8 ms·

Achieving Hunter-Gatherer Fitness in the 21st Century: Back to the Future (2010)

67 points by tomaskazemekas 11y ago

raverbashing 11y ago
And why would I want "hunter-gatherer fitness"? Running slowly for long distances is not the epitome of top-health. In fact it reduces body fat (good) and muscle mass. Just take a look at any marathoner, compare it with short-distance runners. This looks like "Paleo diet" for exercise. And similarly to it, some aspects make sense, but others don't.
- djloche 11y ago
  From the first page.. >"These profound and far-reaching changes in genetic expression may explain why cardiovascular fitness and daily energy expenditure on physical activity are among the strongest correlates of longterm health and survival" This assumes you want longterm health and survival.
  - henrikgs 11y ago
    Well yeah.. "of course" would I say. Doesn't "everybody"? You have to assume something when you write a paper or debate. It would be pretty tedious and difficult if you have to debate every basic existential questions every time you write or say something. It seriously dampens the progress.
    - VLM 11y ago
      The purpose of "citation needed" is not to improve the conversation; its the opposite.
  - sanoli 11y ago
    Right... because most medical articles assume patients and doctors are striving to remain sick and die.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    From a post yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
- biot 11y ago
  From the fine article: "Prolonged and excessive aerobic exercise efforts such as marathons, ultra-marathons, full-distance triathlons, and very-long-distance bicycle rides are inconsistent with our genetic heritage. The pattern of exercise for which we are genetically adapted involves a diversity of activities performed intermittently, at moderate intensities and moderate durations. Even in highly trained individuals, high-intensity, multi-hour endurance exercise effort is associated with damage to the myocardial cells and connective tissue." If your idea of hunter-gatherer fitness is running marathons all day, perhaps reading the article would enlighten you otherwise? edit: See Table 2 in particular for a list of hunter-gatherer activities and corresponding modern activities. Note only 1 or 2 out of 13 activities involves running.
  - toyg 11y ago
    My idea of hunter-gatherer fitness is something optimized to give all you have before you're 40. Something optimized for violence (men) and procreation (women). That's stupid. We didn't evolve to live as long as we do today. We didn't evolve to eat what we'll have to eat to sustain a population of trillions. If we strive to be what we evolved for, we'll go backwards. We should strive to be what we want to be, what we can be.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - gaius 11y ago
    But see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - pasquinelli 11y ago
      tracking isn't running a marathon.
  - 11y ago
golergka 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that once we subject current human population to natural selection that was in effect in paleolithe, everyone who survives a year later will be pretty fit.
lucozade 11y ago
My understanding is that, ignoring infant mortality, life expectancy for paleolithic humans was around 50 years. Does it not follow that the genetic fitness argument can only work if you're some way below that age? The article doesn't seem to address this at all. Disclosure: I know next to nothing about this subject so I appreciate my argument may be naive to the point of laughable.
- peter303 11y ago
  There is the curious case of human menopause and grandmothers. Most species procreate young until death. But humans specifically have woman productively live raising grandchildren 10-20 years after losing fertility. Not quite sure when this evolved, but over a hundred thousand years ago. I think one of Goodall's original female chimps is still popping them out every 3-4 years at age 50, if I am not wrong.
  - panglott 11y ago
    IIRC, one of the main differences between human and chimp behavior towards infants is that human parents are willing to allow other humans, even strangers, to handle their infants. Chimps never allow this, because other chimps even within the group will kill the infants.
- 1stop 11y ago
  Well that would be relevant if paleolithic humans died from cardiovascular disease or physical injury caused by exercise. I'm pretty sure that isn't the case, and they died of things that are completely solved now (hence our longer life expectancy).
  - toyg 11y ago
    > I'm pretty sure that isn't the case That's great! Where can we read the detailed data you have? Nothing is "completely solved". Even the plague is still around, we just avoid it by washing ourselves more -- something you wouldn't do if you followed along with the idiotic notion that what we did "before" was better. It wasn't. People likely died of cardiovascular disease same as today, there was just more competition among "things that could kill you" than there is today. This state of things changed because we stopped doing what we were doing "before".
jacquesm 11y ago
I know a girl that is a fervent supporter of the Hunter-Gatherer meme. She believes fully that in paleolithic times everything was better because back then we didn't pollute as much as we do and the people that are currently in power would not be. Everybody was healthy and lived long and carefree lives, flowers braided in long hair, snatching the occasional berry of a brush and once in a half year butchering a rabbit. When I argue with her about this I can't seem to get the point across that in paleolithic times she'd most likely be dead already, and that even though we may have missed the path to some kind of nirvana in our local maximum limited hill climbing algorithm we are very much better off than anybody, even the most healthy and lucky person in the long ago past. Hunter-Gatherer fitness is not a thing to strive for in isolation, the utility of the energy expense is not balanced by anything you really need to have (say, the ability to outrun a predator) in our modern society. That said, there is also no reason to let your body go to pot.
- k__ 11y ago
