celiac disease compared to breastfed babies.
And formula-fed babies are fatter as children and skinnier as adults.
I'm going to underwrite that, formula babies are fatter as babies.
I'm sorry.
And as children and adults, they're skinnier.
That's an error there.
OK? But remember, the formula are incomplete for the first couple of months.
It doesn't have all the appropriate fatty acids which are necessary for neural development.
Although after a while the brain will replace its all --
Again, our body place itself so that we can all do it.
But it still means that for the first four months the baby is getting basically
inappropriate products, as well as all the immune cells and other things it gets
from the mother via the breast milk.
And then even when one is very conscientious about pumping milk and sharing this,
and it's just great that can be done that the milk is different at different times of day.
So when the mother is going to sleep, the breast milk has a different quality,
has different substances which allows the baby to go to sleep more
and the same thing in the morning.
And now what happens when you mix these up for the baby?
So life is more complex.
And remember, babies that are fed on formula may be slightly disadvantaged.
I've already looked at that.
Babies born in 1970 in formula-fed are twice likely to have neurological problems at age nine
as compared to exclusive breastfed for the first three weeks.
Premature babies who are formula-fed achieve significantly low IQ scores at age eight.
And premature babies are breastfed.
Is this due to the breastfed milk, due the absence of body contact?
Is it due because by having the privilege to be able to breastfeed,
it means you're already in a more upper social class?
There are many of those, you know.
And I can keep going on these if you look at formula.
Maternal milk is better than formula for preterm babies, that date is quite good.
OK. And then finally, which is the most interesting part when you think
of the evolutionary perspective, it isn't only the baby at this point,
we need to also think of the epigenetics.
And I'm not going to talk about that today or much, but remember that the mother --
The pregnant mother's lifestyle has an impact on the fetal -- fetus development.
If the mother is anxious, is stressed, taking drugs, takes alcohol, it affects the development
of the baby and that is a burden the baby will carry.
However, it gets even more significant that in fact the sense
that people say illnesses skip a generation, they're sort of right in a very funny way.
Because a pregnant mother -- woman impacts her baby, but also her future grandchild.
Because the little fetus that's developing, all the fetuses' eggs
that are developing during the time it's a fetus are impacted by the mother.
And that means that when that -- The child becomes the mother,
its eggs are also have already been shaped by her mother.
So the grandmother in fact impacts the mother.
And once you look at that, you can really see how we do --
How our past transcends into the future.
And then let's look at totally about some whole other areas about food, when we --
I cannot say enough about how I would say how bad in many ways the US food supply is.
Bad is the wrong word to use how unnutritious in any way it is.
It's remarkable that we get plenty of calories
and that's very important if you don't have calories.
However, we are now becoming a world of malnutrition, affluent malnutrition.
And we often spend lots of money's time on foods that are not nutritious.
Here's a single case study as we're about to look out for fun.
If you drink 10 Cokes a day for a month -- Now, it's not a study, it's a case report.
But I think it makes perfect sense.
When you drink a can, a £12 can of Coke, you're drinking 39 grams of sugar.
That's a lot.
What happened?
Outcome after one month, increased weight by 23 pounds, insulin levels,
the person became prediabetic, blood pressures increased, the body fat increased by 9%.
And this -- And later on the Harvard study has also shown this,
drinking one can of soda can lead to a five-pound weight gain in a year.
And also drinking soda daily is strongly to early death and increased likelihood
of having a heart attack or stroke.
It's also linked in women with an increase in osteoarthritis even with athletes.
OK? So I'm not recommending drinking Cokes by definition, but just when we don't listen
to our evolutionary diet or background and we now do changes, it may backfire on us.
And I'm going to use a few.
I'm going to give three examples of this.
You can think of many more, but I'm trying to think of a way of thinking about this.
OK. So what I look for is may you feed carnivores or herbivore diet,
when you feed herbivores a carnivore diet.
And when you feed rats foods they were totally unfamiliar with in their history.
So that's an allostatic load.
OK? This goes back to 1985.
This is in the US zoos, cheetahs were not doing well.
They had many deaths, only 18 births, seven died.
Six percent cheetahs had liver damage.
Only 10% of females produce cups.
You could argue well, because they're in a zoo.
It worked out is not the case because in the zoos
in South Africa, the cheetahs were doing well.
Remember, the cheetahs are one of the fastest animals in the world, you know,
and so they had -- But in South African zoos they had no problem.
Why? Well, what is the food we're feeding?
Who knows what it totally is, but what the major factors appear
to be the diet of cheetah's health.
In South African -- In South Africa, the cheetahs ate whole carcasses, whole meat,
just like they did for their evolutionary past.
In the US the cheetahs start to eat commercial prepared cat food because it's much cheaper.
There was horse meat, that's OK.
But they include a lot of soya bean products were added for protein.
Soy contains diazine and genistein which acts as weak estrogens.
And estrogens can affect liver and increase the size of uterus, possibly also carcinogenic
and excessive if you're estrogen sensitive for breast cancer patients.
What is so interesting, when they got rid of the soy and they gave the animals only meat,
their health improved and their fertility improved again.
I'm not saying that eating soy causes this at all.
In human beings because we are not carnivores, we are omnivores.
Although I have my questions about, you know, nonorganic soy,
so I would not quite recommend that.
But then look at the opposite one.
This is the mad cow disease episode that occurred about 20, 25 years ago.
And this was happened mainly in Britain.
And what happened is that the animals developed something called mad cow disease,
bovine spongy form encephalopathy, essentially degenerate brain disease.
It's a similar disease that is seen in human beings as Creutzveldt-Jacob disease.
It's a prion disease.
It's transmitted by eating part of the brain tissue.
And that's also true in human beings because the way, you know -- When you go to New Guinea,
where historically there was a large episode of this kind of disorder is
because when the people would fight each other in New Guinea, the tribes,
then the winning tribe would eat the brains of their --
of the person they had beaten in the battle.
And if they were now infected with this prion, they would then get the same disease.
OK? So we know if you eat the nervous tissue, then that could be an issue.
Most likely, people hypothesize that mad cow disease in Britain started
when they changed the way the meat waste products were distributed.
Namely, what the people did is you would collect meat products and that could be from cows,
from sheep, from all others, you know, and then you would process this to make a meat powder
which you would then feed to the cows to quickly have them gain weight and produce more milk.
OK? So now basically you are giving the cows who are --
whose GI tract has really evolved to eat grass very low quality, you could say food,
low caloric food, you now feed it a carnivore diet.
And most likely in that process, when you now fed them these waste products all ground up
and processed, they contained the prions from the sheep which in sheep is called scrapy.
And then that let it be expressed in cows.
And then when these cows were slaughtered again, you would then take their waste products
as fish holders and you would again feed it to other cows.
And so that's most likely how mad cow disease started.
And the quickest way this was stopped by not doing that anymore.
But it's, you know -- I'm not saying that eating meat would be harmful,
but possibly if you never were exposed to it then your GI tract may not be able to cope
with the scrapy or with the prion or other things that may be occurring.
So that's when you step outside of it and then let me do a different one.
This is a very interesting one about rats.
It's an old study by Campbell and Campbell or it's really by Wells even older in 1976.
You take rats and you give them a low doses aflatoxin,
which is a very powerful carcinogenic agent developing these tumors and cancer.
In most people if a dosage high enough, but you give them a very low dose.
And what is interesting is you get to normal rats, you get this low dose
and then you haven't eaten normal rat show.
And then cancer is expressed in all the animals.
Now what you do is you change -- And you change the rat child of food
because basically what is the rat food?
It's a little rat pellets, but it often has a lot of milk products in it,
milk protein called casein in it.
But I think from an evolutionary perspective, rats never drank milk or milk products.
I mean they eat everything, probably not milk.
So their body probably did not die to process this well then it's an allostatic load.
What is so interesting is when you reduce the consumption of -- in the foods to 5% of casein,
then when you give them this aflatoxin, it would induce cancer.
The cancer does not occur.
So, you can see as if the casein increases or reduces the immune response
or ability and allows the cancer to occur.
Again, from my simplistic perspective is that rats never ate milk or milk products.
So this is a novelty.
And then there's a long-term cost.
There's some evidence in human beings that eating lower animal --
Lower levels of animal protein is associated with lower cancer rates.
So the more veggies and fruits you eat, the probably better it is.
It is not as clear because the Inuit people in the Arctic eat mainly,
historically ate mainly animal products, lots of fats
and blubber, and they did not develop cancer.
So that it may not be as clear as it all looks.
But, you know, living in harmony
with your evolutionary past may give hope for a number of disorders.
I'm going to make a whole long list for a moment.
There's some suggestive evidence -- Some suggestions that even epilepsy in children,
and epilepsy is a complex disease, it's not simple, but for some can be at least controlled
by eating a total ketogenic diet.
This is very hard to do.
And just eating -- And for them, if you put them on a ketogenic diet,
then if they just eat one cupcake which would then be refined flour would trigger seizures.
There are many other factors, but this is at least one the person could have control over.
Two, I already alluded to the cancer as giving a low dose about autotoxin.
But this may also suggest that possibly what the foods were now eating,
some of them are so strange and not part of our evolutionary background
that it may do something for us in a similar way.
We just don't know.
