The human body is a remarkable biological machine, designed over millions of years of pressures presented by the natural environment – adapting with each new generation and growing into the incredible design that we have inherited in the modern world.
In the past tens of thousands of years, the design of the human body has shown its true remarkability, as our species has been able to not only conquer all of the natural, land-based environments that this planet has to offer, but to move out of these natural environments altogether – to create our own environments – our own industrialized societies – ones where we continuously innovate, create more advanced technologies, and move forward living more comfortable lives, free of the burdens that plagued our ancestors that came before us.
Take a moment to consider how remarkable this is. While most species tend to inhabit distinct niches, the human species is different – we have spread across the entire globe, settling into every land-based niche. This involves everything from the abundant environments in the warmer regions, full of plant and animals, all the way to the arctic regions where plants hardly exist at all, requiring diets based entirely on animal species. This has all been possible because the human body is so good at using so many forms of diets – all the way from almost entirely plant-based to entirely animal-based – using this wide variety of nutrition to support a body capable of maintaining a strong and healthy form for decades.
However, as is clearly demonstrated in the modern world, there is a horrendous problem that has progressively arisen as our species has moved forward along the path of industrialization. This problem is difficult to define, but it may best be explained as the inability of the human body to take care of itself, and instead, the tendency for the body to lose its control over internal regulation, resulting in the many forms of poor health that we know as Modern Disease. This dysregulation problem not only manifests as excess weight accumulation and, in more serious cases, obesity, but it also extends further into systems that we cannot see. For example, the dysregulation of energy in the bloodstream results in hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia (elevated fat a sugar in the bloodstream), resulting in the many forms of chronic, noncommunicable disease that is normally diagnosed in the modern world – diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
Understand that this is a relatively novel problem – a problem that has arisen as humans have moved out of nature and into industrialized environments. The problem is, the human body spent millions of evolving in the natural world – a world in which natural laws governed the design parameters, driving selection of traits better fit for certain environments. As has been clearly demonstrated, the process of removing our species from the natural environments for which we had adapted and entering into artificial environments created by us – this process has its repercussions – repercussions that grow increasingly relevant every day.
Now, before we get too carried away, I want to ensure you that this is not going to be a call-to-action to ditch industrialized society for a life off-the-grid growing our own plants and catching our own food. Nor will it be a call to model our lives after our cavemen ancestors. Rather, this article (and, for that matter, this website) is organized as a lesson on how understanding the natural design of the human body allows us to make decisions in our modern lives that better align with the body’s natural design.
When our choices lead to actions that are in better alignment with the body’s natural design, we can close the gap between the mismatch between our body and the industrial environment, and as a result, allow the body to perform as nature designed. When the body can perform as designed, it is capable of living out a long life filled with vitality, free from the chronic, progressive form of disease that regularly plagues the modern world.
Understanding the Design of the Human Body
A word of caution – when I use the term “design,” I must be very clear, as I do not wish to imply that the body was designed with any particular intent in mind nor has any sort of final or ideal design. Rather, we must understand that the body has been designed over time by natural pressures and that the current result is a particular design. Note that this current design does vary from individual to individual, but overall these individual variances are small as compared to the commonalities between individuals. Therefore, when I use the term “design,” I mean it less as an exact, well-thought-out design, and more as a model or framework that we can use to better understand the natural programming of the human body, including how it tends to operate given certain environmental factors.
To help us understand this design, as a starting point, we can look to the overall design – the commonalities that we as a species share, leaving room to explore our individual variances later on. Thus, to get us started, let us work towards building a model of the general design of the human body, with an understanding that each individual body follows this design in general, with some of their own unique design specs.
To finish up this introduction to the design of the human body and to gain a solid context as to how our species has been designed to function, let us journey back through a brief history our evolution. My hope is that by understanding how this species has evolved over the past few million years, you will have a better understanding of how the human body has been designed to function, allowing you to make choices that may better align with your body’s natural programming.
We will get started by journeying back several million years to when our ancestors were still walking around on four legs. At this point in time on our evolutionary scale, our primate ancestors would have received all their nutrition in the form of plants, with some possible supplementation from insects. We can think of our ancestors at this point as completely plant-based.
Note what would have been required to survive off these foods – To support a primate with enough energy and nutrition from a plant-based diet, this would have required long days filled with foraging to consume enough nutrients to support the body. This means that consuming adequate nutrition would have taken up most of the animal’s day, leaving little time for much else. Plants contain plenty of micronutrients, but to support a fully-functioning body, that body needs to consume large volumes to receive enough energy and essential nutrients (e.g. sufficient protein).
Fast-forward to around a couple million years ago, to a time when a crucial shift happened to our ancestors: the addition of meat to the diet. With the ability to consume this high-density nutrition, our species was able to support bigger bodies and larger brains. Note that during this period, acquiring food still would have taken up much of the day. Yet, by consuming a denser form of nutrition, our ancestors would have had more free time on their hands, along with ample amounts of energy to use during this time.
By living off the land and sea, including the full variety of plants and animals that nature provides, our species was able to spend less time worrying about food and more time on other tasks. With the full support of this omnivorous diet, we were able to accomplish some miraculous tasks. For one, our species was able to cross the entire globe, conquering (almost) every land-based ecosystem this planet offers. Meanwhile, as our nutrient-rich diets supported the expansion of our brains, we were able to develop something no species had before – art, culture, and society.
