App INSIDER: The Unforeseen Costs of Civilization And What You Can Do About It.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Welcome to this App Insider interview with Spencer Wells, the author of a really cool book called Pandora's Seed and an expert in genetic testing. If you want to know more about websites like 23andMe and Genographics and this mysterious and intriguing world of digging into your genetics, you'll definitely want to listen to this one. And I think that you can actually get 23andMe.com testing right now for about 99 bucks via Salivary drip. It's a pretty good deal. I did it last year. I'd highly recommend you check it out if you want to see a glimpse into your genetics. But that being said, let's go ahead and jump into today's App Insider interview with Spencer Wells.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and my guest today is Spencer Wells. Spencer is a leading population geneticist and he's the director of a genome project that he'll be telling you a little bit more about in the podcast today. He's not only a scientist as well as a documentary filmmaker, but he's also an author. He wrote a book called Pandora's Seed, which I actually read last month after meeting Spencer at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Boston a couple of months ago. Fascinating book. So fascinating, in fact, that I wanted to get Spencer onto the show to talk about it a little bit and kind of the whole link between modern agriculture, culture, and health, where it's brought us and where it's bringing us. So, Spencer, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Great to be here, Ben.

So, you know, the title of your book kind of sort of hints at what it's about, but can you go into why you called this book Pandora's Seed?

Yeah. Well, so let's just look at the title, Pandora. If you think about the myth of Pandora and actually tell that in the foreword to the book. Pandora was a woman who was given to the gods and she was innately curious. And there was this box that had all of these sorrows and travails for humanity, and she opened it up because she was curious about it, and they all flew out. And that's the reason we have so much trouble in the world, according to the myth. But the one thing that was left in the box was hope. And she clapped down the top and managed to preserve that. So it's basically a story of what happens when you are, in the case of Pandora, curious, but in a broader sense, what happens when you're thinking about the here and now, answering some question, solving some problem that is vital at this point in time, without thinking about the longer term consequences of what you're doing. And the argument that I make in the book is that the development of agriculture was very much in that same vein. I talk in the book and we can get into some of the meat of this in a second, I guess, but I talk about some of the reasons why we would have made that profound shift from the hunter gatherer lifestyle that we had lived for 99% of our evolutionary history to this radically different lifestyle, settling down in permanent villages, eventually cities and towns and growing food. Why would we have done that? And it turns out the likely reason was there was a food crisis going on. This is at the end of the last ice age, lots of shifts in climate and we basically had to figure out a way to produce enough food. And agriculture was the end result of that. And so it solved this immediate problem. But in the long run it's had all these knock on effects, these unintended consequences.

That was one of kind of the interesting things you went into in your book, is how we figured out with agriculture, how to kind of bring crops to us rather than going out and getting those crops and how it kind of affected the way that we eat. Can you explain a little bit about that, about how we went from moving around a lot to kind of bringing agriculture to our backyard?

Yeah, I mean, if you think about the way that hunter gatherers have lived since time immemorial, as they say, and the way some of them still do today. And I've been lucky enough to live and work with hunter gatherer groups, mostly in Ashe Africa over the last few years, including doing research for the book. What you do is you basically rely on the bounty that nature provides, so to speak. And if it's a tough year, then you may have to move on. You typically are leading a nomadic or semi nomadic lifestyle, but you have that freedom to kind of move around and choose places to live that work for you in terms of finding food, finding water, whatever it might be, shelter. Once you tether yourself to fields and permanent settlements, you kind of leave yourself open to the changes that happen, climatic shifts and so on. And you can have a year where the crops don't come in, you've got a drought during the summer, or you've got an early freeze and suddenly there's no food. And this is a serious change in the way that we lived. And it's one that, again, had all these unintended consequences, not just in terms of the vagaries of whether you're going to have a famine one year or not, but it's also the focus on a few species to cultivate. And that is what we see consistently when we look around the world with the development of agriculture. In the case of those of us from Western Eurasia, Europe and the Middle east, it's wheat and it's barley. But in East Asia, it's rice and it's potatoes in the Andes and it's maize or corn. In Mesoamerica and Mexico, you tend to focus on a single crop or a couple of crops to cultivate. The immediate effect of this is that there's a huge reduction in the diversity of your diet. So one of the best studied sites is a place in Syria called Abu Huraira, where they looked at this transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. And they found that the hunter gatherers were living on basically about 150 different species of plants before they went through this transition. Once they became agriculturalists, that diversity drops down to eight, and they're getting most of their calories from two, wheat and barley. And, you know, the immediate effect of this is, well, you're not as healthy, and we can see that in the skeletal material. So, you know, people might think of hunter gatherers as living these nasty, brutish, short lives, but in fact, they lived longer than the agriculturalists did, significantly longer, and they were taller and stronger. They had better bone structure. It wasn't until the 20th century, with the advent of modern medicine, that we actually recovered that lifespan that we lost with the development of agriculture. So, you know, almost immediately, you can see that it's less healthy being a farmer. So the question that I ask in the book is, why did we make that transition in the first place? And again, it comes back to this food crisis that was happening due to the climatic shifts at the end of the last ice age.