And then there's a case of, again, which you all watch by multiple sclerosis by Terry Wahl,
who had severe multiple sclerosis.
She adopts a hunting and gathering diet and then thereby reverses her MS totally.
You know, there are case examples, but I think they give hints.
And then we need to think of foods.
I mean, we, you know -- When you look at your tissue, look at your hand for a moment,
look at -- Remember every cell in your body,
everything your whole body is built, created from the foods we ate.
If you eat, you know -- Think of building a house.
If you have very good materials and you have a very good plan then the house were very strong.
The plan could be your genetics and the epigenetics.
But even with a very good plan, if you have poor materials,
the house or the building you're making will not be as good and would be in danger of collapse.
And think of it this way.
And now much of our foods we're eating and partly because of the green revolution,
which has been great, that allows all of us to have enough plenty of foods.
So there is always a balance.
But our monoculture and our processed foods may eliminate many important micronutrients.
You know, we're not aware of what we need.
Two, our pesticides and herbicides -- I'm just thinking of Monsanta's Roundup,
we'll do this later when we talk about food, are carcinogenic and immune suppressant, you know.
And then there's lots of evidence that we -- That our -- The foods we eat may --
Or the lack of foods we eat may be a cause of a number of illnesses.
Just think of going back during the ages of, you know --
just think back of the age of sailing where sailors got scurvy, you know.
But why did they get scurvy?
Scurvy? Because the foods they were eating was even pickled.
They were not getting enough vitamin C so they lost their teeth.
There's massive death rate of sailors due to scurvy.
It was until the observation was made that when they ate limes, citrus fruit,
which contained vitamin C, there are many foods that have more vitamin C that once they start
to eat those, then they could solve that disease.
And then in the late 19th century, you know, with the advent of the result of colonization
in the -- in much of the world and the idea that brown rice was sort of, well,
that's for common people that white rice was best.
But the trouble was by eating white rice you get rid of the vitamin B1, thiamine.
And that led then to a very serious neurological disease very, very.
You know, it was because we started not eat the whole foods.
There's so many of these we can't think of it.
OK? Let me do another one here about spina bifida.
Spina bifida, you know, is really that the spine does not close of the little -- of the fetus.
However, it can totally be almost avoided, at least decreased
if the food contains enough folic acid.
But what do you get folic acid by?
By eating spinach, asparagus, turnips, greens, legumes, many of these and organ meats
such as liver and kidney all contain folate.
You don't need to take a pill.
You need the right foods.
So when I see these, that we need to add these substances to the foods,
it's really telling me we're eating the wrong foods.
OK? And I already talked about the vitamin C or think
of Omega 3 or fatty, you know -- fish oils.
You know, this then -- The data looks very good that mothers who are at high risk,
that's genetic for allergic disease.
When they got Omega 3s from 21 weeks of gestation to birth,
that there was a significant decrease in eczema, egg allergies and others.
Notice almost it went from 12% for the controls who didn't get it to 7%, 15 to 9.
Most likely if the mothers had it from the at the beginning of pregnancy,
maybe these numbers would even be much better.
And this is the result at age one.
So notice the long lasting cost by having a diet that's low in Omega 3 at least.
And our diet right now is massively weighted to Omega 6s, which is highly inflammatory
because so much of the foods we eat are it include corn, oils,
et cetera, which are all omega 6s.
OK? It even changes behavior if you give Omega 3 supplements for six months.
And that's a double-blind study for 8- to 16-year-olds.
You know, overall, what you see is that it's a reduction in significantly in behavior problems.
It's just really remarkable.
OK? And now I'm going to shift again to diet one more time, going back to the exposure of getting
to food poisoning which so often occurs in our modern diet, whether all of a sudden thousands
of people die or hundreds of people die and some or get sick and a few die
because they ate hamburgers or even the romaine lettuce.
Here's one of romaine lettuce.
But the question really is what caused it?
And in most cases, we would see as caused basically, you know, by e. coli.
Right? But look at -- But I would want to argue that it's really what we have done
with the -- with our cows and our animals.
So let me take you through a little story why we get possibly one pathway, we get food poisoning
in one case and not in the other.
OK. The normal diet of a cow is basically somehow grass us is on the left,
but now we bring them to a feedlot where they're getting a lot of grains.
The reason you do this, because they'll bulk up very quickly.
However, the gastrointestinal tract of a cow is not really -- It did, you know --
From an evolutionary perspective did not have to process it.
And it changes the pH in the cow in the fecal mass.
OK? And so, if you look at that -- If you look at the manure
of cattle eating grass, it's about 7.7.3.
While the manure of cattle at feedlots wheat grain, which is very high caloric value is 5.3.
Now why is this important?
OK, all the manure in cows contain e. coli, but there are many different versions of e. coli.
And the one that lets us get sick, really get sick is the e. coli 0157.
That is the e. coli that survives at a very low pH and much more acidic condition.
And notice that if the manure of the cow is that eats grass is 7.3,
there will be a very low number of this e. coli because they wouldn't really survive well
at this higher pH. And then when that cow gets slaughtered, keep that in mind, then probably --
Sometimes the intestinal content contaminates the meat.
Now you eat your hamburger with the contamination in it.
But since it is the e. coli that survives at 7.3 when it --
but you now eat it goes into your stomach, but the stomach is a ph of 2
and all those e. coli essentially all get killed and so you don't get sick.
Now on the other hand, if you're eating meat from the cattle from a feedlot
that has been eating the mainly grain, its manure is 5.3 and then it's in --
And you see a thousand times more e. coli, you know, 0157 which is the one
that is really makes us very sick as I point out.
And when you now -- And they now multiply in the meter or so
and now when you eat them they go through your stomach.
But now, they can survive this pH's acid of and 10% survive that
and then they start multiplying this lethal infection in your intestines.
So that is really the big difference.
So the cure is probably not to try to give antibiotics or anything else.
It would say maybe we should think of the evolutionary backup.
What should cattle be eating to reduce their health?
So we fed the cows hay or grass then the pH would stay up to 7.3 and would reduce the odds
of having this e. coli 0157 be present in the foods.
Because now if the cattle that has the -- is from the feedlot is slaughtered
and the meat is contaminated, now when you eat it, you potentially get sick.
But moreover, the manure of this cattle at 5.3 drifts over fields
where there may be spinach is grown or other foods are grown or a worker carries this
on their boots and goes to those fields or goes for the water.
Then all of a sudden, you're spraying some fields of vegetables with this e. coli 0157
and then you can get sick by eating even the vegetables.
OK, I think that's enough.
OK? And then there's so many other factors,
I can keep going that the foods we eat also change our bacteria.
Remember, the foods we eat affect which colonies of bacteria increase or decrease.
But most of the foods we now eat look the same and are totally different.
Almost all the grain, corn, soy, processed foods and meats contain low level
of Monsanta's produced herbicides, Roundup and other herbicides and pesticides.
And those -- And they in fact suppress some of the healthy human biome bacteria
and allow the more pathological ones to continue possibly as this we may have messed up.
We need to go back and think how we're living in the first place.
And remember, we are an ecological system.
I want to underline this.
We -- And now I move even more to a slight different perspective on this,
to some illnesses that they evolved with parasites, bacteria, and viruses, you know.
And when we eliminate some of those bacteria or parasites, the balance is disrupted.
The pathology can occur.
Some of you have experienced that already when you have taken antibiotics.
Often more women may have experienced that more when they had no problems at all,
then they took antibiotics even maybe for acne.
And then the antibiotic not only killed a whole class of bacteria
in their GI tract but also in the vaginal barrel.
And then they've developed a yeast infection.
Because when you remove certain groups of bacteria, others will take over.
So what is critical is the balance.
And I want to talk about.
And that's all what you'll be reading in the book by Blazer,
which really looks at the human biome.
But I want to go back now for a moment about our parasites, bacteria, and viruses.
We've lift those forever.
We live in symbiosis.
That is really where the bacteria are mutual.
You know, we live together and they're in different categories.
In mutualism, they both benefit.
And many bacteria benefit by living with us, and we benefit from them.
Then there's commensal, which is where one benefits but not the other one doesn't.
There's no harm, you know.
And the final one is basically a parasite where one benefits and the other one is harmed.
And the harm can be very minimally.
If you're intrigued in parasites specifically, a great older book which I really like,
is by Rob Dunn, the Wildlife of Our Bodies.
It's really the epidemic of absence.
It's a way of understanding autoimmune illnesses, you know.
But let me give this as an example.
In the 1930s and '40s, nearly half American children had worms.
And if you go all around the world in third world countries, except in our weird world,
that's Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries,
many people had little worms, you know, sometimes like whip worms and others.
In most cases, they were very benign unless you had too many of them.
There are some bits you never want to get.
OK? And one way that -- In the 1930s, most of people had it just
like your dog has worms at times.
OK? But usually, the way you would avoid getting worms is
that you would not have to walk on human fecal mass.
So what you then did is but you -- If you wore shoes
and used an indoor toilet, you're less likely to get it.
But what is so interesting is that a disease called Crohn's disease did not exist in places
where people generally didn't have people at intestinal worms.
But as the intestinal worms have become very rare, which we have done in the US
and many other places, all of a sudden, we get this -- The much more --
And whole serious illness called Crohn's disease.
Now, worms is always relevant.
