A Brief History of the Human Diet: How 'The Evolution Gap' is Ruining Your Health

When the hard stuff happens, I want you to get that if life was unbelievably easy, you would give up on it. I did a workshop yesterday, and for those of you. Who's there? Who's there? Excellent. I shared with all those people that the reason that my voice is like this now is that I've decided that to become the best speaker in the whole world, I have to sound like Tony Robbins or something's irritating my throat. And in any event, I want to share something with you guys. And this has been a challenging talk for me to kind of put together. And I've been thinking about it for quite a long time. I'll tell you why it's challenging. It's because, like, a third or half of you have done WildFit, another third or half of the remaining people have been to a WildFit masterclass, and some of you have no idea what WildFit is yet. And so you can imagine putting a talk together. What that means is I have to try and put a talk together that is going to have something interesting and new in it for the people who have spent three months to a year with me in some form, then I've got to do something that will be interesting for the people who have done, like, a really good masterclass with me but don't know a lot more, then I've got to somehow get the basics in there for the people who have never heard of anything that I do. Challenge accepted. Challenge accepted. And so I really thought that what might be powerful is to share with you why it is that WildFit is so successful in the diet space, why it is that our completion rates are so high, and why it is that a year later, like, people have been using, like, you know, sending me notes and going, wildfit anniversary. A year later, I'm still on track. You understand? That's not how the diet industry works. That's not how it works. Statistically, the average person that goes on a diet gains three pounds every time they go on a diet. And often their food habits get worse. The worst we get, every now and again, we get clients that go, oh, Eric, I've kind of fallen off the wildfit bandwagon a little. And I go, well, how far did you fall? And they go, well, I never will eat this again, and I don't eat that, and I don't even want that. And I go, well, how far did you really fall? Right. You know, sure, there can always be room for improvement. So I want to share with you how that came to be. And the reason I want to share it with you is that I think some of the principles are things that you can apply in your life, in your business, in your parenting, in your relationships and everywhere. We're going to start mostly with food. And I'm going to introduce something to you that I've been working on for about two years and that I've never spoken about publicly before. Does that sound good? All right, so I want to introduce you to something that I call the evolution gap. The evolution gap. The evolution gap, as I define it, is the gap between our genetic evolution and our social evolution. So it's the gap between our bodies, our minds, and the way our civilization is evolving around us. And I want to share my theory with you that almost all human suffering, all personal human suffering is because of this gap. Almost all of it, every time we're depressed or sad or upset or angry in a. Let's call it a non productive way, is because of that gap. And I want to share how that gap kind of works. I want you to think that, like, just think about something for a minute. How long we've been on this planet in some form. My grandfather found the oldest, up until recently, the oldest homo sapien skill in the skull, sorry, in the history of the world. 259,000 years old. The pyramids are 3,500 years old. Just consider that. And the truth is, humans probably started something in the realm of 5 million ish years ago. And our social constructs did not change a great deal during that 5 million year period time. It didn't change a great deal. So we evolved with those changes really slowly. And then suddenly we started taking massive turns. We started making massive changes in the way we live. And yet our software and our hardware did not make those turns with us. It cannot turn that fast. Evolution is like turning a massive ship. It takes forever. We are about five years, five million years in the making. Like, it's a massive process. Humans first encountered dairy products about seven or 8,000 years ago. And in that seven or 8,000 years, all we've evolved is that a small minority of people on Earth are not lactose intolerant. That's as far as we've gotten. We've not evolved a nutritional dependency upon it. We've not even evolved the ability to not get sick from it. Some people have evolved the ability to not get immediately sick in their stomach because they continue to produce lactase and they can break down lactose, but they'll still get prostate cancer. We've not evolved to deal with that change we made. And so I want to suggest to you that some of the challenges that you might have in relationships, in parenting, in running your business, and in social interaction stem from these differences. That your instincts don't match your life, that the messages that you're getting from your body, from your software, don't exactly match your life. Does anybody feel like that occasionally? Like, I'll give you an example. As a parent, one of my least favorite things in the world is mom guilt. I hate mom guilt. It's awful what guilt does to mom, you know, my poor wife. We've got the most gorgeous little baby girl. And she is vivacious and intelligent and fun and excellent. And you know what? Every now and again, we need a break from her. Any parents on with that? Right? And so what happens is, and not only do we