So one of the phrases you actually say in your book is that modern diet, which I know is kind of a consequence of some of these changes in eating that you just alluded to. You write that modern diet represents a profound shift in the causes of disease. What exactly do you mean by that?

Well, so a lot of things happened when we settled down into these agricultural communities. Clearly, we go from having some carbs in our diet to having mostly carbs in our diet. And in fact most of the calories consumed around the world today are these relatively simple carbs from grain sources. So that's unusual. And we see the effects right away, not only with the differences in stature and life expectancy and so on, but cavities suddenly become a problem tooth. Cavities. You hardly ever see them in skeletons that predate the Neolithic, the development of agriculture, hardly ever see them in hunter gatherer populations today. But by God, you go into a farming community and everybody's got them. So they start to show up around 6, 7, 8,000 years ago when people are converting to this starch rich, sugar rich diet. And you know, this plays out even into today as we, you know, those of us who follow a paleo or somewhat paleo diet or try to at least believing that it's more indicative or more in keeping rather with the way that our ancestors would have been living. You know, when we look at a lot of the health problems that are afflicting us today, whether it's diabetes or hypertension or just plain old obesity, a lot of that traces back to having this, you know, simple carbohydrate source as your primary source of calories.

And a lot of the simple carbohydrate sources that you're alluding to are things that we got access to much more readily in terms of this advent of agriculture versus the hunter gatherer lifestyle.

Yeah, exactly. So again, we're reducing the diversity of the vegetables in our diet, certainly even the meat sources. And we're basically becoming slaves, if you will, to these grain stands, these fields of grain, which require a huge amount of effort to cultivate and harvest and store. And you have to have a standing army in case somebody in the next village has a famine and they want to come and take all of your grain. There are lots of changes that came into human society as a result of planting those first seeds.

Now, you give some really specific examples in your book that kind of are in that vein of how farming or even animal domestication has kind of had a deleterious or a damaging effect on society in terms of the changes that it caused in society. If we were to jump into the nitty gritty in terms of some specific examp of how that's actually happened, you know, the harm that's occurred from kind of straying from the hunter gatherer approach. Can you give some examples?

Well, you know, I think probably the most obvious one would be all of the, what we call the zoonotic diseases, diseases that originated in the animals that we domesticated and came into the human population relatively recently. And in fact, most of the major plagues in the Bible, some people think might have been descriptions of the first emergence of these diseases, whether it's measles coming out, the cattle virus, rinder pest or whatever it might be, even malaria probably exploded as a result of us settling down in these villages and having open water, standing around very close by, giving the mosquitoes a place to breed. When we look at the evidence of all of these different diseases, whether we look at the genetics of the disease itself or our adaptation to the disease, malaria has been very well studied. In that case, people have actually adapted genetically in the last 10,000 years to these new diseases. And it's as of changing the environment we live in, whether it's the animals we have daily contact with or it's the environment that we've sculpted so that we can grow our rice and patties, for instance.

