Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick

Noel T. Boaz

Wiley, Oct 15, 2002 - Health & Fitness - 256 pages

Human illnesses can be understood as damage to those adaptations that we took on at various stages in our evolution from pre-life molecules to modern Homo sapiens. Preventing these illnesses entails avoiding what causes the damage-- which too frequently are the everyday hazards of twenty-first-century life, as the chart below shows:

Level of Evolution

Cause of adaptive failure

resulting disease or problem

Pre-life

Environmental poisons

Certain birth defects

Single cell (bacteria and amoeba-like)

Viral infection

Colds/flu/HIV

Morula (sponge-like)

Cellular stress

Cancer

Chordate

Physical stress

Back pain

Fish

Excess dietary salt

Hypertension/heart disease

Amphibian

Tobacco smoke

Lung cancer/emphysema

Lower primate

Excess dietary sugar

Diabetes mellitus

Higher primate

Vitamin C deficiency

Scurvy

Ape

Excess dietary protein

Gout

Homo sapiens

Reduced dietary variety

Nutritionaldiseases/food allergies

What people are saying

Review: Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick

User Review  - Jodi - Goodreads

I'm a very big supporter of the ideas behind evolutionary medicine, but this book was very poorly done and offered poor quality advice as well. There are far better books on this topic out there ...

Review: Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick

User Review  - Jackie - Goodreads

I was excited to read a book about evolutionary medicine but at times I questioned the source material. It would have helped if the material didn't come across as an opinion so much. While, I did learn a lot, I found the book, "Your Inner Fish" to be far more informative.

About the author

NOEL BOAZ, Ph.D., Biological Anthropologist, is the founder and Director of the International Institute for Human Evolutionary Research and Professor of Anatomy at Ross University School of Medicine. He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, the leading textbook in biological anthropology, and two popular science books, Quarry and Eco Homo.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick
• Author: Noel T. Boaz
• Publisher: Wiley, 2002
• ISBN: 0471212997, 9780471212997
• Length: 256 pages
• Subjects: Health & Fitness / General