8. THE GOOD OLD DAYS

It might appear from the arguments in the preceding chapters that if we want to be healthy, we should abandon our soft lives and go rough it in the wild. Here's a little perspective on that idea.
 
The primitive foraging tribe, usually limited to about forty people by the carrying capacity of the land, had an average lifespan of around 22 years.¹ Humans were excellent prey. Not having strength, size, or speed to match the great predators, just trying to stay out of the jaws of the food chain would have been a full time preoccupation. In fact, it is believed that one of the reasons that North America was delayed in being extensively populated was the presence of great carnivores. One was a monster bear that could stand over 10 feet high and had the speed of a horse. Imagine taking a Sunday stroll in the woods with these creatures lurking behind the bushes.*
 
If you weren't being dined on, even a minor injury like stubbing a toe, embedding a thorn, or getting cut on a rock as you were scrambling to get away from one of these monsters could be the beginning of the end. No Emergency Room, no disinfectant, not even a Band-Aid. There would be no time to lie around recuperating with someone else feeding you. No entitlement programs, no panhandling. You had to keep going. If death didn't come from the injury, it might from starvation or exposure to the elements. Before that welcome end, you would be in the most dreaded category that predators just love—the weak and disabled, the unfit.
 
There was every manner of infectious and parasitic disease. To this day in our North American woods there is giardiasis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, a cadre of parasitic worms, mycotic and bacterial skin infections, ehrlichiosis, babesiosis, brucellosis, shigellosis, schistosomiasis and Eastern equine encephalomyelitis. Hordes of mosquitoes, black flies, deer flies, spiders, and ticks could make a person want to spend nights plunged neck-deep into leech-infested waters for relief from the relentless attacks.
 
People today, infected with mosquito–transmitted Eastern equine encephalomyelitis, for example, either get to spend their life propped up in a chair with a bib, or, more mercifully, die. Lyme disease, on the other hand, lets a person experience a smorgasbord of misery: headaches, fever, chills, fatigue, shortness of breath, dizziness, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, depression, and cardiac irregularities. Then there are the hanta viruses, which swarm above the feces of mice and rats. These are killers and can be contracted by just lying on the ground, breathing rodent droppings ubiquitously present on the forest floor (as Bill Bryson put it in A Walk in the Woods, after attempting to traverse the Appalachian Trail).²
 
Wild living, the principle we need to apply if we are to have health, is just that—only a principle for modern humans. Primitive times were good in that ignorance and rudimentary technology did limited damage to the environment. Being out in nature, active, and eating what nature provided also gave them robust health because they were living in tune with their genetics. The bad part was that life was hard and dangerous. Their exposed and precarious predicament is not necessarily something to envy. Besides, we have long since grown in population beyond the point where everyone could walk out their door and survive on what the woods and fields provided.
 
We're kind of stuck in the modern predicament. But on the bright side we can have the best of all worlds if we would just apply thinking. Our technology can bring safety, comfort, security, abundant food, health, and happiness. On the other hand, our advanced tools can strip mine the Earth of all resources, pave it over, and create health-robbing addicting foods and conveniences that turn us into mushy, unfit weaklings festering with chronic degenerative diseases.
 
We modern hunters must now hunt for the right ideas and be willing to use them. Such intelligence is our ultimate technology and can bring to us the optimal health that only nature obeyed can bring.¹
 
*To get a sense of what life was like as prey, and to help make the point that we are intimately linked to nature, turn the volume way up on your computer and go to our asifthinkingmatters.com website and click on the "Multimedia" link, and then the "Predator" link. This sound of a predator will create sensations in you including chills running up and down your skin that are almost impossible to control. Such feelings were a part of daily life for our ancestors living in the wild.