Twenty first century Homo sapien Livin’ it up, packin’ weight on my waist again Like a boss with the visceral fat Rockin’ a Rick Ross body instead of a six pack Rippin’ open a crisp snack, drinkin’ a six pack Of high fructose soda, livin’ a mismatch Our ancestors were Africans Most of them died from infectious pathogens Hunting, gathering, violence, accidents Frequent negative energy balances But the habitat that they adapted in Ain’t like 2015, back in the day They hunted meat and ate nuts and seeds Fibrous fruits, tubers and crunchy greens They slurped up whatever they could and saved it As body fat, no surplus wasted Evolutionarily adapted To walk ten clicks per day on average Five or six pounds of sugar per year We ingest a hundred pounds up in here! Livin’ large and sedentary, scoopin’ the Ben and Jerry’s Cemeteries full of people with teeth full of dental caries Yeah, so raise up the libations To the fruits of civilization!
Osteoporosis, OCD, scurvy, diabetes First world problems Hypertension, anxiety, impacted wisdom teeth First world problems Atherosclerosis, myopia, chron’s disease First world problems The non-infectious, chronic, mismatch list is long indeed First world problems
The military industrial complex In your blood stream responds to bomb threats We always had a belly full of intestinal worms That’s our “natural” state where selection’s concerned Now we’re so hygienic, we’re out of tune Attackin’ ourselves, call it “auto immune” We beat back cholera, polio, small pox But chronic diseases are tougher to outfox Fewer loopholes, evolution moves slow As far as food goes, we crave fruit rolls Instead of fruit, overdose on glucose Sucrose, the emperor’s edible new clothes Fabulous opulence, gastroenterologist People buy rich food, ask an economist It took a while to evolve lactose tolerance How long will it take to adapt to McDonald’s then? So many products, simple starches Mismatches everywhere, fallen arches Women’s liberation! Babies, havin’ less of them Extra periods full of cancer-causing estrogen Who knew? Too many, too few Too clean, too comfortable, too new We got a genome livin’ in the stone age But there’s no goin’ back to the old ways
Osteoporosis, OCD, scurvy, diabetes First world problems Hypertension, anxiety, impacted wisdom teeth First world problems Atherosclerosis, myopia, chron’s disease First world problems The non-infectious, chronic, mismatch list is long indeed First world problems
Time for the epilogue What can we do to not hurry death along? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants Jog until you gotta hold up your pants Seek to understand and hence empathize There’s more to it than just diet and exercise Metabolic imprinting is also relevant Pregnancy, neonatal, early child development Environmental-genome interactions Yeah, these bodies are phenotypically plastic And we moderns are livin’ like kings Nice food, nice drink, nice linen, nice things And most of the illnesses that dispatch us Are past-present evolutionary mismatches Now take that perspective and be sensible ‘Cause seventy percent of these deaths are preventable