Having a few worms in you, many of them that you would --
You intake them, they would multiply in you, you would excrete the eggs
and it would be one cycle till you get reinfected.
Others could be very harmful.
But in many cases of -- They could be more, you know -- They would just do a tiniest harm.
It's only if you're a highly malnutrition
that other issues were going on that it was very harmful.
And remember, I want to underline again, most people had experience of worms
until the 20th century, but by having better hygiene, wearing shoes,
and children are now growing up without ever having had worms.
And the worms can live in our, you know, GI tract or bloodstream.
I'm not recommending it in a bloodstream.
And to survive -- However, to survive within the host, worms must interact with
and change the host immune system.
You see. And some worms can cause disease, but many are not, possibly even harmful
and may even beneficial for our immune system.
That's hard to believe, I know conceptually.
But you could argue if we live for as long as we know with some parasites,
our immune system would then be in a kind of balance
with these parasites or this -- with these worms.
And all of a sudden, if you take these worms away,
then our immune system may not know how to cope.
So it is now believed that the inflammatory bowel diseases,
such as Crohn's disease is really partial --
is partially caused by dysregulation of mucosal immune system, you know.
So, we see this massive increase in Crohn's disease.
If, on the other hand, if during childhood you get exposures to Helmuth, that's worms,
they somehow talk to your immune system or they produce something
which tells the immune system, hey, slow down.
I'm just here as a passenger.
I won't do too much.
Just keep it cool.
I'm making this up.
And then as if -- It stamps down the inflammation.
But without that experience, the immune system has no way to change.
And this is one of the hypotheses by Joel Weinstock
and he has done some very interesting studies
on using Helmuth parasitic worms to help the immune system.
As I pointed out earlier, the disease,
Crohn's disease is a very difficult illness on our GI tract.
It's where our immune system is attacking and causes horrible abdominal pain, skin rash.
It's just truly difficult.
OK? It's just a disaster.
And now estimates 1/3 million people have this, at least in the United States.
And one of the ways -- If you think about it, how come Crohn's disease does not exist
in third world countries because people have worms.
That's a hypothesis, by the way.
But people have been doing episodic experiments on this.
And now in a more systematic study by Joel Weinstock,
he took chronic people with chronic Crohn's disease.
They now gave them worms.
Now, you know, with worm, it's just benign.
It doesn't do any harm.
You know, you put little eggs in it.
You don't even know you're swallowing in.
And what happened in this study of these 29 patients?
Four patients, yuck, worms.
I don't want to do this.
So they got a medication to get rid of the worms.
But in 24 weeks, all but one patient was doing, 21 patients were in remission.
Now that is remarkable.
Their bodies were much healthier than when they had -- now they had parasites.
And so, you know, this is very suggestive.
And it's a similar model you see later, as you'll be reading in the book by Blaser,
about the whole part of our human biome that when they're empty -- when there's absence.
And remember to underline, going back again to the inflammatory GI disorders,
one of the promising remedial acts against irritable bowel disease
and other allergic autoimmune illnesses is helminth therapy.
It can also be probably bacterial therapy or human biome therapy.
Cure of helminth therapy seems to be the most effective therapy
in the irritable bowel disease currently proposed.
OK? And now I'll jump even more that the human biome is active
and a vital participant in our lives.
Remember, more than half of your -- of the DNA in your body are bacteria, are human biome.
And that's critical.
So do look at the book by Blaser.
And we get these exposures to these different -- once in many different ways.
You know, kids play in the dirt.
Eating dirt is very helpful, you know?
You know, our GI tract, these bacteria produce serotonin and many, in fact, interestingly,
many of our antibiotics are derived from material, you know, grown in dirt.
So, play the dirt.
It's much better.
OK? And maybe we shouldn't be using so many antimicrobial soaps, you know?
Possibly, yes.
If you know someone is infectious do wash your hands and after bathroom use wash your hands
but most likely don't use antimicrobial soaps because basically you are developing --
You get rid of the healthy bacteria and maybe leave a place for unhealthy bacteria.
And as I said earlier our human body is made of many cells at least half of those in our bodies
or more our bacterial nonhuman cells.
It's most interesting.
And there's so many factors that affect the gut bacteria which includes the birthing process,
the breastfeeding, exposure dirt, antibiotic exposures, diet and they all are interactive.
And I think on that note I will stop but keep thinking
of the evolutionary background what are you doing now that your great, great,
great grandparents would have no idea about?
And it's likely that those novelties could be harmful or increase an allostatic load
and could be a co-contributor to many of these inflammatory diseases we now have.
>> Living in harmony with our evolutionary past, Part 1.
This is an asynchronous presentation.
As we all know, we are part of parcel of nature, and it always reminds me,
when we look at our genetics and DNA.
Remember, genetically we're, even to bananas, we are 60% genetically similar.
To a cow, about 80%.
To a mouse, 85.
To a cat, 90.
To a chimpanzee, 96% genetically similar.
And all modern humans are 99.9% genetically similar.
So in a way, we are almost controlled, in a way, or modulated by our evolutionary past.
And know any variation of that may make life more challenging.
But anyway, it sometimes then helps to ask the question on a reflection: how did we evolve,
and how did they live for those thousands of generations?
Go back 50,000 years ago.
How did they live?
We were hunters and gatherers.
We ate all variety of food.
We lived in small clans.
Yes, people died in childbirth, people died in accidents,
but some lived until the age 90, just as much.
There may have been a deduction in some of the illnesses, we now so commonly have,
such as our inflammatory illnesses.
You know, and what kind of foods people eat, by which they are allowed themselves
to survive, by which we survived?
How did we move?
How did we take rest?
What constitute our social systems, which is probably a small thing.
All those factors still are seen in our behavior today.
We still react.
We still live, and optimally, when we accept any and live in harmony with our evolutionary past.
So this presentation will focus more on this.
And part of it is that I look around, and I'm also shocked of how many young children
and adults have now autoimmune illnesses, have cognitive disorders, such as ADHD, or you know,
you know, or how many other illnesses is listed here?
And how come many of this those diseases are mainly absent in rural Africa,
and much more common in the industrialized first world.
And we see this kind of epidemic of autoimmune illnesses, of allergies increasing
and increasing all around the world.
And then, how come 1/3rd of American children are now pre-diabetic,
which is really a horrible prediction for the future.
How come there's such an increase in nearsightedness?
How come cancer, Alzheimer's disease, appears to be occurring earlier than ever before?
And how come these diseases are occurring more frequently, and were almost absent
in your grandparents generation or in our non-industrialized people.
These are the interesting questions to me, because they ask not just,
what can we do to treat these disorders, what can we do to treat allergies?
And it's remarkable that we can do some of that.
But what is it that we need to do to things to prevent it, and optimize our health.
So that is really the sense of trying to understand living
in harmony of our evolutionary past.
And statistically, as you can see very well on this slide, that many of the illnesses,
incidence of infectious diseases, either by viruses or by bacteria, have now been reduced.
Look at hepatitis A going down.
TB has been going down.
Mumps and measles.
I know that looks like it's only due to vaccinations,
but many of these were already going down before vaccinations ever occur.
And look how we have this -- this epidemic, in a way, of these more autoimmune like illnesses.
You know, whether it's Crohn's disease, that's the gastrointestinal disorder,
or type one diabetes, asthma, multiple sclerosis.
You know, it's really, it's shocking to me to think of that, you know, of this radical change.
You can also see that it's so interesting, it says, mainly those diseases,
those inflammatory diseases, are those from the Western Hemisphere.
So you look at the graph of [inaudible], look at Western Europe,
and Canada, and the United States.
And you see it's almost totally absent, or much less in the other parts of the world.
You know, and you can even look at a rate of their increase in autism,
you know, from very low to now very high.
It's true that some of this is more powerful diagnostic ways of doing it.
We may recognize it when, in the past, it was not recognized as a disorder,
but it also looks like a real phenomenon.
Okay?
And then you look at many of the allergies we have.
You know, I just think, I keep thinking of that, you know, I used to remember flying.
And when I flew, people would be serving peanuts and nuts,
and the concept of having peanut allergy just wasn't part of my awareness.
And if you ask your grandparents, when they go back and think of their childhood,
and they were in school, how many of them knew people who had allergies?
And many will say, maybe only one in 40.
Now our students, 1/3rd of us will say, gosh, I have some reactivity emerge.
And it may be because we have been changing our world so much.
We are now living away from our evolutionary past.
You know, look at it, for example, about hay fever.
Hay fever was first described in 1819, by John Bostock, and, you know, and it occurred, really,
among people of higher class and living in cities.
Part of it is that if you were a farm child, or living in the farms,
you would be continually exposed to these -- the materials from the hay,
and therefore you would not develop this allergy.
And the similar phenomena seems to be it has occurred for irritable bowel disease
and Crohn's disease, that was first described in 1932 by Burrill Crohs, you know,
in which he described this necrotizing inflammation, scarring of the intestines.
However, this disease clearly is associated with social class, and wealth, and being more
and more removed from any part of nature.
It used to be one, literally, per 10,000.
Now it's even one per 200.
It's just shocking to think about it.
And then, why is it that these have all increased?
I am not saying I know the answers at all, but I'm looking at possible causes.
I don't think they can say it's genetics.