  You're probably right. But as far as I know, the short average lifespans back in the days had mostly to do with higher child mortality.
  - pinaceae 11y ago
    count the times you took anti-biotics, cut yourself deep enough or needed surgery (from bad teeth to things like an appendectomy) - if anything of those applies, you would very likely have died in the good old days. my eye sight requires contact lenses, without i cannot survive. there is a reason earth only had a minimal population at that time. the current billions of people are only possible through the modern marvels of medicine, agriculture, etc.
    - k__ 11y ago
      hehe, true. I had Meningitis when I was about one year old and a double Pneumonia when I was about twelve. But nothing happened in my adult life.
    - mamon 11y ago
alberto_ol 11y ago
It's a pdf
gadders 11y ago
Obligatory New Yorker Cartoon: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Newsletter-Cave-1-2.jpg http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Newslett...
- kelvin0 11y ago
  That's awesome.
- ckuehne 11y ago
  Those who cannot differentiate between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at adulthood are doomed to draw misleading cartoons.
seivan 11y ago
Food, yeah defiantly (and definitely). The rest? Meh not so much. Just stand up more than sitting and you'll be alright. But I genuinely believe we had less carbohydrates (regardless of complexity). A single slice of bread is too much for the average person. With "normal" food, I only lose weight if I run 5k every day. Otherwise I rise to the point where my kcal requirement increases because of my weight and it "evens" out. My definition of "normal" includes bread, rice, pasta and stuff like potatoes. Even whole grain.
gkya 11y ago
Cookie absent? I have cookies disabled and am redirected to a blank page with the URI: http://secure.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/action/cookieAbsent What does this mean? Was the site expecting to have put a cookie in advance of my visit, given that this page would be the first ever I saw from this site?
euroq 11y ago
Anyone who is glorifying hunter-gatherers needs to look at the hard evidence, of which we actually have. There are plenty of recorded evidence of hunter gatherers societies and there are still many that exist, such as in Papa New Guinea for example. Their lives are full of incredible violence and murders happen all the time. There is a reason that the populations do not exceed a certain capacity. Because they kill each other. (Sometimes it's because there is only so much food in a certain area to support them) There are plenty of sources. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a great book that can explain some of this.
panglott 11y ago
The main problem with this is how you conceptualize "hunter-gather" exercise. Hunter-gatherers comprise ancient societies spread across the planet in a huge range of ecosystems, from the Arctic shore to African deserts. Most of the remaining hunter-gatherers live in very marginal or sensitive environments that are difficult to sustainably convert to agriculture, like deserts or deep rainforest. As with most articles of this type, I fear that the authors are assuming an overgeneralized and not-very-empirically-grounded overview of "the" hunter-gatherer lifestyle and exercise regimen. Their sources to characterize hunter-gather lifestyle include things like The Paleolithic Prescription (and some paywalled journal articles). There were hunter-gatherers where everyone walks thousands of miles over the course of the year, and hunter-gatherers where people stay near their villages, and hunter-gatherers where everyone travels great distances, and hunter-gatherers where the women stay at home, and societies where everybody stays at home and just pulls some fish or brazil nuts out of the river/forest when they're hungry, and hunter-gatherer societies so rich that they had hierarchical proto-states with leisured elites and slavery. And most hunter-gatherer societies disappeared so long ago that we simply have no real information about them, as far as questions like this go. And frankly, looking at their Table 2, while it is true that the actual activities people may do on day-to-day basis may be different (carrying logs vs. carrying groceries) at the same level of activity, the premise that hunter-gatherers had very different exercise patterns may be exaggerated. Compare the discussion here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/200910/how-much-physical-activity-do-we-really-need https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/200910/... "Detailed research on two hunter-gatherer societies (or "foragers") allows us to calculate how active they are. These are the Ache of Paraguay and the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. The !Kung are rather smaller (at about 100 lbs) and have comparatively low activity levels whereas the Ache are bigger (at about 130 lbs) and highly active thanks to their high birth rate. A !Kung male uses about 2,200 (kilo)calories per day in total, almost exactly the same as a male office worker... Out of their respective total daily energy consumption, the !Kung use about 894 calories on physical activity (compared to 607 for office workers) whereas the Ache use a whopping 1772 calories this way. Since the !Kung and Ache are so much lighter than Americans, it is important to take body weight into account. ...If Americans wanted to be as active as the !Kung, they would need to add the equivalent of 3.8 miles of walking to their daily activity. ...An hour-and-a-half of shopping with a cart uses about the same amount of energy as walking 5 miles." Sure, the !Kung are exercising more, but only on the scale of say, walking/cycling instead of driving for short trips. Not on the scale of running daily marathons. It seems like an exaggeration to say: "Humans remain genetically adapted for a very physically active hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Many of the health problems endemic today result from lifestyle that is at odds with this evolutionary milieu." Although to be fair they do insist that the difference does just imply a need for some more low- to moderate-intensity exercise.

