deviation from traditional diet causing disease

Are obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular illnesses and more the result of a "mismatch" between the meals we eat and the foods our bodies are prepared for?

The "mismatch hypothesis" argues that each of our bodies has evolved and adapted to digest the foods that our ancestors ate, and that human bodies will struggle and largely fail to metabolize a radically new set of foods.

"No one diet is universally bad. It's about the mismatch between your evolutionary history and what you're currently eating."

The "mismatch" idea has been around for years, but it's hard to test directly. Most experiments focus on comparing Westerners to members of hunter-gatherer societies, but that inevitably conflates any effects of diet with other genetic or lifestyle differences.

Enter the Turkana, Traditional Turkana still rely on livestock—dromedary camels, zebu cattle, fat-tailed sheep, goats, and donkeys—for subsistence, while Turkana living in cities have switched to diets that are much higher in carbohydrates and processed foods . 

"We realized that we had the opportunity to study the effect of transitioning away from a traditional lifestyle, relying on almost 80% animal byproducts—a diet extremely protein-rich and rich in fats, with very little to no carbohydrates—to a mostly carbohydrate diet," said Julien Ayroles, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and LSI who is the senior researcher on the new paper. "This presented an unprecedented opportunity: genetically homogenous populations whose diets stretch across a lifestyle gradient from relatively 'matched' to extremely 'mismatched' with their recent evolutionary history."

The project grew from there, taking shape as a study of health profiles across 10 biomarkers of Turkana living in cities, villages and rural areas. The researchers found that all 10 were excellent among Turkana still living their traditional, pastoralist lifestyle—and among the Turkana who were leading in rural villages, making and selling charcoal or woven baskets, or raising livestock for trade.

But Turkana who had moved to cities exhibited poor cardio-metabolic health, with much higher levels of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular illness and high blood pressure. The health metrics also showed that the longer Turkana had spent living in the city, the less healthy they tended to be, with life-long city dwellers experiencing the greatest risk of cardiovascular disease.

 

결론: 조상님들이 먹어오던 것을 먹어야 건강하다.. sci.adv에 나왔다.

 

reference

Amanda J. Lea et al, Urbanization and market integration have strong, nonlinear effects on cardiometabolic health in the Turkana, Science Advances  21 Oct 2020: Vol. 6, no. 43, eabb1430. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb1430 , advances.sciencemag.org/lookup … .1126/sciadv.abb1430