I think genetics, in many cases, we look at that, and they can find a genetic, you know,
link that is clear, but in most cases, genetics, you know, only provides the possibility,
you know, and it's the environment that it pulls the trigger to expose it.
So you may have a genetic predisposition to gain weight, and thereby,
potentially get more type two diabetes.
But if you don't eat the foods that do this, you most likely won't get it.
Okay? So look at over the last 30 years, we have now increased in allergies.
And how come all this may occur?
Well, there are many factors.
I'm only listing a few.
I'm sure many of you can add many more, and they are all probably correct.
It is very difficult to identify that.
Because if you do animal studies, you know, we're not totally, totally the same as animals.
We still getting the same foods, and so it is not totally the same.
There are hints at least.
Well, let's just list a few.
One, it's during pregnancy, the fetus experience either a kind of, I'll call malnutrition,
but it's [inaudible] malnutrition in the Western world,
but it really means probably inappropriate amount of essential nutrients,
or an exposure to endocrine dysregulating chemicals.
These are all the plastics, the these are all the pesticides, herbicides,
and the many things we ingest without knowing,
which in fact act as endocrine in our system's dysregulation.
Then because of finance, in many cases, socioeconomic inequality, during the first year
of life, we don't allow babies to breastfeed and bond,
and possibly to concurrent malnutrition by giving formula.
And by giving formula, you also miss the transmission of immune --
appropriate immune cells, which you have gotten from the breast milk.
And then during early childhood and life, we get exposed to endocrine dysregulating substances.
The plastics which are all exposed to often act as estrogens.
The pesticides, the herbicides, they all may affect our immune system.
You know, then we have this massive exposure to antibiotics.
Antibiotics are great.
I mean, gosh, if you have bacterial infection, you're going to die,
please get the appropriate antibiotic.
However, in so many cases, it's used inappropriately.
And what antibiotics do do is they basically remove or kill whole groups of bacteria,
which are which are essential for our health.
So in fact, we have an impoverished human biome.
And then we have excessive hygiene by which, in many ways, we are no longer exposed
to some viruses or bacteria, which in the past, would have immunized us.
And we see this now coming up in the post-pandemic,
that many people have been separated from each other, and now when we meet again,
all of a sudden, we have an increase in flus.
There's nothing new to this.
This has been observed before in the expeditions to the Antarctica.
When people in the Antarctica would go, a scientist, they would then be living there.
And then the Antarctica winter would occur.
They would now have no new people meeting them.
And first upon -- when they first got it together,
there were a number of flus and illnesses.
Now they were all exposed.
No new bacteria came in.
And for the next six months, or however much time it is, none of them got sick.
People did get sick of other diseases, but not of bacterial or viral infections, basically.
And then the first visitor came, and all
of a sudden people would get their colds or flus again.
So by not being exposed, we put ourselves more at risk.
And then our lifestyle, in a way, has really shifted so much.
You know, we're so much -- we sit so much.
We have so much lack of movement.
We have lights that interfere, in fact, with our health.
Light at night, for example, may -- maybe -- may affect, not only may,
does affect our diurnal rhythms, our daily rhythms, because light,
especially a blue component of light, tends to suppress melatonin.
And it's one of the factors people have hypothesized is why young girls are developing
earlier menarche, meaning the first menstruation occur, because they have lights on at night,
which disturbs their biological rhythms, as well as increased weight and fat.
There are many other factors.
Okay? But overall, you could argue that a number of these kind
of newer illnesses are the result of our lifestyle.
Namely, we have disrespected our evolutionary origins without realizing that we are part
of this intrinsic web, that includes diet, movement, parasites, biological rhythms,
bacteria, you name it, viruses, they're all part of us.
And in many cases, some -- or in many cases, dysfunction can be reversed,
or maybe even prevented, by respecting and returning to our evolutionary origins.
The data is overwhelmed that people, for example, who get up and do significant amount
of movement, tend to have less cardiovascular disease.
Notice that's a dysfunction which can be reversed.
Eating less sugar and simple carbohydrates, which is not part of our evolutionary past,
would mean that they would not develop type two diabetes, or much less likely.
So in a way, it goes right back to the simple rules of health,
which we described earlier by Nassim Taleb.
Anything that was not part of our evolutionary past is probably harmful.
I want to underline it again.
Anything that was novel, and not part of our evolutionary past is probably harmful.
And probably, we don't need evidence of harm to claim that a drug
or any unnatural procedure is dangerous, even if that harm does not yet exist.
Therefore, the easiest way to optimize health is to remove what he would call via negativity,
remove the unnatural, the unfamiliar.
You know, just think of reducing lung cancer,
which is what people have demonstrated very clearly, by stopping smoking, which is pollution
and the irritation of the airways.
All of a sudden, lung cancer is decreased, and a number of other illnesses.
Although right now, we are seeing an increased epidemic of the use of e-cigarettes,
which will again lead to a future epidemic.
Okay, remember, from an evolutionary perspective, let me outline, genes survive
and prosper if their reproductive fitness increases.
And the changes in our external environment continually impacts the natural selection
of genes, named reproductive fitness.
Novel and increased inputs reduces our reproductive fitness,
they could say, act as an allostatic load.
And nature and natural selection favors those mutations, those genes, those behaviors,
that enhance the reproductive fitness with these novel stimuli, therefore by --
thereby reduce the allostatic load.
And you keep in mind that that is especially true for younger people,
and people, you know, in their 20s and 30s.
But once you have given birth, or an older adult, remember,
you're not going to reproduce anymore.
So then those illness that have much -- are much less affected by this evolutionary perspective.
So I would not expect that Alzheimer's is impacted by this,
because there's no natural selection.
We have already reproduced.
Okay? But remember to underline this again.
Natural selections.
Individuals best adapted to their surrounds enjoy increased reproductive success.
They pass on the traits, adaptive versus even maladaptive, or neutral, to their descendants,
who gradually consider a greater proportion of the, of the population.
Remember, we carry this imprint of our biological heritage in us.
So it's useful to say how and what were we doing earlier on that allowed us to be us now?
And now, I want to underline this even more.
But this is very important.
That's habitat selection.
We are wired for whatever habitat we are involved in.
Biologists, who study animals in the wild, describe this as "habitat selection theory".
And the general rule is that animals who are in their natural habitat do much better.
They thrive, both physically, and psychologically, and social behavior compared
to animals that are placed in unnatural habitat, such as a zoo.
They most likely evolved in the forest of Africa without the presence of digital displays.
And so by just sitting in front of digital displays the whole time,
or just sitting the whole time, we probably are reducing our health.
And people have called sitting the -- you know, our -- the new epidemic of smoking, basically.
And what I've said many times before is that genetics only loads the gun, but our behavior
and environment pulls the trigger.
And I like that phrase a lot.
So let me look at it -- give an example how our environment may cause us to develop illness.
This is called, the concept is evolutionary or ecological traps.
Evolutionary/ecological traps occur
when formally adaptive habitat preference become maladaptive, meaning they become harmful,
because the cues the individually preferentially used in selecting habitat may now lead
to lower fitness than other alternatives.
It means that whatever adaptive habits of preference we evolve for,
and now we allow that to happen too much, it may lead to illness.
But let me give a remarkable example of this.
This is the birds in the Pacific called the "albatross".
And when you go to Midway Island, it's just shocking.
In Midway -- on Midway Island, you see these many carcasses of these birds.
You can see the skeletons.
You can see the feather.
And you see the -- what was left over in a gastrointestinal tract.
Look at all the pieces of plastic.
How was that?
How come? And so many are dying.
Well, think of the albatross going over the ocean from Midway there.
That's an island which is 2,000 miles away from any other islands.
And the bird lives, you know, eats the fish.
So it goes -- it is flying over the ocean.
It sees some shimmering in the water.
It looks like a fish.
And those birds, through evolution, who you know, who have adapted,
and could identify this the quickest and the most.
They would then dive, they would eat it, swallow it,
and then possibly regurgitate it to their chicks.
Now, however, that same shimmering in the water now is our small pieces of plastic,
which are coated, also, by the algae, so it has some of the similar outer taste initially.
So now what happens is the birds now take this plastic, and swallow it as food.
Now, do we say these birds are stupid, or are we at fault that we have created this world
where these birds, we made such a radical shift, so these birds were evolved to --
to be able to see that shimmering, they would then go at it, and now, they would die.
And that is a very, you know, it looks really challenging.
And as Professor E.O. Wilson stated, "Organisms, when housed in unfit habitats, undergo social,
psychological and physiological breakdown."
Here, then you see that the habitat radically changed.
The animal still is wired to find that shimmering object
as food, but now it's no longer food.
I want to keep this down because our weak --
our other evolutionary or environmental traps are there for people today.
You know, just if you look at a piece of paper, think of things that may --
you may be doing, which you automatically do, but it basically are triggered
by the environment because you have evolved for that to respond.
Pause -- I'll pause.
I won't pause.
Pause the computer for writing down, and let's check it out.
Let me just think a few.
One, we react to cues of food, automatically.
We see food, we may become hungry.
We smell it, we become hungry.
We -- you know, automatically.
Well, why?
Because we need food for survival.
You know, for millions of years, probably, you know, food was only challenging.
We always had to hunt for food.
Therefore, we have really no mechanisms easily to stop eating.
And this is especially true for sugars.
