Objective
How can evolutionary medicine be applied to our ailing world? Is the connection between medicine and bacteria drastically overlooked? In the 6th grade, I would like to include the concept of evolutionary medicine as a foundational approach.
Middle school students may begin to wonder about the same medical issues due to family members dealing with some of the above health problems. Students know that more and more students in their classroom are sensitive or allergic to nuts, fruits, and spices. How do young middle school students begin to wrap their minds around all these health issues? The day will come when our middle school students will question why a family member has passed due to diabetes or cancer. In the Navajo Nation, diabetes is very prevalent. Our local health aids or health workers try to remedy this by teaching our community to have a balanced diet at every meal. The factors of allergies to food and processed food are not explained in total to help the people of the Navajo Nation, and most of the processed food in our local grocery stores could be the problem. A nutritionist or healthy-living expert entering our grocery stores in the Navajo Nation would be appalled. Fifty years ago, the food in the local grocery stores was not part of a typical Navajo Family today. Most of all, the food eaten in the past was fresh and not processed like canned food. A time may come when our bodies evolve to adjust to eating processed foods, but currently our bodies are mismatched to the chemicals and additives in food that cause some malfunctions. The same story is true for our pets and domesticated animals in our corrals, which often have less healthy diets than in the past. The dependence on humans to feed them instead of foraging to get their food has caused them to develop health issues too. So, owners use medicines like antibiotics, vaccinations, and other pills or manmade medicine to try and cure the animals. The evolution of how our body is adjusting and how our body is feeding back needs to be balanced.
Evolutionary medicine demonstrates that evolutionary biology is a valuable science that poses new medical, relevant questions and raises hypotheses and possible answers. In our Yale National Initiative seminar lectures, Dr. Paul Turner stated simple questions such as why humans become susceptible to disease. Why is the human body not adjusting fast enough to change the problem of being overweight by burning excessive amounts of food stored in the body? The processed foods in our diets are not being digested differently to avoid the extra fat and high starch food raising blood sugar. Evolutionary medicine would help my students understand that processed food was unavailable in the past, and creates a health problem in the present. Human’s typical consumption long ago was wild plants and wild animals for meat. Mayo Clinic’s Healthy Life Style article indicated that genes are not well adjusted for modern diets that grew out of farming practices. Farming made gathering food a lot easier. Growing domesticated food like grains and legumes made food plentiful. Not only did the people make grain and legumes readily available, but humans also made meat easily available. Humans domesticated wild pigs, cows, and sheep for meat. As the Mayo Clinic said, Dr. Paul Turner reiterated that the change in food gathering happened quickly. Still, the evolution of humans' ability to adjust to modern food has not happened.
As Florence Yaun indicated, evolutionary medicine can also reshape how we view specific human characteristics. Only some humans can digest the sugar lactose in dairy milk as adults. The study of genetics and mutations in human populations, particularly those of European and African descent, explains how lactose tolerance is a response to cattle domestication. Because domesticated cattle can be milked as a food resource, it is an advantage if you are a variant that is capable of digesting lactose throughout life, as opposed to only during childhood. It was interesting to hear Yaun on YouTube: this means that lactose-intolerant people may be the “normal” ones because this was the same in our long ago ancestors before cattle domestication became popular (Yaun, 2024).
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