need a break from her, but she needs a break from us. This idea that two people are supposed to raise one child by themselves is insane. And it's brand new. Even two generations ago, even two generations ago, the grandparents would be there, the uncles and aunts would be there. That's gone. I know some of you still have it, but it's fast leaving Elise and I. No grandparents help my mother, not a baby woman. I'm lucky to be alive. She was a fantastic mom. I'm kidding. She's just not really into babies. My mother in law, not a baby person. My father and my father in law, same thing. They'll be great grandparents in a couple of years, but they're not helpful now. So that leaves us on our own. It was not meant to be there. And now to make it worse, not only do we sometimes expect two people to raise one, but we expect two people to raise two or one person. Sadly, too often a woman on her own to raise 1, 2, 3 children and then judge her when we see her on her own that somehow she's doing something wrong. Go for it. I dare you to try it. One on your own. And you know why it's so difficult? Because you weren't built for that. I have been out, as many of you know, through Wildfit to go and visit with the Hadza Bushmen on a number of times. I'm going again in a couple of weeks. I'm so excited. And it's like, again, just for those who don't know what I'm talking about is proper hunter gatherer, nomadic people. They do not have money, they do not have cell phones, and they have no Google. They know what they know. And I Can tell you that when I've been in their camps, when I've been in their villages, because they don't move. I shouldn't even call it a village because they don't have permanent placement. They don't live in one place. They move with the water, they move with the animals. And when I've been with them, I tell you, you come with me one time. Here's what I dare you to try to do. Figure out whose child that is. Figure it out. I dare you. And then you go, well, what if they're breastfeeding? I'll figure it out. Still. I dare you. Because they share. They don't have the social hangups that we do. They want to breastfeed, they do it. It's just right there. They don't have to have a special booth in the airport where we hide our women in shame. And so many of the instincts that we have are a mismatch with the way we live. Because if you imagine 30,000 years ago, or if you're a bushman today, right, the way we lived most of our genetic history. You've got a baby. Say it's 2ish toddlerish, and it's crawling over here and you're here. Okay, no mom guilt. Make sense. Why should you have mom guilt? The baby's right there. Tiny bit of mom guilt. Because there are hyenas. A little more mom guilt. That's what it's for. It's not for you to feel this horrible, seething, knife, stabbing pain when you're not with your child, Even when your child is doing something socially healthy for itself. Does this make sense? And yet mothers punish themselves with this. I got such a powerful lesson in this. Because our little girl goes to a little Montessori preschool, which she loves. Like in the morning, I have to go, Zoe, bye, bye, Zoe, bye, bye, bye bye. Like, she loves going. And so Elise sits at home and feels guilty about it. And I'm like, why? She goes, well, I should be with her. I go, do you want to be with her right now? Yes. Then go to the school and be with her. Because the school we picked allows that. Do you want to be with her right now? And if she says, well, actually, no, then I'm like, well, why don't you enjoy the time you have now to the maximum? No, no. You know why? Because the more she's enjoying herself, the more guilt she feels. Because there's hyenas out there. Because if you were this far away from your child and you started to get distracted by enjoyment, your child got eaten. And so your software says, don't enjoy yourself when you're away from your child. Do you get this? Okay, so let it go. So let's do it with food. Let's do it with food. All right, I want you to think about food now. Think of our evolution relative to food. Here's what we evolved to deal with. Food was incredibly rare. It was incredibly rare. In anthropological terms, we have this measurement where you go. It's called calories per acre. It's called calories per acre. So what does that mean? It means how many calories are available per acre in your social construction. And so if you're like a totally nomadic, hunter gatherer, bushman, your calories per acre are very minimal. That means that every single day you're going to have to walk 10 or 15 miles minimum to get your calories per acre and all the other non calorie nutrients you need. Does that make sense? Then as you come forward, we say forward in civilization. And you get to say, the Masai people, they are pastoralists, so they keep livestock, which means they now have hundreds of thousands of calories per acre around them all the time. They don't need to do quite as much work, except that the calories they have around them need to graze. So their calories have to move around, so they have to move with them. Then you go to agriculturalists. Well, agriculturalists grow millions of calories per acre, so they get to do nothing. They work very hard to plant and very hard to sow. But in the middle, it's kind of not so much work compared to being a hunter gatherer. And now we're in Southern California where we live in kazillions of. Of calories per acre. No, we live in kazillions of calories per bite. I would like Uber Eats. Let's see, what would I like to get right now? Maximum calorie load, minimum effort. How's that working out for the population? You see, because what we evolved for was the rarity of food. We evolved not to starve. And if I look around America, I