Harvard Professor: They’re Lying To You About Running, Breathing & Sitting! - Daniel Lieberman

TL;DR

The vast majority of deaths in the Western world are from mismatch diseases—conditions like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes that arise because our modern environment (processed food, sedentary lifestyles, chronic stress) is radically different from the conditions we evolved for.

Key insights

• Natural selection cares only about reproductive success, not health or happiness. We evolved to eat a huge range of foods (ultimate omnivores) and to store fat as an energy reserve for reproduction an
• Most modern diseases are “mismatches”: our bodies are poorly adapted to novel environments like constant comfort, processed foods, prolonged sitting, and chronic psychosocial stress.
• Sitting itself is not the primary problem; the key is that we sit in long, uninterrupted bouts. People who sit a lot at work but also during leisure time have much higher disease risk.