I'm sure that a lot of people are listening in and thinking, well, you know, obviously there, there may be some advantages to farming, you know, perhaps in terms of the convenience that it's given us with life. But obviously, as you've just outlined, there are some disadvantages too when it comes to propagation of disease. In terms of a solution, are you advocating indicating that we just return back to a hunter gatherer culture and I make a spear and quit buying Wonder Bread? Or I mean, what's the direction that we go? Because this is all really. Obviously you can't just reverse agriculture with one book or with one theory like this. But what do we do?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and I don't have all the answers. I mean, in part what I was doing was writing this book to kind of highlight some of the causes for some of the things that I see happening today. The ultimate causes rather than the immediate causes. You know, Ding Dongs and supersized big gulps might be the proximal cause of obesity, but you know, they came from somewhere and I was trying to figure out where that somewhere was. It would be great, maybe if we could go back to living in center gatherers, we'd have to give up a lot. I mean, I really like my carbon fiber racing bike. It's a joy to ride. And not many hunter gatherers gathers have access to something like that. So, you know, there are a lot of great things about society and modern culture that I think most people listening to this wouldn't ever want to give up. But I think you can ask, you know, what can we do to try and live in a way that's perhaps more in harmony with what our biology is and the way it evolved over again, the vast majority of our history as a species. And, you know, simple things like trying to reduce the simple carbs in your diet. Do you really need that super sized Big Gulp? Do you really need the ice cream, things like that. Trying to increase the diversity of the plant sources in your diet, not just eating bread and things that come from grains, things like that. In terms of the biological side, in terms of the mental side, I talk a little bit about that. The idea that most of us, we are now largely an urban species. More than half of us live in cities and that number is increasing every year. There's this kind of cultural cacophony, if you will, in a city, people are thrown into contact with lots of other people. And in some ways that's new and exciting and fun, but in other ways it kind of sets us on edge because we're not really connecting with those people as human beings. They're kind of background noise. And so there is this kind of background noise in most people's lives today that I think sets us on edge. And all you have to do is look at the most widely prescribed class of drugs in the world. You know, there are antidepressants, anti anxiety medications. It's not the statins, it's not the antihypertensives. Everybody's worried about their hearts and cholesterol levels. No, it's something to make you feel less anxious about your life, less depressed. And I think that's indicative. It's like, you know, there's a sense that a lot of us are kind of on the wrong path and we have to find a way through that. And all I'm saying in the book is I think these hunter gatherer groups and the way they've lived since, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago can give us some clues.

I seem to remember you actually saying something about that in the book, about how modern agriculture has affected us on a societal level in terms of the way that, the ways that we relate to one another. Am I remembering incorrectly or do you actually talk about that in the book a little bit?

Yeah, I do, I do. There's a great little example that I talk about. There's a journalist for the Atlantic magazine, a guy called Toby Lester, who wrote an article back in the late 90s where he was sitting around his office, he was trying to write another story, and he noticed there was this kind of background moaning, this sound that came from all the pieces of machinery sitting in there and the traffic outside. And he wrote, I'm actually reading now. My. My office plays a curious combination of intervals. One joyous and stable do, mi, another, devilish and inimical do FA sharp, and the third mi, FA sharp, emotionally neutral. The overall result is an ambiguous chord that, at its upper end, begs for resolution. And it turns out that this exact chord was recognized by the medieval Catholic Church as something called the diabolus in musica, the devil in music. And it was forbidden for musicians to ever compose with this chord. And so Lester asks, you know, could this ambiguity and tension be one reason I so often feel on edge? Yeah, it's possible. So the whole idea. The idea is we have this built environment that we're living in, and each piece was designed in isolation, but we throw everything together, and these properties emerge that maybe are not so good for us.

So one of the things that you talked about was trying to maybe avoid things that are in our diet that might not replicate what we would have encountered in a hunter gatherer situation, such as not eating Big Gulps or avoiding our intake of starches or processed sugars or things of that nature. And obviously, especially with a podcast like this, you've got people listening in who are triathletes. I know that you yourself are a triathlete, and by the way, for those of you listening in, Spencer just finished the nation's triathlon, right?

