Recently I read the book "The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease" by Daniel Lieberman. It was a fascinating read. A main idea of the book is that a lot of the current human diseases are mismatch diseases. Our ancestors did not evolve to live in the current environment. Agriculture is just a recent discovery (around 12, 000 years ago) and brought many diseases. After agriculture people started to live in bigger communities which made them prone to infectious diseases. Also agriculture increased the risk of famine and malnutrition because people relied on just a few crops. The industrial revolution worsened living and work conditions for a while. Then in the last one hundred years things started to get better for living and work conditions but surprisingly we fell into the other extreme. Things are too much better. People don’t do much physical work and the modern diet is full of readily available calories. At one point Daniel Lieberman asks the reader to think what would happen if we bring a zebra from Africa to Massachusetts and let it roam around. For sure the zebra would not live long because it is not adapted to the environment in Massachusetts. Human beings are in a similar situation. Our environment is very different than the environment in which we evolved (think hunter gatherers). Our body is not fit to deal with processed food, inactivity, daily stress. There is a trend in science to blame many of the current diseases (e.g diabetes, cardiovascular diseases) on genes. The truth is that the genes have been around for a very long time and only recently the incidence of these diseases exploded. What changed is the environment (more processed food, chemicals and more inactivity). Instead of changing the cause (environment) our society is trying to fix the symptoms (diseases). I am very supportive of basic science and clinical science. We truly need to understand how our body works. But a lot of the current diseases do not require complicated solutions.