Almost all foods that that are sweet are usually not poisonous.
Yes, I knew that -- know that the paint that, you know, lead paint, is sweet when you chew it,
the pikas [phonetic] that it's called.
However, that's that rare things.
Most other things in nature that are sweet are -- represent calories.
Therefore, we want to eat them, because we need the calories for survival,
and we don't have an off switch easily.
The same thing will be true for fats.
So we are -- when the cue of food is shown to us, we react to eat, want to eat, or hunger.
And I'll show that in a moment.
Okay? And the similar part is, I think, for reproduction.
You know, we, you know, that's probably the drive for pornography is
such is probably the biggest bandwidth on the Internet, because there are cues, which said,
ah, survival that leads to, maybe because, you know, for reproduction.
And then we have all the cues around us for protection.
We remember our -- we're historically prey.
There were other animals that saw us for food, so we always had to be very careful.
We had to look around and be vigilant.
We still all are.
And now, however, all those cues, which -- of sounds, of changing objects around,
cause us to react all the time, and where -- which captures our attention.
You know, no wonder we tend to get addicted to computer games.
Once we sit, and we watch one -- you know, we start to watch a Netflix series.
Automatically, we keep sitting there, and then the next sequence pops up,
and we don't change because we're captured by it.
And then, for survival, in small groups, for in clans,
we need to know who the power structure was, because as we, you know, mature,
we want to be part of the power structure.
We don't want to be excluded.
We need to know what's going on.
So in some sense, you could say that's our social media addiction.
You know, it's basic -- and it's triggered that way.
And then our bodies really want to rest.
Why expend energy when there's not enough energy you have, or calories?
So anytime you could rest, you would do it.
So that quickly leads to excess sitting and lack of movement.
In the past, we didn't have to go to the gym.
We didn't have to go jogging.
Our whole world included that physicalness, and so now our -- it doesn't.
And then there are many other things that occur.
Light. We want to be active.
We want to be involved.
However, light, artificial lights, which keeps us awake, keeps us active,
also reduces our rest, interferes with melatonin, affects our circadian rhythms,
etc. And then the final piece is, from my perspective, the brain cannot, I would say,
discriminate between actual and visual auditory images.
So when we watch a film in front of us, for our brain, this is really real.
I know you -- we all would say, yes, I know it's a, it is a drama.
It's a play.
It isn't real.
And yet, for our body, this the first time in our evolutionary past, well, really,
since cameras were, you know, since you could do film in late 19th century,
then we could have a picture, which was not real.
In the past, everything we saw was always real.
We could touch.
And so when things go into our eyes, our brains say that's real, and we react this way.
And even though we may want to argue that, I think most of you, if not all,
have had the experience that if you watch a horror movie, or horrible scenes
where horrible things happen in a series.
And then you go outside, all of a sudden,
that little noise behind you triggers a massive autonomic response,
in the past, that would not have done that.
Because we -- our bodies saw what we saw in the film, we act as real.
And I think we have really underestimated that -- how powerful that phenomena is.
And part of the reason we have these -- we are --
we react all the time, is because our commercial industry uses these --
these cues, which are really traps for us to capture our eyeballs.
And that's the whole basis of our social media, of all the many of the [inaudible].
It's really people don't get paid for the content.
They get paid for our attention, hijacking our attention.
And equally, for many industries, it is the profit margin that doesn't ask is it healthy?
It just asks can we -- will you buy the object?
Just think of the, all the cereals, with highlighting the sugar,
all the candies in front of the counters, you know.
And do we then blame children that they have no control?
So in a child, who is wired from an evolutionary perspective for survival to eat more calories,
when it sees the sweets, it wants those.
Do we blame the child, or should we be blaming the corporate culture, the world around us?
And maybe we really need to be careful with this, and say, oops,
you may need to define that, and we may need to set, you know, social constraints
that we don't trigger these dysfunctional behaviors.
And remember, even watching pictures of food, and smelling it, will activate your brain.
You know, it is most interesting.
I think I have a slide in that later.
Okay?
So the solutions really are that the society may need to protect its own population
from the commercial exploitation of these evolutionary, ecological traps.
Now this is a great, difficult discussion,
because we think of the freedom of speech in a very broad sense.
But yes, I think it is a critical issue.
We cannot depend upon self-regulation to reduce our sugar content in our Coke,
in our in our foods around us, or anything else.
And you can already see the effect in human physiology
by having been exposed to these environmental traps.
If you look at the brain wave activity, the quantitative electroencephalograph,
the brain activity, the brains of normal students today look more
like an ADHD student than 20 years ago.
If you look at the spine of young people today, as colleagues of mine in Canada have observed
in the athletics department, that compared to 20 years ago, the spines are --
the upper spine of these people are slightly more cured for,
because our whole world is looking down at our cell phone or looking at our screens.
The pandemic only, you know, accelerated this trend that was already going on.
And then there are so many other qualities, things that we have, increase of pesticides,
of plastics, of BPA, all of that which may lead to pathology.
So we may need to control our -- our legal system, the be exposure to protect ourselves.
It's a challenge.
Okay? But just for fun, let me go back for a moment,
what I said about what you see and smell affects your body.
The brain and visual system, remember, are intimately linked to the acquisition of food.
It is necessary for survival.
And when we get an image of food, and the smell of food,
our physiological, neurological changes respond.
Then it may even be a danger in our growing exposure --
these beautifully presented images of foods, which we do each time I go to Facebook --
to Facebook, or Instagram, or TikTok.
And I make a short video on TikTok about the delicious food I'm eating, or I take a picture
and post it on Facebook or Instagram on the food.
What happens is, it will induce this in the person.
Here, I take the picture, and then I can look at the brain, what happens to the person.
This is their work.
And you can see Wang et al, you can see that if you show the food inside a, you know,
PET [inaudible] imaging, where you can see how the blood flow goes
through the brain, basically, or metabolism.
Then you see, all of a sudden, that there's a 24% increase in the brain metabolism
by just showing the images of foods while lying in the scanner.
Now this is a very complicated study, you know, they only saw the image.
They brought the smell in.
They put it on your tongue as well.
So it's a very -- it's -- it is a complex one.
However, imagine -- imagination and seeing it affects physiology.
And so next time you sent that great meal to your friend, you may be helping them to want
to eat more and increase their obesity.
So really, you know, our diet and exercise do change it.
You've been sitting here for a little while now.
So just for a moment, once again, just get up.
Just get up and move.
I know, it's so hard.
But get up, just wiggle and move.
Just move.
I'm swinging.
I reach up, and then I look up.
I look up again, and I look up again.
I take a big breath, and then, and I let my sit myself down again.
And just note it again, when you have done that, note two things.
One, how hard it was to get up and do it, how much we want to just keep sitting.
And two, that after you did it, how your energy slightly went up.
Okay? So really, remember, what I want to point out is health is living your evolutionary roots,
and whatever increases reproductive fitness predominates.
And then remember our past, that we are wired to be prey.
And finally, we start regenerating when feel safe.
Okay. And if you look at that more, it means you may look at diet.
We'll look at that much later in the semester.
But have a lot of greens, tubers, nuts, organic foods.
And then we can see that the absence of some of the vitamins may lead to significant illnesses.
And I'll talk about this in a moment.
The lack of Omega 3, which we now have massively upped, because we mainly have Omega 6s,
because a massive amount of corn products we eat, you know,
may inhibit embryological development, increase eczema, others.
Well, folic acid, which is part of food of healthy eating, a lot of veggies,
may increase the risk of spinal bifida.
And then we have all the cases where people are no longer doing breastfeeding.
I'll talk about that in a moment.
That increases the risk of Celiac disease and asthma.
And then we have the whole light/night, melatonin suppression by light.
And then our relationship of our bodies, bacteria, parasites.
And I'll talk about that in a moment, like Crohn's disease, etc. Okay,
let me just see in detail a little bit what happens
when you disregard your evolutionary background.
I'll go through the following fairly quickly, living in isolation,
possibly formula versus breastfeeding, or breastfeeding versus formula,
eating processed foods, or really being -- having [inaudible] malnutrition.
Feeding an animal, a carnivore, an herbivore diet.
Feeding an herbivore a carnivore diet.
Feeding rats milk protein, casein that they have never been used to.
Possibly, how come we can get food poisoning, etc., etc. Okay.
So let me first go back to isolation.
It's most interesting.
This was a study at Kaiser, which I really liked, where they looked at the adults
without children, who contract COVID-19, versus those who had children.
And notice that for equivalent ages, this is before we were vaccinated, that adults,
who had now -- who are not around little children,
were 49% were likely to be hospitalized.
And 76% were likely to have Intensive Care Unit admissions, than infected adults of similar ages
and health histories, who had young children at home.
This really is a very impressive data.
It suggests both social isolation is harmful, or it really says, gosh, for all our evolution,
we lived in little clans, that included grandparents, great grandparents, parents,
children, and even babies, and all together.
And what it -- but you could possibly argue is that little babies
and toddlers continually have snotty noses.
They have flus.
And these are -- they're all by different, in most cases, by viruses.
And by being exposed to that continuously or episodically, we're getting a kind
of natural vaccination, and that may then protect us from the COVID virus.
Because 30% of flus are Coronavirus, which is in a similar family as the COVID.