Yeah, Olympic distance. My very first tri, in fact, and I loved it, and I'm hooked. And. Yeah, so I guess I can call myself a triathlete now.

Congratulations. Yeah. So anyways, for healthy people like us who are maybe already considering these type of things, what do you think about kind of hacks to almost trick our body into thinking that we're in more of a hunter gatherer environment, like structuring big workouts around big meals, or doing things like structuring our exercise sessions around our primary carbohydrate intake of the day, or doing things that might. Might kind of fool our bodies into thinking that it is really having to work for the food or to hunt down or to engage in a higher amount of physical activity based on that food.

Yeah, great questions. And I'm not an expert on exercise physiology. I'm learning as I go along, and I've read Rob Wolf and Marc Sasson and I've read your stuff on the web and trying to figure out these hacks, as you say, and I think everybody is in that position today. Nobody has the answers right now because it's so new. I mean, we were all sold on the standard American diet until about a decade, a decade and a half ago, most of us. It's only relatively recently that people have started thinking in terms of, well, maybe it's not good to get 60, 70% of your calories from simple carbs and just eat pasta all the time. Maybe it is good to have meat, but maybe it should be grass fed meat because of the omega 3s versus omega 6 ratios rather than grain fed. We're all trying to figure this stuff out now. I think doing a workout early in the morning before you eat so that you go into some mild state of ketosis and then the way you recover and the amount of glucose that you're taking in or carbohydrates after the workout, all this stuff I think is very important, certainly if you want to burn fat and if you want to increase your VO2 max, whatever it might be, in terms of how to do it. I don't have a simple prescription for that. Again, I'm trying to learn from you guys who think about this stuff all the time and go out and experiment on yourselves and observe other people doing these things, things and then come back and report to us. But I think, you know, again, we can take a cue from the hunter gatherers and, you know, one of the things that the hardcore Paleo people seem to do quite regularly and it works for them, is they'll do an occasional fast. And that's something that our ancestors almost certainly would have had to have done. You know, there are times when you're just not going to be able to find your food and you don't eat for 24 or 36 hours. Maybe building in things like that, you know, again, learning from the past, but learning how to do it properly in the present. I think those are the kinds of packs that really kind of show us the way forward.

Yeah, that's a good point. And I think probably the simplest way for people to think about it might just be to avoid caloric density in the absence of physical activity, which seems really dumb and easy. But if you really think about it and try and implement that in your life, it sometimes gets harder than you might imagine, especially with the impending holidays here at the time of this recording. So I know that you're pretty heavily involved in gene research and genetic products projects, and I wouldn't bring those up if you hadn't alluded to that somehow potentially being some kind of a solution in your book. So can you tell me about how genetics might tie into this paradox that we've kind of dug ourselves into when it comes to modern agriculture.

