Book Review: The Health Evolution by Dr. Stephen Hussey
Introduction
I am a fan of Dr. Hussey’s approach to health and nutrition. He takes an evolutionary approach and does a great job pointing out in this book that modern humans who have practiced agriculture have only been doing so for the last 10-12000 years. In the grand scheme of things, that’s just a blip. Why this is significant is because we evolved for a different environment, a hunter and gatherer environment, and considering how long it takes to evolve as a species, we have still have not evolved for our environment from 10000 years ago, let alone our current environment which has dramatically changed since the 1870’s via the industrial revolution.
7 Major Takeaways:
**An individual's state of health is a direct results of their environment*** This applies to epigenetics where genes are the gun, but environment is the trigger. Having a genetic predisposition for something does not mean that thing will happen, how you live your life and your environment will have the biggest effect.
Modern healthcare is not equipped to handle the chronic disease epidemic, the modern healthcare system was developed to combat acute events (such as infections and car accidents and ect.) It is currently using the approach for acute events to try to battle chronic disease and it is a total failure.
Being fatigued, having headaches, carrying extra weight, insomnia, ect. These are all things that “healthy” people have that are non diagnosable, therefore these people are considered healthy by modern medicine standards. However, these things should not be a part of your life, and if they are, you are not actually healthy
Vitamin K is essential for bone mineral density, much more so than vitamin D, since vitamin K lets the calcium go into bones as opposed to into the arteries for example
Modern society takes a reductionist approach to human health, thinking that altering one biochemical pathway will treat the illness, the illness itself is caused by a multitude of factors, and therefore treating one pathway will never be successful
Since our environment (everything from food, relationships, light, water, EMF’s and ect.) has a direct impact on our health, the best thing we can do is change our individual environments, if enough people change their individual environments by voting with their dollar, our global environment should change as a whole
Avoiding grains, sugars, and seed oils is imperative, other than that just focusing on high quality local foods is the best thing you can do for your health nutritionally
Conclussion:
Like always, I don’t want to give too much away, but this is a pretty good book and I do recommend reading it. I agree with the evolutionary perspective for health, and traveling back in time by changing our environment is something that can make rapid changes in your health.
Amazon link The Health Evolution by Dr. Stephen Hussey
The Health Evolution by Dr. Stephen Hussey