So that's possibly -- and when we've looked at what happened with COVID,
is that the greatest deaths occurred with elderly, who were in in locations
where there were no little kids around, and had comorbidities.
Okay.
But if we -- you know, let me shift to different ones.
Reflect on the statement.
Thinking of the risk and benefits of feeding a baby.
Formula is better because it allows the mother to sleep and regenerate.
It evolves the partner in the, in the baby's care.
Right? Pros and cons on that.
Just stop, and think about it.
Now, I'll argue a few reasons why maybe breastfeeding is normal, natural and healthier.
And this data, I'll talk about, can be very much criticized, because you could argue that,
by definition, people who can breastfeed may be more affluent,
have different socioeconomic factors.
And then you control from those, the risk, these data may slightly disappear.
Okay. But there's no way I can be persuaded, from an evolutionary perspective,
and Pallop's [phonetic] perspective as well, that a formula can be better than breastmilk,
unless there, obviously there's some specific cases of sickness, or others.
Okay? But basically, the data is overwhelming from this perspective, that children, babies,
who are breastfed, have a reduced risk of asthma, obesity, type two diabetes,
ear and respiratory infections, and sudden infant death syndrome.
It also, it lowers the mother's risk of hypertension,
type two diabetes, ovarian and breast cancer.
You know, but it's so sad is that this is mainly the chance of economic disparity, and in the US,
it's our public health policies, or public policies which basically do not allow,
or give women time to breastfeed.
Namely, in some European countries, you can have a year off or two years off, where,
after you give birth, you can be at home and get your salary paid.
And I think we need to do that.
Basically in the US, what we want to do is we want to not have costs at the beginning,
and then we're stuck with these very high costs as we get older.
I would recommend we should do the cost upfront, and support the women,
so their jobs are kept being -- that they have equality
and they can go back to their job afterwards.
But if you look at the data, the data is, I think, is clear.
Most children, most mothers, if they can, in some cases you can't.
There's no harm in that.
You do the best one can do.
But in those cases, you can.
Most mothers want to breastfeed, and try to continue to.
However, it's very difficult if you go to work and then you have
to pump the breast, and do other things.
The system is just against us.
It's too much work.
And notice by, you know, after three months,
only half the baby is very exclusive in breastfeeding.
And by 12 months, only 1/3rd, you know, and most supplemented with formula.
The key is you don't want to supplement with formula.
At best, what you do is you want to breastfeed continuously,
and keep supplementing other foods, enter other foods continually to it,
then you also reduce a massive rate of any allergies to food.
The data is clear that if you do both at the same time,
then there's very low allergy rates to foods.
However, in the United States, this is really an issue
of economic disparity, and to me, it's immoral.
But the quick summaries, and I'll give some data on these for the mother.
It distinctly reduces the breast cancer risk, reduces stress, enhanced bonding for the baby,
hence, its body reduces allergy, reduces obesity, probably enhances immune function.
But look, for the mother in detail, if you study breast cancer for 10 years after pregnancy,
then you see those who, who had 34 more weeks of breastfeeding had a cancer risk drop by 13%.
You know, and there is distinct, and this is probably much higher than that
if that one gives birth in your early 20s.
This is a consensus of early first birth, an increased number
of full-term birth are associated
with significantly long-term reduction of breast cancer risks.
Okay? And I think this is really something we don't talk about.
And for the benefits, for the baby, as a group, and again, like I said,
the data is very difficult, because this is so confusing by socioeconomic inequalities,
babies who are breastfed have higher IQs as adults than formula fed.
You know, the people born in 1920s and 30s, who are breastfed as babies,
achieve significantly upward mobility, and they were in their 60s
and 70s, compared to formula fed babies.
Men and women, who were part of this study in 1937, '39,
had a 50% reduction developing celiac disease.
That seems to be very common.
So as if, by being breastfed, and then slowly adding food to it, you don't --
you can, you can continue to be able to eat glutens,
and not develop celiac disease, compared to breastfed babies.
And formula-fed babies are fatter as children, and skinnier as adults.
I'm going to underline that.
And formula babies are fatter as babies --
I'm sorry, and as children and adults, they're skinnier.
That's an error there.
Okay. But remember, the formula are incomplete for the first couple of months.
It doesn't have all the appropriate fatty acid, which are necessary for neural development.
Although, after a while, the brain will replace it's all -- our body replaces itself,
so that we can all do it, but it still means that for the first four months,
the baby is getting basically inappropriate products, as well as all the immune cells,
and other things it gets from the mother via the breastmilk.
And then, even when mother is very conscientious about pumping milk, and sharing this,
and it's just great that can be done, that the milk is different at different times of day.
So when the mother is going to sleep, the breastmilk has a different quality,
has different substances, which allows the baby to go to sleep more,
and the same thing in the morning.
And now what happens when you mix things up for the baby?
So life is more complex.
And remember, babies, who are fed formula, maybe a slight disadvantage.
I've already looked at that.
Babies born in 1970, and formula fed, are twice likely to have neurological problems
at age nine, as compared to exclusive breastfed for the first three weeks.
Premature babies who are formula fed achieve significant lower IQ store scores at age eight
than premature babies who are breastfed.
Is this due to the breastfed milk?
The absence of body contact?
Is it due because by having the privilege to be able to breastfeed,
it means you're already in a more upper social class?
There are many of those, you know.
And I can keep going on these if you look at formula, maternal milk is better
than formula for pre-term babies.
That data is quite good.
Okay? And then finally, which is the most interesting part when you think
of the evolutionary perspective, it isn't only the baby at this point.
We need to also think of the epigenetics.
And I'm not going to talk about that today, or much.
But remember that the mother, the pregnant mother's lifestyle has an impact
on the fetal -- fetus development.
If the mother is anxious, is stressed, taking drugs, takes alcohol, it affects the development
of the baby, and that is a burden the baby will carry.
However, it gets even more significant that, in fact,
the sense that people say illnesses skip a generation, they're sort of right
in a very funny way, because a pregnant mother, woman,
impacts her baby, but also her future grandchild.
Because the little fetus that's developing, all the fetus's eggs,
that are developing during the time it's a fetus, are impacted by the, by the mother.
And it means that when that -- the child becomes the mother,
its eggs are also have already been shaped by her mother.
So the grandmother, in fact, impacts the mother.
And once you look at that, you can really see how we do --
how our past transcends into the future.
And then let's look at totally about some whole other areas, about foods.
And I cannot say enough about how, I would say how bad, we know anyways, the US food supply is.
"Bad" as the wrong word to use.
How unnutritious [phonetic] in any way it is.
It's remarkable that we get plenty of calories,
and that's very important if you don't have calories.
However, we are now becoming a world of malnutrition, [inaudible] malnutrition.
And we often spend lots of money, time, on foods that are not nutritious.
Here's a single case study, as we're about to look out for fun.
If you drink 10 cokes a day for a month.
Now, it's not a study, it's a case report, but I think it makes perfect sense.
When you drink a can, a 12-ounce can of Coke, you're drinking 39 grams of sugar.
Now, that's a lot.
What happens?
Outcome after one month, increased weight by 23 pounds.
Insulin levels, the person became prediabetic.
Blood pressure's increased.
The body fat increased by 9%.
And this equal -- and later on, a Harvard study has also shown this drinking one can
of soda can lead to a five-pound weight gain in the year.
And also drinking soda daily is so linked to early death and increased likelihood
of having a heart attack or stroke.
It's also linked in women with an increase in osteoporosis, even with athletes.
Okay. So I'm not recommending drinking Cokes by definition.
But just when we don't listen to our evolutionary diet, or background,
and we now do changes, it may backfire on us.
And I'm going to use a few -- I'm going to give three examples of this.
You can think of many more, but I'm trying to think of a way of thinking about this.
Okay. So what I look for is, when you feed carnivores a herbivore diet,
or you feed herbivores a carnivore diet,
and when you feed rats foods they were totally unfamiliar with in their history.
So that's allostatic load.
Okay? This goes back to 1985.
This is in the US zoos.
Cheetahs were not doing well.
They had many deaths.
Only 18 births.
Seven died.
Sixty % of Cheetahs had liver damage.
Only 10% of females produced cubs.
You could argue, well, they -- because they're in a zoo.
It worked out it's not the case, because in the zoos
in South Africa, the cheetahs were doing well.
Remember, the cheetahs are about the fastest animals in the world, you know.
And so they had -- but in South African zoos, they had no problem.
Why? Well, what does, what is the food we're feeding?
Who knows what it totally is, but what the major factors appear to be the diet
of cheetah's health in South African -- in South Africa, the cheetahs ate all carcasses,
whole meat, just like they did for their evolutionary past.
In the US, the cheetahs decide to eat commercial,
prepared cat food because it's much cheaper.
That was horsemeat.
That's okay.
But they include a lot of soybean products, are added for protein.
Soy contains daidzein and genistein, which acts as weak estrogens.
And estrogens can affect liver, and increase the size of uterus, possibly also carcinogenic
in excessive, if you're estrogen-sensitive for breast cancer patients.
What is so interesting, when they got rid of the soy,
and they gave the animals only meat their health improved, and their fertility improved again.
I'm not saying that eating soy causes this at all
in human beings, because we are not carnivores.
We are omnivores.
Although, I have my questions about, you know, non-organic.
So I would not quite recommend that.