Yeah, sure. So I run a project for National Geographic called the Genographic Project. You can Google it or just go to genographic.com if you want some more background. And what we do basically is use genetics as a tool to study human relationships around the world, how people are related, how we model migrated around the planet over the last 60, 70,000 years, and what it means to be European vs East Asian vs Indian vs Sub Saharan African at the genetic level. And so we study what we call genetic markers, and these have been inherited down through the generations. They all originated as mutations. And we're all carrying this standing level of genetic variation that kind of defines who we are and which groups we're most closely related to. And so that's what we're trying to figure out on the scientific side. But of course, a lot of these genetic variants have functional consequences. And I think those are the mutations that most people would think about, mutations that cause cancer, that originate in a somatic tissue, so they're not something you inherit, but you smoke too much and your lungs have a mutation and boom, you have lung cancer, that kind of thing. And then there are the inherited ones, so bad diseases that people are very concerned. Cystic fibrosis, single mutation accounts for 70% of the cases in Europe. And it's a very bad disease if you have two copies of it. And these are things that we want to try and avoid giving our kids because obviously they're doomed to a very short and unhappy life. It's possible now using relatively straightforward genetic technology that hasn't been widely applied yet. But I suggest in the book that it probably will become much more widely applied in the future to, as you're going through, say, an IVF procedure, do a quick scan of the entire genome of each of these potential embryos that you're going to implant, and you can choose the genes that you want to have, have in your child. And in the case of something which is potentially lethal and very nasty, like cystic fibrosis, I think most people wouldn't have an issue with saying, well, you know, it's a good idea to try and avoid that scenario and simply not implant those. The question I raised, though, is, okay, we can test for that stuff, but we also know genetic variation contributes to hair color, eye color, iq, athletic ability, all of these other traits that aren't life threats by any means, but they're life changing, perhaps. And when do we cross that line and move into this Gattaca kind of scenario, that movie that came out about a decade ago, where people were doing exactly this, choosing the characteristics that their kids were going to have. When does it become dangerous? When does it become kind of immoral to do that? And again, I don't have all the answers as a scientist. What I'm doing in the book is explaining that the future is actually happening now. And I talked about a family that had done this so that they could have a child that was a perfect tissue match to another child that was very, very sick. And it all worked out in the end and it was a great story. But again, there are these other cases where actually there's a company out in California where you can go in and get this done. You can actually choose whether your child is likely to be blonde or blue eyed or whatever the characteristics are that you want. And I think people just inherently kind of pull back from that and say, whoa, that's a little scarier. Where again, it gets into an even grayer area, is okay. So we've got all of these diseases that afflict us today, and most of the major disease problems in the developed world at least are avoidable. So don't smoke, you're not going to get lung cancer, in all likelihood, don't spend too much time in the sun, you're not going to get skin cancer, don't drink too much, you reduce your chances of getting breast cancer. Eat well, try and stay in shape, you're going to reduce your chances of hypertension and diabetes and so on. But there are also genetic components to all of those. Some people are more likely to become diabetic even if they exercise, even if they keep their weight normal. And, and when are we going to start trying to select against those characteristics? You know, it's possible that it could be happening now or it could be happening in the near future. The number of people going through IVF to conceive, you know, is skyrocketing as women delay childbirth until much later in life. And it's more difficult to get pregnant by normal means. So you go in for an IVF procedure. Given how easy it is to do the genetic testing, what characteristics are we going to be selecting for in the future and where might that lead us? If we are essentially serving as the hand of selection for our offspring, we're actually serving as the hand of natural selection for everyone that comes after them. And are the characteristics that we want in our child going to be adaptive in 1,000 years or 10,000 years. So that's the responsibility we have. And again, it goes back to the whole story of Pandora, these unintended consequences when we set these things in motion, if we choose genes. Because right now, everybody in junior high school is drinking 27 sugar drinks a day. But that changes in the future. Diabetes, perhaps, is less of an issue. Was it important to choose that particular genetic variant that gives you the ability to digest all this sucrose much more efficiently than anybody else? I don't know, but it is a possibility. We do have the technology, and I guess it's a warning that we as geneticists are able to do these incredible things today, and it's making it out there into the clinic. But we as a society need to be really careful about how we choose to implement those tools.

Now, there's also, I know, a lot of these genetic testing services that are kind of popping up where you can swab the inside of your cheek with like, a Q tip and mail it off to a lab.

And in fact, we do that with our project just looking at ancestry again.

And as far as those go, you can look at ancestry, but there are some services that also will tell you the diet you should be eating, or maybe the supplements that you should be taking. Is there much credence when it comes to that kind of stuff? Or do you think that more of this or more of the importance comes from looking at your family history and your ancestry?

