What advice can an evolutionary biologist from Harvard give for India’s looming healthcare crisis?
Plenty, it turned out.
But first, some startling projections. According to a World Health Organisation report, conditions such as cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes and cancer are likely to reach alarming levels over the next three years in India (CVD from 2.9 crore in 2000 to 6.4 crore; diabetes from 2.6 crore to 4.6 crore, and cancer from 8,00,000 to 10,00,000). While there are a range of responses to many diseases, Lieberman dealt with the best possible approach to the ‘lifestyle diseases’ – so called because they are related to changing urban lifestyles.
Lieberman was addressing a packed hall at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, last week. The evolutionary biologist quoted some figures to show how scary the picture would be in a few years, but then assured everyone he knew of one magic pill. Exercise.
Unlike healthcare experts who might have talked about government policy, international assistance, drugs, etc. (all of which have their place in combating disease), Lieberman’s magic pill consisted of this: moderate exercise for 30 minutes a day, five days a week.
What were the potential benefits? The professor quoted from a well-known study: it had been shown, he said, that moderate exercise would lead to 40% reduction in heart diseases; 27% decrease in stroke; and amazingly, 50% decrease in diabetes, cancer and blood pressure.
In effect, you couldn’t ask for a better magic pill.
But what was it about exercise that caused such drastic improvement in disease resistance?
That’s where Lieberman’s training as an evolutionary biologist comes in. Physical work is part of our evolution, but modern lifestyles have caused us to stray ever so far away from even moderate physical work. While our food has become increasingly carbohydrate-based, we just aren’t doing the work required to burn off those calories. But it isn’t just about maintaining energy balance. The human being is primed to perform some pretty impressive physical tasks; it is only over the last few hundred years that he has become comfortable in a role he wasn’t meant for.
What was it about homo sapiens, Lieberman asked, that caused them to dominate the natural world? After all, humans have no distinct physical advantages over other animals – no claws, no fangs, no hide, no explosive speed.
But humans did have one thing that helped them flourish in the natural world – they were great endurance hunters. A pack of slow-moving endurance hunters could outlast even the swiftest gazelle because the animal couldn’t move at its speed for too long, and its body temperature would rise so high that it could restore it only by panting. Humans, on the other hand, cooled off as they moved by sweating. They also had several other features (we are bi-pedals, and that saves us 75% of the energy that quadrupeds require) that gave them an evolutionary advantage that helped them become astute hunters. Further, the skills involved in hunting would drive thehuman brain to evolve better than any other – endurance running therefore was key to understanding human evolution.
Since we can’t return to the hunter-gatherer days, the closest we can mimic that is through sport.
Lieberman is no empty theorist. He is an avid barefoot runner himself, and he features prominently in the cult book ‘Born To Run’.
Every form of sport or exercise, Lieberman said, was good enough. If Governments would take this piece of advice seriously, sport would become a great way of reducing their healthcare burden. And we would have a truly sporting society.
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