And why would I want "hunter-gatherer fitness"? Running slowly for long distances is not the epitome of top-health. In fact it reduces body fat (good) and muscle mass. Just take a look at any marathoner, compare it with short-distance runners. This looks like "Paleo diet" for exercise. And similarly to it, some aspects make sense, but others don't.

djloche 11y ago
From the first page.. >"These profound and far-reaching changes in genetic expression may explain why cardiovascular fitness and daily energy expenditure on physical activity are among the strongest correlates of longterm health and survival" This assumes you want longterm health and survival.
- henrikgs 11y ago
  Well yeah.. "of course" would I say. Doesn't "everybody"? You have to assume something when you write a paper or debate. It would be pretty tedious and difficult if you have to debate every basic existential questions every time you write or say something. It seriously dampens the progress.
  - VLM 11y ago
    The purpose of "citation needed" is not to improve the conversation; its the opposite.
- sanoli 11y ago
  Right... because most medical articles assume patients and doctors are striving to remain sick and die.
- dhimes 11y ago
  From a post yesterday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
biot 11y ago
From the fine article: "Prolonged and excessive aerobic exercise efforts such as marathons, ultra-marathons, full-distance triathlons, and very-long-distance bicycle rides are inconsistent with our genetic heritage. The pattern of exercise for which we are genetically adapted involves a diversity of activities performed intermittently, at moderate intensities and moderate durations. Even in highly trained individuals, high-intensity, multi-hour endurance exercise effort is associated with damage to the myocardial cells and connective tissue." If your idea of hunter-gatherer fitness is running marathons all day, perhaps reading the article would enlighten you otherwise? edit: See Table 2 in particular for a list of hunter-gatherer activities and corresponding modern activities. Note only 1 or 2 out of 13 activities involves running.
- toyg 11y ago
  My idea of hunter-gatherer fitness is something optimized to give all you have before you're 40. Something optimized for violence (men) and procreation (women). That's stupid. We didn't evolve to live as long as we do today. We didn't evolve to eat what we'll have to eat to sustain a population of trillions. If we strive to be what we evolved for, we'll go backwards. We should strive to be what we want to be, what we can be.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- gaius 11y ago
  But see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - pasquinelli 11y ago
    tracking isn't running a marathon.
- 11y ago

golergka 11y ago

I'm pretty sure that once we subject current human population to natural selection that was in effect in paleolithe, everyone who survives a year later will be pretty fit.

