Evolutionary Association: Prelude and Overview
The Premise
Our biochemistry is old, but our food is new.
Human metabolism adapted over hundreds of thousands of years to a particular food environment - and that environment changed faster than ever before both 10,000 years ago (with the arrival of agriculture - though for some peoples only a few hundred years ago) and over the last 50 to 150 years. Whenever a novel dietary change and a novel disease of civilisation (or comparable phenomenon) appear in lockstep, and there is a plausible biochemical explanation for it, I call that an evolutionary association.
What this series is - and isn’t
This series is pattern recognition plus mechanism, not proof.
I’m aware of the following points - and that awareness is part of the series:
Association is not causation. A temporal correlation plus a plausible pathway make a hypothesis, not a certainty. I’ll say where an association is among the cleanest in epidemiology (e.g. fructose and fatty liver) and where it is more speculative or on the fringe of the mainstream view.
No medical advice. I describe what I’ve read and how I make sense of it - in the style of a curious nerd, not a doctor’s practice.
Honest about the evidence. The chapters are backed to varying degrees. That should be made transparent, otherwise the weakest claim drags the strongest down with it. In the end, though, they remain associations, not claims of causation.
The main focus is on the changes of the last 50-100 years. The arrival of agriculture gets only a supporting role for now - but who knows, perhaps more chapters and angles will follow in which it plays the lead.
Why?
The spark for this series came from a social-media discussion on the topic of the series’ first article: saturated fats. In that discussion I wanted to dismiss the fear that saturated fats are dangerous with a simple answer - but it turned out that the answer I expected needed far more research.
That further research led me to ask several follow-up questions, which in the end led to this series.
The four recurring suspects
Across all the chapters, essentially four drivers keep recurring - often in combination:
- Industrial seed oils / PUFA - the remodelling of the body’s own fat (adipose tissue, brain, germ cells).
- Refined sugar / isolated fructose - flooding the liver and constant growth signalling.
- Ultra-processing / additives - what is added to food (e.g. emulsifiers) or taken away (fermentation).
- The great deficiency - what is missing due to depleted soils and processing (e.g. magnesium, iodine, fat-soluble vitamins A/D3/K2).
The current plan for the series
The narrative arc runs from fat through sugar and processing to deficiency and the visible remodelling of the body. Directories and chapter numbers follow this reading order:
Block A - The fat question (the remodelling of the body’s own fat)
- The composition of body fat: tissue mirrors diet
- Fertility: the low-fat era and cholesterol, the raw material for hormones
- Mental crises: the same seed oils, this time in the brain
Block B - The sugar flood (flooding and the growth command)
- Non-alcoholic fatty liver: fructose, the “alcohol without the buzz”
- Body height: IGF-1 overdrive: taller, earlier, sicker. Does size matter, or not?
Block C - What we do to food (processing)
- Sourdough: not the grain, but the forgotten fermentation
- Emulsifiers: additives, leaky gut, autoimmunity
Block D - The great deficiency and the remodelling of the body
- Fertiliser / magnesium: depleted soils meet the sugar tab
- Iodine: four halogens, one receptor
- Dental health: caries as a metabolic disease
- Orthodontics: the Weston Price effect, a visible finale
Anyone in the know now sees what’s coming, and - if the curiosity is truly pressing - can go research it themselves. Anyone who feels something is missing has the chance to suggest further chapters.
And anyone who wants to read up on a topic before its chapter is published may well find some of its aspects already covered from a different angle among the other articles already published on this site.