But then look at the opposite one.
This is the Mad Cow Disease episode that occurred about 20, 25 years ago.
And this was -- happened mainly in Britain.
And what happened is that the animals developed something called "Mad Cow Disease",
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, essentially degenerating brain disease.
It's a similar disease that is seen in human beings, as Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease.
It's a prion disease.
It's transmitted by eating part of the brain tissue.
And that's also between human beings, because the way, you know, when you go to New Guinea,
where, historically, there was a large episode of this kind of disorder,
is because when the people would fight each other in New Guinea, the tribes,
then the winning tribe would eat the brain of their --
of the person they had beaten in the battle.
And if they were now infected with this prion, they would then get the same disease.
Okay. So we know if you eat the nervous tissue, then that could be an issue.
And most likely people hypothesize that Mad Cow Disease in Britain started
when they changed the way, the way the meat waste products were distributed.
Namely, what that people did, is you would collect meat products,
and that could be from cows, from sheep, from all others, you know.
And then you would process this to make a meat powder, which you would then feed to the cows
to quickly have them gain weight and produce more milk.
Okay? So now, basically, you're giving the cows who are --
whose GI tract is really evolved to eat grass, very low, low quality,
you could say food, low-calorie food.
You now feed it a carnivore diet.
And most likely, in that process, when you now fed them these waste products, all ground up
and processed, that contains the prions from the sheep, which, in sheep, it's called "scrapie",
and then that let it be expressed in cows.
And then when these cows were slaughtered again, you would then take their waste products
as placeholders [phonetic], and you would then feed it to other cows.
And so that's most likely how Mad Cow Diseases start.
And the quickest way is to stop by not doing that anymore.
But it's, you know, I'm not saying that eating meat would be harmful.
But possibly, if you never were exposed to it, then your GI tract may not be able to cope
with the scrapie, or with the prion or other things that may be occurring.
So that's when you step outside of it.
And then let me do a different one.
This is a very interesting one about rats.
It's an old study by Campbell and Campbell, or it's really about,
it's really by Wells, even older, in 1976.
You take rats and you give them a low-dose aflatoxin,
which is a very powerful carcinogenic agent that will induce tumors in cancer
in most people, if a dosage high enough.
But you give them a very low dose.
And what is interesting is you get these normal rats, you get this low dose.
And then you have them eat the normal rat Chow, and then cancer is expressed in all the animals.
Now what you do is you change -- and you change the rat chow to food.
Because basically, what the what is the rat food?
It's a little rat pellets, but it's also has a lot of milk products in it,
milk protein called "casein" in it.
But I think from an evolutionary perspective, rats never drank milk or milk products.
I mean they eat everything, probably not milk, so their body probably did not know how
to process this, then it's an allostatic load.
What is so interesting is when you reduce the consumption of -- in the foods to 5% of casein,
then when you give them this aflatoxin, it would induce cancer.
The cancer does not occur.
So you can see as if the casein increases, or reduces the immune response,
or ability, and allows the cancer to occur.
Again, from my simplistic perspective, is that rats never ate milk or milk products,
so this is a novelty, and then there's a long-term cost.
There's some evidence, in human beings, that eating lower animal --
lower levels of animal protein is associated of lower cancer rate.
So the more veggies and fruits you eat, the -- probably the better it is.
It is not as clear because the Inuit people, in the, in the Arctic, eat mainly,
historically ate mainly animal products, lots of fats
and blubber, and they did not develop cancer.
So that it may not be as clear as it all looks.
But you know, living in harmony, with your evolutionary past,
may give hope for a number of disorders.
I'm going to make a whole long list for a moment.
There's some suggested -- some suggestions, that even epilepsy in children,
and epilepsy is a complex disease, it's not simple, but for some, can be at least controlled
by eating a total ketogenic diet.
This is very hard to do.
And just eating -- and for them, if you put them on a ketogenic diet,
then if they just eat one cupcake, which would then be a refined flour, would trigger seizures.
There are many other factors, but this is at least one, the person could have control over.
Two, I alluded to the cancers, giving a low dose of Aflatoxin..
But this may also suggest that possibly, what the foods we're now eating,
some of are so strange, and not part of our evolutionary background,
that it may do something for us as equally in a similar way.
We just don't know.
And then there's a case of, again, which you will watch, multiple sclerosis, by Terry Wahls,
who has severe multiple sclerosis.
She adopts a hunting and gathering diet, and then their diet reverses her M.S. totally.
You know, there are case examples, but I think they give hints.
And then we need to think of foods.
I mean, we, you know, when look at your tissue, look at your hand for a moment.
Look at -- remember, every cell in your body, everything, your whole body,
is built, created from the foods we ate.
If you eat -- you know, think of building a house.
If you have very good materials, and you have a very good plan,
then the house will be very strong.
The plan could be your genetics and the epigenetics.
But even with a very good map plan, if you have poor materials, the house,
or the building you're making, will not be as good, and would be in danger of collapse.
And think of it this way, and now much of our foods for eating,
and partly because of the greener revolution, which has been great.
It allows all of us to have enough -- plenty of foods.
So this is there is always a balance, but our Mona culture, and our processed foods,
may eliminate many important micronutrients.
You know, we're not aware of what we need.
Two, our pesticides and herbicides.
I'm just thinking of Monsanto's Roundup, we'll do this later when we talk about food,
are carcinogenic and immune suppressant, you know?
And then there's lots of evidence that we -- that our --
the foods we eat may, or the lack of foods we eat, may be a cause of a number of illnesses.
Just think of going back during the ages of the --
-- you know, just think back of the age of sailing, where sailors got scurvy, you know.
But why did they get scurvy?
Scurvy -- because the foods they were eating was either pickled.
They were they were not getting enough vitamin C, so they lost their teeth.
There's a massive death rate of sailors due to scurvy.
It wasn't until the observation was made that when they ate limes, citrus fruit,
which contained vitamin C, there are many foods that have more Vitamin C, they don't say --
they start to eat those, then they could solve that disease.
And then in the late 19th century, you know, with the advent of the result of colonialization
in the -- in much of the world, and the idea that brown rice was sort of, well,
that's for common people, that white rice was best.
But the trouble was, by eating white rice, you get rid of the Vitamin B1, thiamine,
and that led then to a very serious neuro -- neurological disease, Beriberi.
You know, it was because we started not eat the whole foods.
There's so many of these, we can think about.
Okay? Let me do another one here about Spina Bifida.
Spina Bifida, you know, is really that the spine does not close of the little -- of the fetus.
However, it can totally be almost avoided, at least decreased, if the,
if the food contains enough folic acid.
But what do you get folic acid by?
By eating spinach, asparagus, turnips, greens, legumes, many of these.
And organ meats, such as liver and kidney, all can take folate.
You don't need to take a pill.
You have to eat the right foods.
So when I see these, that we need to add these, these substance to the foods,
it's really telling me, we're eating the wrong foods.
Okay? And I already talked about Vitamin C. Or think of Omega 3, or fatty, you know, fish oils.
You know, the data looks very good, that mothers, who are at high risk,
that's genetic for allergic disease, when they got Omega 3 some 21 weeks of gestation to birth,
that there was a significant decrease in eczema, egg allergies, and others.
Notice, it almost -- it went from 12% for the controls, who didn't get it, to 7%, 15 to 9.
Most likely, if the mothers had had from the beginning, at the beginning of pregnancy,
maybe these numbers would leave me much better.
And this a result at age one, so notice the long-lasting cost by having a diet
that is low in Omega 3, at least.
And our diet right now is massively weighted to Omega 6s, which is highly inflammatory,
because so much of the foods we eat are -- include corn oils, etc., which are all Omega 6s.
Okay? But even a changed behavior, if you give Omega 3 supplements for six months.
And that's a double-blind study for 8 to 16 year olds.
You know, overall, what you see is that sort of reduction in --
significantly in behavior problems.
It's just really remarkable.
Okay.
And now I'm going to shift again to diet one more time, going back to the exposure of getting
to food poisoning, which so often occurs in our modern diet, where all of a sudden,
thousands of people die, or hundreds of people die, and some -- or get sick.
And a few die because they ate hamburgers, or even the romaine lettuce.
Here's one of romaine lettuce.
But the question really is, what caused it?
And in most cases, we would see it's caused, basically, you know, by E. coli, right?
But look at -- but I would want to argue that it's really what we have done
with the -- with our cows and our animals.
So let me take you through a little story, why we get --
possibly one pathway, we get food poisoning in one case, and not in the other.
Okay. The normal diet of a cow is basically somehow grass, as is on the left,
but now we bring them to a feedlot where they're getting a lot of grains.
The reason you do this, because they'll bulk up very quickly.
However, the gastrointestinal tract of a cow is not really --
it did, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, it does not to have to process it.
And it changes the pH in the cow, in the in the fecal mass.
Okay. And so if you look at that, at the --
if you look at the manure cattle eating grass, is about 7.3.
Well, the manure of cattle at feedlots, with grain, which is very high caloric value, is 5.3.
Now why is this important?
Okay. All the manure in cows contain E. coli,
but there are many different versions of E. coli.
And they're the one that lets us get sick, really get sick.
is the E. coli 0157.
That is an E. coli that's survives at a very low pH, a much more acidic condition.
