Zebras in Rift Valley, Tanzania. G. Diggs
I grew up on a farm in the rolling hills of piedmont Virginia. Among the earliest lessons I learned was that you had to give animals the appropriate food. The black angus cattle were fed one thing, the chickens another, the pigs something else. If animals didn’t get the right type of food, they simply weren’t healthy and didn’t grow and reproduce properly. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, we were feeding each type of animal an evolutionarily appropriate diet. This is also a basic concept fo
One of the basic tenets of the developing fields of Ancestral Health and Evolutionary Medicine is that humans are now living in a “novel” environment —a new environment very different from the one in which we evolved. For the vast majority of the past two million years our ancestors evolved as hunter-gatherers on the African savannah. The modern world is radically different from this ancestral home, the home that shaped our genetics. As a result, there is an evolutionary mismatch between the condition