Evolution Never Saw This Coming

It took thousands of years for humans to evolve to meet the demands of our environment. Today that environment is radically different and changing rapidly. Understanding that can help us make smarter, healthier choices.

Desk jobs. Garage door openers. Cell phones. Zoom meetings instead of face-to-face contact. Life today looks nothing like it did for our grandparents. We've built a less active, less social, less healthy way of life.

"We didn't sit in chairs all day. We did work, we walked, we were outdoors,” says Professor David Bunn, author of Health Basics for a Mismatched World. “Our body is basically our physical body, and it stays healthy when we use it — that doesn't happen so routinely today. You have to work at it."

Our diets have changed, too.

"We now consume about 20 times the amount of sugar we evolved to eat, and it's not healthy for us. It's addictive, and it's probably the primary thing that's leading to insulin resistance, and therefore diabetes."

We do live longer than we did a century ago — pasteurization, inspection, fortification, and food labels have helped. But that longevity comes with more chronic disease and disability. People are still sick and dying from what we eat.

"It's not by accident,” says Bunn. “Sophisticated companies use really high-level science to hook you on their foods... The supermarket is not about selling you nutrition. It's an engineered environment to get you to consume repeatedly."

The most addictive foods — loaded with salt and sugar — are also the most harmful. Bunn argues we're spending trillions on healthcare, but the root of the problem is on our plates. Make good food cheaper and more available, and we'd spend far less treating the diseases bad food causes.

Junk food marketing shares the same DNA as cigarette marketing — sometimes it even shares the same corporations. Philip Morris once owned Kraft and General Foods, makers of Lunchables and Jell-O. RJ Reynolds owned Nabisco, maker of Oreos and Ritz. Internal documents show these companies moved expertise, personnel, and marketing strategy straight from tobacco to food: being attractive to kids, bright packaging, sports sponsorships, targeting low-income communities, tying products to happiness and success, and burying us in coupons.

Both industries used the same regulatory playbook too — funding favorable research, pushing "personal responsibility," fighting ad restrictions, disputing inconvenient science. Tobacco companies eventually spun off their food brands. The tactics didn't change.

And Bunn says it's not just food companies profiting from our poor eating habits.

"It's also in the pharmaceutical industry's interest that we remain chronically ill for many years... because then they have products to sell for many years."

Consider Ozempic and its GLP-1 cousins, now used by roughly one in eight American adults. They are treating the symptoms of a broken food system, rather than fixing the system itself.

There are signs the public is waking up. A number of lawsuits have been filed against the food industry. But the forces protecting the status quo are enormous — and until policymakers get bold and less dependent on corporate cash, this will likely play out just as it did with tobacco.

— Dr. Michael Wilkes with a Second Opinion

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