World's No. 1 Exercise Professor: "Our Comfortable Lives Are Causing Cancer", "The Truth About Running", "Hand Sanitiser Is Making You Sick!

Answer, violence, aggression, obesity, stress. If you want to fix all your complex problems, well, this is controversial, but the vast majority of the evidence suggests that A Harvard professor who uses the information of our evolutionary past to understand the health crisis we are in today and educate people on how to live a long, healthy life. The vast majority of us in the Western world will die from a mismatch disease. Chronic stress, that's what we call a mismatch. Obesity, heart disease. Many cancers are mismatches. And it's because we now live in a world where we're able to have incredible levels of comfort with all this choice. For example, the number one medical complaint is back pain. because I'm sitting in this comfortable chair, I don't have to use any of the back muscles. So we develop weak backs that don't have any endurance. We know that people who sit a lot at work, but then also sit a lot in their leisure time run way more risk of disease. And if you aren't physic, you don't grow as much skeleton. And then when you hit 25 to 30, for the rest of your life you're gonna start losing bone. Oh sh there go.

Even in this highly sanitized world, we're much more likely to develop allergies and various kinds of autoimmune diseases because our immune systems are so unchallenged they'd end up accidentally attacking us. Also, famous studies show that the richer the country, the higher the rate of cancer. Bangladeshi women who move to England, their cancer rates go way up because of diet and physical activity and stress. Things that have changed. changed in our modern world for which we are very poorly adapted. There's a lot to take in. Is there an actionable conclusion that I can do today that is going to reduce my chances of getting one of these mismatched diseases? Yes. I think there's two. The first is Mm-hmm.

What is your Job title. I'm a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. And what does that mean? It means I get to have a lot of fun.

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