see some people doing a fantastic job of not starving. Their body is responding well, packing it in just in case that drought arrives. Right, and so how does that happen? All right, well, we evolved for this incredibly rare food situation. And then one day, I often imagine it like this. A couple of early people, they're in camp one day and they get back to. Matter of fact, they arrive at a camp that they haven't been at for about a Year. And they look, they get situated and then one of the guys looks over here and he's like, hey, look at this. You know that root vegetable that we really like all the time? There's this one gorgeous root vegetable I eat when I'm with them. And it's like halfway between a sweet potato and an onion. And you can eat it raw, but if you put it in the fire, it's amazing. And so the guy goes, yeah, you know those things, the sweet potato, onion things, they're growing here. They never used to grow here. Why do you think they're growing here? I don't know. Do you know? I think that's where we left all the bits and pieces last time. I think that's where we dropped. Do you think we grew them? That's the moment that it changed. That's the moment we changed our relationship with food. We started to be able to control it. We started to deal with agriculture. We started to be able to grow our plants. Now here's one of the problems that happens with that. I would like you guys to vote with me. There are two plants we can grow. One is a gorgeous, luscious, sweet tasting watermelon, explosion of gorgeousness. And the other one is kale. Which one should we grow? Now what I want to suggest is at the moment, at the very moment that they figured out that they could grow their own food, they will have selectively begun breeding for food that they enjoyed the most, not necessarily the foods that they needed the most. Does this make sense? That's where it starts going wrong. That's where it begins. And then technology comes in. Technology comes in and they start being able to do stuff to food that they were never able to do before. See, you can't eat wheat. I dare you, I dare you to just take some wheat and eat it. Try chewing that stuff. Go for it. You don't have the teeth for it. You don't have the digestive system for it. That grain has a hard shell on the outside. It has glutens in it, it has enzyme blockers, it has hormone triggers, all designed to, to fool the digestive system of a bird. Luckily, your teeth can't break in there, so you don't have a problem right up until you figure out how to grind them into powder. You start grinding them in powder. Now you're introducing a new nutritional constituent into your diet and your digestive system doesn't quite know how to do with it. And weirdly, 15, 10, 15,000 years ago, we start seeing bone diseases properly for the first time in the fossil record and dental caries. And we continue to take this left turn away from our evolution. And our bodies can't keep up with that. Our body tries. A few people start becoming gluten tolerant. They're not the lucky ones. A few people start getting lactose tolerant. They are definitely not the lucky ones because they don't get the warning. Being lactose tolerant is like turning off the car alarm. That's what it is. If you drink milk and you eat cheese and it doesn't make you sick, I am sorry. I wish it did, because then you wouldn't do it anymore. Does this make sense? So then this left turn continues because we fast forward and we mass produce food. And then pretty soon we need to start getting involved in regulation, government intervention. That's a good idea, don't you think? And so the government goes out and they hire this incredible food scientist to develop the food pyramid. Go to develop a food pyramid. Apparently, the first food pyramid is officially Swedish. But I know the story of the American food pyramid. They hired this woman and they brought her in and she designed this incredible food pyramid. It was good, but they wanted to get some expert feedback on it. You know, It's a good idea, don't you think? So who should we get? Should we get the United States Dairy Association? Should we get Kellogg? Because we did. And the beef growers and the sugar industry, because we got them. And they took the pyramid and they turned it upside down. And the woman who created the pyramid said this. If you publish this pyramid, you will create an unbelievable epidemic of type 2 diabetes and obesity like you've never seen before. And they still did it. And she was right. Because our bodies are not built for this massive left turn and not our instincts either. See, here's another one. Fruit was always seasonal for our ancestors. It was always seasonal. And you know what's crazy now is that the whole keto movement has come along and vilified sugar. Sugar's evil, man. Look, English is a complicated language. It's complicated because you can use one word to say many different things with different meanings. So, for example, is meat good or bad? I don't know. It depends, doesn't it? There's definitely some bad meat out there. And there's definitely good. I mean, so you can't do it like that, you know? And so we've done the same thing with sugar. We say sugar's bad. Well, no. Our ancestors grew up eating sugar when it was available. I gotta tell you something. When I'm out hunting with the Bushmen. Nothing will distract them more than a beehive. It is amazing. We're, like, totally on the hunt. Hunting along. Oh, honey. Okay, everybody stop hunting. They crack the tree open and they hacking at it, and the bees are swarming everywhere. Those bees don't sting, interestingly enough. They. They're tiny little bees. And you scoop the honey out of the tree. Sorry, vegans, because there's bees in the honey.