What makes for a healthy body? This question is at the core of all health-related endeavors, ranging from nutritional research to clinical medicine to personal training. Much attention is devoted to how different types of stimuli and exposures – nutritional elements, medications, exercise practices, and so forth – presumably affect our well-being and consequently how […]
Evolution and Medicine
It Pays to Be Smooth: Another Reason Why Health Matters (a Lot) in Evolution
One of the most common and pernicious misconceptions about evolution is that health is somewhat irrelevant to Darwinian selection. All of the focus is placed on reproductive success, whereas parameters related to organismal health, vitality, and well-being are largely ignored. Even some experienced researchers operating within the realm of Darwinian/evolutionary medicine operate in this manner, […]
Darwin: A Guardian Angel for Medicine
Charles Robert Darwin has by some proponents of Darwinian or evolutionary medicine been described as a sort of guardian angel for medicine. Historically, this spiritual helper hasn’t regularly come to our rescue, but that’s not because it hasn’t been willing to, but rather because we humans have ignored it and the assistance its willing to […]
Evolutionary Mismatch: The Larger Issue Facing the Inhabitants of the Earth
If you were to go out on the street and ask two dozen people what they believe is the biggest and most pressing issue in the world today, chances are many of the individuals you ask would say that it’s pollution, global warming, warfare, or food insecurity. The obesity epidemic, terrorism, and a widespread infiltration […]
The Evolution of Medicine. Part 2: The Rise of Evolutionary Medicine
(Note: This article is the second and last installment of a 2-part feature on evolution-based medicine. The first part can be found here.) Ever since the time when I first stumbled upon concepts and ideas related to ancestral health and Stone Age diets in my late teens, I’ve been interested in, bordering on obsessed with, […]
The Evolution of Medicine. Part 1: The Theory That Could Change the Game
In the world of medicine as a whole and as it exists today, chaos is the norm, whereas order and cohesion is the exception. There is no foundational, scientifically robust paradigm in place, which helps explain why a number of disparate theories, concepts, and practices abound, many of which haven’t got a solid premise behind […]
Darwinian Medicine in a Nutshell
When I was first introduced to Darwinian medicine, AKA evolutionary medicine, many years back, I was led to believe from reading about the discipline that: 1) It encompasses a number of different concepts and theories pertaining to the origins of disease. 2) It’s mostly of theoretical use. It has little practical/clinical value. Over time, however, […]
The Life-Saving Potential of Darwinian Medicine
Diseases and health problems such as breast cancer, heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and AIDS claim millions of lives every year. Darwinian theories can not only help us understand these types of conditions; they can also help us prevent and treat them. By incorporating Darwinian logic into health policy making and medical care, a number of […]
10 Scientific Papers That Can Transform Your Understanding of Health & Medicine
If you’ve followed this site for some time, you may have noticed that I occasionally put up posts in which I list scientific articles covering topics that have to do with Darwinian medicine. The papers I include in such posts are carefully selected, in the sense that I only include articles that I find particularly […]
Darwinian Nutrition: A (R)evolutionary Paradigm That Can Bring Order and Structure to the Field of Nutrition
The field of nutrition is riddled with disagreement and conflict. Some people claim that we would all be best off we adhered to vegan diet principles; others hold the belief that the grain-heavy diet that’s pushed by governmental health agencies is a truly wholesome diet; and yet others again say that it doesn’t really matter […]