Just Move: Scientist Author Debunks Myths About Exercise And Sleep

Michie

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For much of history, human beings needed to be physically active every day in order to hunt or gather food — or to avoid becoming food themselves. It was an active lifestyle, but one thing it didn't include was any kind of formal exercise.

Daniel Lieberman is a professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. He says that the notion of "getting exercise" — movement just for movement's sake — is a relatively new phenomenon in human history.

"Until recently, when energy was limited and people were physically active, doing physical activity that wasn't necessarily rewarding, just didn't happen," Lieberman says. "When I go to these [remote African tribal] villages, I'm the only person who gets up in the morning and goes for a run. And often they laugh at me. They think I'm just absolutely bizarre. ... Why would anybody do something like that?"

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Just Move: Scientist Author Debunks Myths About Exercise And Sleep
 

Quid est Veritas?

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Just to point out, the idea that the 'natural state' as embodied by hunter-gatherer societies is a medical fallacy. The human organism alters to fit its surroundings, so for instance, people from traditional rice eating cultures gain less weight from rice eating and appear to have some protection from diabetes; or sickle cell trait in malarial parts of Africa; or lactose tolerance in Europeans.

They did the same with blood pressure, measuring lower blood pressures in hunter-gatherers. But people in our society with those pressures have syncopal events; and certain hunter-gatherer cultures they studied, such as those in Panama, have massive salt intakes. If we ate that much salt, our blood pressures would go through the roof, with concomittent strokes and heart attacks.

You can't assume the activity or lack thereof of modern hunter-gatherer or tribal societies are the same as our ancestors. They too, underwent millenia of development from out ancestors.

This is just a version of the Noble Savage myth.
 
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