I think right now we can say a lot more with scientific certainty about your ancestry than anything else. There are certain relatively rare genetic mutations that have a high impact or a large impact on your health that we can test for fairly easily. Cystic fibrosis is the one that I gave before the example I gave, but there are loads of them out there. Where it gets more tricky is when we get into traits and complex diseases or complex characteristics, whether it's your likelihood of developing diabetes or whether it's the diet you should be eating. In quotes. We just don't know enough about the genetic. There is a problem in human genetics which most human geneticists won't discuss with the members of the general public, but we all discuss it behind closed doors at conferences, because we're trying to figure it out still. It's something called the missing heritability problem. So most interesting characteristics in humans are about half environmental and about half genetic in terms of what controls them. So, you know, certain genetic characteristics, but it's how you deal with those characteristics that determines what the ultimate outcome is. And, you know, we know this from doing things like twin studies and so on, we can show that, yes, There is roughly 50% of this trait that is genetically determined. Problem is, when we go out and we try and find those genetic variants, we can only find in most cases, around 10% of them that are contributing to that 50%. So 90% of the genetic variation stuff that we know is there, we just can't find it. Where is it? Lots of theories for what's going on there, but it's a sign that the field hasn't matured to the point where you should be believing all of the stuff that it's possible to buy on the Internet. So we're still figuring it out. It could be a good decade, two decades before we figure out what's going on there. It could be that there are a lot of extremely rare genetic variants that are pretty much unique to a family or maybe a village group of related people, but very, very low frequency. So we're just not seeing it. When we scan through the population and look for the common variants, we found most of those far. It could be something about the way the genetic variation is interacting. So you've got six or seven or eight genetic variants that interact in a very complex way. Long story short, the science is getting there. We're trying to figure it out. I don't think it's quite ready for prime time yet.

Gotcha. So you wouldn't personally go out and do like a cheek swab to figure out what kind of diet supplements you should take?

I wouldn't right now. Again, simply because we don't know the genes that are involved in most of these traits. And in some cases we might, but I think for a lot of the really interesting stuff, we just. We don't know yet.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. Well, I know that this whole genetic component is just at the cusp of where it's going when it comes to how far we can take this as far as looking into our health, et cetera. Do you have any resources that you'd like to point people towards? I know that you mentioned checking out Genographics, but as far as things we can include in the show, notes for folks, is that kind of the main website where people could find out more?

Yeah, if you want to include others. The other main genetic testing company, and they really focus on health stuff, although they include a little bit of ancestry stuff, is 23andMe. So if people are interested in testing for some of these diabetes markers or whatever it might be, macular degeneration, I mean, there's stuff that is useful And I actually found out something useful from 23andMe. You know, about a clotting variant that I have that's fairly common in Northern Europe. About 10% of the Dutch population has it. But it improves my blood's ability to clot. Probably highly adaptive when we were living in center gatherers. However, because I fly a lot, it gives me much higher risk of having some sort of clotting problem, deep vein thrombosis kind of thing. So I actually pop a couple of aspirin before I hop on a long flight now. So, you know, that kind of information is useful and I think, yeah, it's worth checking that kind of thing out. But in terms of the nutritional stuff, it's just the science really isn't there yet. Yeah.

Well, I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes for folks as well as to your fantastic book Pandora's Seed. I think it's a great read if anybody out there is interested in really delving into this a little bit more deeply. We just kind of scratched the surface of what's in the book during today's talk. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well as to the genographic project. And as far as you go, Spencer, what's next on the horizon for you in terms of your triathlon involvement? Because I know we have a lot of triathletes on the show.

Yeah. So I'm going to stick with a couple of Olympic distance events for next year probably. I am actually toying with the idea of trying to train seriously for a 70.3 for a half ironman. I was surprised at my run, although it wasn't that fast in the the Olympic triathlon that I did, I felt good enough at the end of it that I was like, okay, I could imagine pushing that, maybe doing double the distance and then you're kind of getting up there closer to a half Ironman. And you know, the bike's never been a problem. I've been riding since I was a kid and swimming, same thing. But the run has always been the thing that I have to conquer and I felt pretty good at the end of it. So, yeah, I'm going to do at least two or three triathlons next year. And maybe, you know, if I'm feeling good beginning middle of December, I might try and do a half ironman, say.

In September, maybe take it to the next level. I like it. Well, folks, if you're listening in and you have any suggestions for Spencer on the 70.3 that you think he should do. Feel free to leave it in the comments on the show notes for this podcast. And of course, if you're there, you may as well leave any other comments, questions, or feedback you have about modern agriculture and how it has affected us, thoughts that you may have on that, or on genetics, the ethics of genetic testing and gene research and health. So let's go ahead and open up that conversation over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com in the show notes for this episode with Spencer Wells. So Spencer, thanks for coming on the call today.

Awesome. Thanks a lot, Ben.

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Sam.