lucozade 11y ago

My understanding is that, ignoring infant mortality, life expectancy for paleolithic humans was around 50 years. Does it not follow that the genetic fitness argument can only work if you're some way below that age? The article doesn't seem to address this at all. Disclosure: I know next to nothing about this subject so I appreciate my argument may be naive to the point of laughable.

peter303 11y ago
There is the curious case of human menopause and grandmothers. Most species procreate young until death. But humans specifically have woman productively live raising grandchildren 10-20 years after losing fertility. Not quite sure when this evolved, but over a hundred thousand years ago. I think one of Goodall's original female chimps is still popping them out every 3-4 years at age 50, if I am not wrong.
- panglott 11y ago
  IIRC, one of the main differences between human and chimp behavior towards infants is that human parents are willing to allow other humans, even strangers, to handle their infants. Chimps never allow this, because other chimps even within the group will kill the infants.
1stop 11y ago
Well that would be relevant if paleolithic humans died from cardiovascular disease or physical injury caused by exercise. I'm pretty sure that isn't the case, and they died of things that are completely solved now (hence our longer life expectancy).
- toyg 11y ago
  > I'm pretty sure that isn't the case That's great! Where can we read the detailed data you have? Nothing is "completely solved". Even the plague is still around, we just avoid it by washing ourselves more -- something you wouldn't do if you followed along with the idiotic notion that what we did "before" was better. It wasn't. People likely died of cardiovascular disease same as today, there was just more competition among "things that could kill you" than there is today. This state of things changed because we stopped doing what we were doing "before".

jacquesm 11y ago

I know a girl that is a fervent supporter of the Hunter-Gatherer meme. She believes fully that in paleolithic times everything was better because back then we didn't pollute as much as we do and the people that are currently in power would not be. Everybody was healthy and lived long and carefree lives, flowers braided in long hair, snatching the occasional berry of a brush and once in a half year butchering a rabbit. When I argue with her about this I can't seem to get the point across that in paleolithic times she'd most likely be dead already, and that even though we may have missed the path to some kind of nirvana in our local maximum limited hill climbing algorithm we are very much better off than anybody, even the most healthy and lucky person in the long ago past. Hunter-Gatherer fitness is not a thing to strive for in isolation, the utility of the energy expense is not balanced by anything you really need to have (say, the ability to outrun a predator) in our modern society. That said, there is also no reason to let your body go to pot.

k__ 11y ago
You're probably right. But as far as I know, the short average lifespans back in the days had mostly to do with higher child mortality.
- pinaceae 11y ago
  count the times you took anti-biotics, cut yourself deep enough or needed surgery (from bad teeth to things like an appendectomy) - if anything of those applies, you would very likely have died in the good old days. my eye sight requires contact lenses, without i cannot survive. there is a reason earth only had a minimal population at that time. the current billions of people are only possible through the modern marvels of medicine, agriculture, etc.
  - k__ 11y ago
    hehe, true. I had Meningitis when I was about one year old and a double Pneumonia when I was about twelve. But nothing happened in my adult life.
  - mamon 11y ago

alberto_ol 11y ago

It's a pdf

gadders 11y ago

Obligatory New Yorker Cartoon: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Newsletter-Cave-1-2.jpg http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Newslett...

kelvin0 11y ago
That's awesome.
ckuehne 11y ago
Those who cannot differentiate between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at adulthood are doomed to draw misleading cartoons.