And notice, that if the manure of the cow is --
that eats grass is 7.3, there will be a very low number of this E. coli,
because they would really survive well at this higher pH. And then
when that cow gets slaughtered, keep that in mind,
then probably sometimes the intestinal contents contaminates the meat.
Now you eat your hamburger, with the contamination in it.
But since it is the E. coli that survives at 7.3,
when you now eat it, it goes into your stomach.
But the stomach is a pH of two, and those E. coli essentially all get killed.
And so you don't get sick.
Now, on the other hand, if you're eating -- if you're eating meat from the cattle,
from a feedlot, that has been eating the mainly grain, its manure is 5.3.
And then it's in -- and you see a thousand times more E. coli, you know, 0157,
which is the one that is really -- makes us very sick, as I pointed out.
And when you now -- and then I multiply in the meter [phonetic] or so.
And now when you eat them, they go through your stomach, but now they can survive this pH,
this acid [inaudible], and 10% survive that,
and then they start multiplying this lethal infection in their intestines.
So that is really the big difference.
So the cure is probably not to try to give antibiotics or anything else.
We would say maybe we should think of the evolutionary background.
What should cattle be eating to reduce [inaudible]?
So if we fed the cows hay or grass, then the pH would stay up to 7.3,
and we would reduce the odds of having this E. coli 0157, be present in the foods.
Because now, if the cattle that has the --
is from the feedlot is slaughter, the meat is contaminated.
Now, when you eat it, you potentially get sick.
But moreover, the manure of this cattle, at 5.3, drifts over fields
where there may be spinach is grown, or other foods are grown, or a worker carries this
on their boots and goes to those fields, or goes through the water.
Then all of a sudden, you are spraying some fields or vegetables with this E. coli 0157,
and then you can get sick by eating even the vegetables.
Okay, I think that's enough.
Okay? And then there's so many other factors, I can keep going,
that the foods we eat also change our bacteria.
Remember, the foods we eat affect which colonies of bacteria increase or decrease.
But most of the foods, we now eat, look the same, and are totally different.
Almost all the grain, corn, soy, processed foods and meats contain low level
of Monsanto's produced herbicides, Roundup, and other herbicides and pesticides.
And those -- and they, in fact, suppress some of the healthy human biome bacteria,
and allow the more pathological ones to continue.
Possibly, this, we may have messed up, they go back
and think how we're living in the first place.
Remember, we are an ecological system.
I want to underline this.
We -- and now move even more to a slight different perspective on this,
to some illnesses that evolved with parasites, bacteria and viruses, you know.
And when we eliminate some of those bacteria or parasites, the balance is disrupting.
The pathology can occur.
Some of you have experienced that already when you've taken antibiotics.
Often more women may have experienced that more -- when they have no problems at all,
then they took an antibiotics even, even maybe for acne.
And then the antibiotic not only killed a whole class of bacteria in their GI tract,
but also in the vaginal barrel, and then they developed a yeast infection.
Because when you remove certain groups of bacteria, others will take over.
So what is critical is the balance, and I want to talk about.
And that's all that you'll be reading in the book by Blaser,
which really looks at the human biome.
But I want to go back now for a moment about our parasites, bacteria and viruses.
We've lived with those forever.
We live in symbiosis.
That is really where the bacteria are mutual, you know, we live together.
And they're in different categories.
In mutualism, we both benefit, and many bacteria benefit by living
with us, and we benefit from them.
Then there's commensal, which is where one benefits, but not the other one doesn't.
There's no harm, you know.
And the final one is very truly a parasite, where one benefits and the other one is harmed,
and the harm can be very [inaudible].
If you're intrigued in parasites, specifically, a great older book, which I really like is
by Rob Dunn, "The Wildlife of our Bodies".
It's really the epidemic of absence.
It's a way of understanding autoimmune illnesses, you know.
But let me give this as an example.
In the 1930s and 40s, nearly half American children had worms.
And if you go all around the world, in third-world countries,
except in a weird [phonetic] world, that's Western, educated, industrialized, rich,
democratic countries, many people had little worms, you know,
sometimes like whipworms and others.
In most cases, they were very benign, unless you had too many of them.
There are some bits you never want to get.
Okay. And one way that, in the 1930s, most of people had it, just like your dog has worms
at times, okay, but to it -- but usually the way you would avoid getting worms is
that you would not have to walk on human fecal mass.
So what you then did is, but you, if you wore shoes
and used indoor toilet, you're less likely to get it.
But what is so interesting is that a disease called "Crohn disease" did not exist in places
where people -- generally didn't have place where people have intestinal worms.
But as the intestinal worms have become very rare, which we have done in the US,
and many other places, all of a sudden, we get this --
much worse, and the whole serious illness called "Crohn's disease".
Now worms is always relevant.
Having a few worms in you, and many of you -- they would --
you would intake them, and they would multiply you, you would excrete the eggs,
and it would be one cycle till you get reinfected.
Others could be very harmful.
But in many cases, they could be more, you know, they would just do a tiniest harm.
It's only if you're highly malnutritioned,
and other issues were going on, that it was very harmful.
And remember, I want to underline again, most people had experience of worms
until the 20th century, but by having better hygiene, wearing shoes,
and children are now growing up without ever having had worms.
And the worms can live in our, you know, GI tract, or a bloodstream.
I'm not recommending them in a bloodstream.
And to survive, however, to survive within the host, worms must interact with,
and change those immune system, you see.
And some worms can cause disease, but many are not possibly even harmful,
and may even be beneficial for our immune system.
That's hard to believe, I know, conceptually.
But you could argue, if we live for as long as we know, with some parasites,
our immune system would then be in a kind of balance with the,
with these parasites, or with these worms.
And also, if you take these worms away, then our immune system may not know how to cope.
So it is now believed that the inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn's disease,
is really partial -- is partially caused by dysregulation of mucosal immune system.
You know, so we see this massive increase in Crohn's disease.
If, on the other hand, if during childhood, you get exposures to helminths, that's worms,
they somehow talk to your immune system, or they produce something
which tells the immune system, "Hey, slow down.
I'm just here as a passenger.
I won't do too much.
Just keep it cool."
I'm making this up.
And then the as if it -- it dampens down the inflammation.
But without that experience, the immune system has no, has no way to change.
And this is one of the hypothesized Joel Weinstock,
and he has done some very interesting studies on using helminth,
parasitic worms, to help the immune system.
As I pointed out earlier, the disease, Crohn's disease,
is a very difficult illness on our GI tract.
It's where our immune system is attacking,
and when it causes horrible abdominal pain, skin rashes, right?
It's just truly difficult.
Okay? It's just a disaster.
And it now estimates 1/3rd, three million people have this, at least in the United States.
And one of the ways, if you think about it, how come Crohn's disease does not exist
in third world countries, because people have worms?
That's a hypothesis, by the way, but people have been doing episodic experiments on this.
And now in a more systematic study by Joel Weinstock, he took chronic people,
with chronic Crohn's disease, they now gave them worms.
Now, you know, whipworm, it's just benign.
It doesn't do any harm.
You know, you put little eggs in it.
You don't even know you're swallowing them.
And what happened in this study of these 29 patients, four patients, "Oh, yuck, worms.
I don't want to do this."
So they got a medication to get rid of the worms.
But in 24 weeks, all by one patient was doing -- 21 patients were in remission.
Now, that is remarkable.
Their bodies were much healthier than when they had -- now, they had parasites.
And so, you know, this is very suggestive, and it's a similar model you see later,
as you'll be reading in the book by Blaser, about the whole part of our human biome,
that when they're empty, then there's absence.
And remember to underline, going back again to the inflammatory GI disorders,
promising remedial acts against irritable bowel disease,
and other allergic autoimmune illnesses, is helminth therapy.
It can also be probably bacterial therapy, or human biome therapy.
Cure with helminth therapy seems to me that was effective therapy
in the irritable bowel disease currently proposed.
Okay? And now I'll jump even more that the human biome is active
and a vital participant in our lives.
Remember, more than a half of your -- of the DNA in your body are bacteria, our human biome.
And that's critical.
So do look at the book like Blaser.
And we get these exposures to these different ones, in many different ways.
You know, kids play in the dirt.
Eating dirt is very helpful.
You know, you know, our GI tract, these bacteria produce serotonin.
And many, in fact, interestingly, many of our antibiotics are derived
from material, you know, grown in dirt.
So play the dirt.
It's much better.
Okay? And maybe we shouldn't be using so many antimicrobial soaps.
You know, possibly, yes, if you know someone is infectious, do wash your hands.
And after bathroom, use -- wash your hands.
But most likely, don't use antimicrobial soaps, because basically, you are developing --
you get rid of the healthy bacteria, and maybe leave a place for unhealthy bacteria.
And as I said earlier, our human body is made of many cells, at least half of those in our body,
so more are bacterial, non-human cells.
It's most interesting.
And there's so many factors that affect the gut bacteria, which includes the birthing process,
the breastfeeding exposure, dirt, antibiotic exposures, diet.
And they all are interactive.
And I think, on that note, I will stop.
But keep thinking of the evolutionary background.
What are you doing now, that your great, great, great grandparents would have no idea about?
It -- and it's likely that those novelties could be harmful, or increase in allostatic load,
and it could be a co-contributor to many of these inflammatory diseases we have now.