Healthy Lifestyle: Even a Caveman Can Do It

There’s a certain commercial that’s airing now for a car insurance company where the announcer states: “…it’s so simple, even a cave man can do it.” The next shot shows him apologizing to a couple of cavemen seated at a table in a fancy restaurant. “Were sorry, we didn’t even know you guys were still around.” He says. The caveman, highly offended, tells him that maybe next time he could do a little research.

Well, according to the latest research, the caveman IS still around. At least your body thinks so. It’s not just that we are evolved from hunter-gathers, in reality we still are. We have evolved enormously in a technological and social sense, (well, that last statement may be open to argument), but according to our DNA we haven’t changed much since the Paleolithic era. The typical caveman’s day may have consisted of walking for miles tracking an animal, expending a great deal of energy killing it, dragging the carcass back a long way to the cave, and eating a relatively small portion. After all you have to share it with the members of the tribe, like woman, children, and elders who can’t hunt for themselves. The only saving grace was that you could eat some of the fruits, vegetables, and roots that they had foraged while you were gone.

Sometimes you didn’t get lucky and came home exhausted and empty-handed. Compare that feast or famine scenario to our lifestyles today where we sit at a desk all day and then stop by for a massive amount of calories at the drive-in window on the way home, and then eat our fries in front of the television. Compared to the caveman, we live in a perpetual feast and constant leisure. Take the fight-or-flight syndrome for example; for our ancestors who faced death from predators every day, this mechanism was crucial. When our hearts raced and the adrenaline pumped, it gave us extra energy to get away. Now the same process takes place when your boss yells at you and it’s certainly not healthy.