seivan 11y ago

Food, yeah defiantly (and definitely). The rest? Meh not so much. Just stand up more than sitting and you'll be alright. But I genuinely believe we had less carbohydrates (regardless of complexity). A single slice of bread is too much for the average person. With "normal" food, I only lose weight if I run 5k every day. Otherwise I rise to the point where my kcal requirement increases because of my weight and it "evens" out. My definition of "normal" includes bread, rice, pasta and stuff like potatoes. Even whole grain.

gkya 11y ago

Cookie absent? I have cookies disabled and am redirected to a blank page with the URI: http://secure.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/action/cookieAbsent What does this mean? Was the site expecting to have put a cookie in advance of my visit, given that this page would be the first ever I saw from this site?

euroq 11y ago

Anyone who is glorifying hunter-gatherers needs to look at the hard evidence, of which we actually have. There are plenty of recorded evidence of hunter gatherers societies and there are still many that exist, such as in Papa New Guinea for example. Their lives are full of incredible violence and murders happen all the time. There is a reason that the populations do not exceed a certain capacity. Because they kill each other. (Sometimes it's because there is only so much food in a certain area to support them) There are plenty of sources. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a great book that can explain some of this.

panglott 11y ago

The main problem with this is how you conceptualize "hunter-gather" exercise. Hunter-gatherers comprise ancient societies spread across the planet in a huge range of ecosystems, from the Arctic shore to African deserts. Most of the remaining hunter-gatherers live in very marginal or sensitive environments that are difficult to sustainably convert to agriculture, like deserts or deep rainforest. As with most articles of this type, I fear that the authors are assuming an overgeneralized and not-very-empirically-grounded overview of "the" hunter-gatherer lifestyle and exercise regimen. Their sources to characterize hunter-gather lifestyle include things like The Paleolithic Prescription (and some paywalled journal articles). There were hunter-gatherers where everyone walks thousands of miles over the course of the year, and hunter-gatherers where people stay near their villages, and hunter-gatherers where everyone travels great distances, and hunter-gatherers where the women stay at home, and societies where everybody stays at home and just pulls some fish or brazil nuts out of the river/forest when they're hungry, and hunter-gatherer societies so rich that they had hierarchical proto-states with leisured elites and slavery. And most hunter-gatherer societies disappeared so long ago that we simply have no real information about them, as far as questions like this go. And frankly, looking at their Table 2, while it is true that the actual activities people may do on day-to-day basis may be different (carrying logs vs. carrying groceries) at the same level of activity, the premise that hunter-gatherers had very different exercise patterns may be exaggerated. Compare the discussion here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/200910/how-much-physical-activity-do-we-really-need https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/200910/... "Detailed research on two hunter-gatherer societies (or "foragers") allows us to calculate how active they are. These are the Ache of Paraguay and the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. The !Kung are rather smaller (at about 100 lbs) and have comparatively low activity levels whereas the Ache are bigger (at about 130 lbs) and highly active thanks to their high birth rate. A !Kung male uses about 2,200 (kilo)calories per day in total, almost exactly the same as a male office worker... Out of their respective total daily energy consumption, the !Kung use about 894 calories on physical activity (compared to 607 for office workers) whereas the Ache use a whopping 1772 calories this way. Since the !Kung and Ache are so much lighter than Americans, it is important to take body weight into account. ...If Americans wanted to be as active as the !Kung, they would need to add the equivalent of 3.8 miles of walking to their daily activity. ...An hour-and-a-half of shopping with a cart uses about the same amount of energy as walking 5 miles." Sure, the !Kung are exercising more, but only on the scale of say, walking/cycling instead of driving for short trips. Not on the scale of running daily marathons. It seems like an exaggeration to say: "Humans remain genetically adapted for a very physically active hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Many of the health problems endemic today result from lifestyle that is at odds with this evolutionary milieu." Although to be fair they do insist that the difference does just imply a need for some more low- to moderate-intensity exercise.