All of this is not to paint this time as a paradise with abundant food and ample free time free of any and all health issues. Infectious disease or trauma would have been deadly, leading to poor outcomes and low average life expectancies. Yet, for those that escaped any of these unfortunate events (infection or trauma), they would have been free to live out long, healthy lives.
Fast forward some 2 or so million years, with our strong omnivorous diet supporting strong and intelligent bodies, we were able to progress even further, eventually leaving the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle as we shifted out of nature and began building civilization. Notably, this step went hand in hand with a second crucial shift in our diets: a shift to agriculture. The ability to grow and raise our own food gave our species newfound control over the food supply, allowing for stable expansion of the population. This was a necessary step for supporting populations as they grew into civilizations.
Note that agriculture was central to the ability to expand the population, albeit with a cost. This agricultural shift may have resulted in greater availability of energy to support an expanding population, but it also resulted in a restriction in the variety of many foods. Although the food supply may have been more plentiful and more stable, the shift to agriculture was a step away from the diverse array of nutrition that nature provides out in the forest or on the savanna.
At this time our species began dealing with a new phenomenon – that of greater occurrences of a novel type of disease – disease that does not arise due to a specific event (e.g. infection or trauma), but disease that seeps in slowly, sticking around and leading to impairment, and, in most cases, a premature death. Mummified remains dating back thousands of years reveal the first forms of chronic disease. These diseases can be attributed to a number of factors, prominently among them being dietary changes.
Still, the shift to agriculture provided the ability for our population to explode and for civilizations to flourish, and as we know, these primitive civilizations transformed over time, turning into the town, cities, and metropolitan areas covering the globe today.
To accomplish this magnificent feat, our species had to make one last dietary shift – the shift to industrial processing of the food supply.
Feeding 8 billion people is no easy task, and to accomplish this task our population made the choice to shift to a food structure based on crops that are easy to produce in enormous quantities, easy to store for long periods of time, and easy to ship across the globe. This meant that our species shifted to a diet based on grains, which are easy to grow, store, and ship, making them perfect for feeding all corners of the globe. To simplify the storage and shipment task even further, along the way these grains go through a process of which they are broken down into their basic components, only to be recombined with other components to create a novel, yet still edible, structure.
Of course, this grain-based diet is often supplemented with other forms of foods, but these foods tend to follow the same pattern: a food is grown or raised, it is broken down into components, and these components are then combined with non-food-based components to make a new product that we may label as food, yet bears no real resemblance to the food that our species once consumed.
Which brings us to the modern world’s typical diet – a diet based on highly refined foods, most of which come in the form of highly refined grain. As we all are (hopefully)aware, this grain is void of any nutritional value, requiring the addition of external sources of nutrition, either directly to the food or external to it (i.e. as a supplement). Yet, it does the job supporting 8 billion lives, at least to the extent of covering the basics – that is, supplying the energy necessary to maintain the survival of the individual – while leaving the nutrition to supplemental sources.
The Problem with our Story
The shift in our food supply has allowed us to grow as a species, forming higher and higher levels of society. As our ability to support our species has developed, we have become capable of increasingly miraculous feats. Yet, while we can see this as growth and improvement from one perspective, we can also view it from a second perspective and see how these shifts have been taking us in a direction that have not beneficial for the state of the human body itself.
The problem is that, while the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture to industrialization has improved our ability to thrive as a culture, that shift out of nature and into an industrialized society has had disastrous effects on the health of the human body. Today, although we live with the same overall design of the body as all those ancestors that walked before us, we live in a very different world, supported by food that comes in an entirely different form. This, I believe, is the root of Modern Disease.
I want to leave you here with one idea. With this introduction to the design of the human body, we have some context as to how our species has been designed to function.
Throughout our history, our species has made drastic dietary shifts – dietary shifts which corresponded with design shifts. The shift to a fully omnivorous diet went hand-in-hand with the growth of large brains and bodies, which went hand-in-hand with the ability to form basic structures of society. Then, the shift to agriculture allowed these societies to flourish. Finally, the industrialization of food allowed us to move out of nature entirely and into a completely new form of society that we live in today.
The history of our species paints a clear picture that we are designed to be omnivores – to eat a wide variety of plants and animals. By consuming nutrient-dense, real, whole foods, our species was able to thrive. By consuming nutrient-deplete, calorically-dense not-so-foods, the human body is unable to support itself, resulting in its premature dysfunction, what we know as Modern Disease.
However, this history does not present a complete picture regarding how each of our bodies is designed to function. Yes, knowing our evolutionary history gives us great context as to how we have functioned, and therefore, how we may best function; and yet it still leaves much room for more questions and answers to get to the bottom of our actual design.
To understand more about how your own body is designed, you’ll have to stay tuned for my series on the genetic and epigenetic programming of the human body. This second perspective will help bring answers to questions regarding the physical design of the human body, including how the body is created in the form you experience from its genetic code that has been passed down to you.
However, the initial point of this article was to provide context as to the design of the human body so that you have some context before jumping into the Reprogrammed Systems Approach. Given the information contained in this article from an evolutionary perspective, I believe this point has been established enough to continue on with our walk through of the Reprogrammed System Model – a model that you can use as you approach making healthy decisions in your own life.
You can move forward in this direction knowing that we will circle back around to a deeper discussion of the design of the human body later on.