Modern Life Compared with Early Humans'

We often hear about the stresses of modern life, and how they lead to heart attacks and so forth. So I decided to give a little thought to what stresses or worries are present in modern life, and what stresses our early human ancestors had to cope with.

First, early humans had these risks to life and limb present in their world:

• Being made ill or killed by disease
• Being killed or maimed in war with other tribes
• Being killed or maimed by wild animals
• Fear of hunger or starvation if the hunt or the crop failed
  

Now let's look at modern, western life.

• Despite medical advances, we are still subject to diseases, many of which (cancer, heart disease, etc.) can kill us.
  
• We still have wars, and certainly, worldwide, thousands are still killed in wars each year.

So two of the four in the first list are still present, even after all these hundreds of thousands of years of human existence.

Now--in contrast to our ancestors--we are subject to little risk to life and limb from wild animals. (The risk definitely still exists for people in some parts of the earth.) But, for too many, modern life has added some new hazards such as being killed in an auto accident or in a shooting (hopefully the odds of dying due to being shot by some civilian's gun are not large).

As to the last item in the first list: in modern, western countries, fewer people rely on their own hunting or even farming for their sustenance, so they may not worry about starvation. (But people who do produce their own sustenance are still at some risk, and it's only 150 years ago that large numbers in Ireland died due to the massive failure of the potato crop.)

But, to the two items in my second bulleted list, we need to add some worries which, if not usually fatal, certainly add to the stresses that we moderns often live with:

• Financial worries such as lack of money due to unemployment.
• Worries about mortgage foreclosure, which can mean loss of one's home.

So I think I'd say that modern life still has some of the same stresses that humanity has faced for millennia--plus some worries that are part of the modern age and that our ancestors did not face. And we work harder. I read one time that the Bushmen in Africa--a hunter-gatherer society--spend about fifty percent of their time in finding their food, and the other fifty percent sitting around telling stories!

So, are we more or less stressed than our ancestors very long ago? It may be a wash. I somehow tend to think that the worries of modern life are more insidious.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Is Our Food Bad for Us?

Today, unless your head is in the sand, you hear that a lot of our dietary habits are bad for us. We eat too much salt, sugar, fat, red meat, processed meat—the list goes on, and it seems like it's added to every day.

When I was a kid you never heard of anyone worrying about what they ate. We ate lots of sugar and fat and salt. All the cake we wanted, and ice cream, and cookies. Ah, the good old days! My mother, who cooked with chicken fat (I hear you going, "Yuck!" but that was normal Jewish cooking, which would not use lard), was concerned that I did not eat enough fat, as a kid, and, to seduce me into taking in more butter, she added it to tomato soup!

You have to wonder what's changed, and, logically, you'd think the answer would be "nothing."

However, that might not be correct. That farm hand or cowboy of 100 years ago who ate steak and eggs and ham for breakfast didn't develop clogged arteries and coronary disease because his work was heavily physical. Today we are all couch potatoes who don't even get up off the couch to change the channel on our TV.

And, although you hear more about heart disease and cancer, and the incidence of diabetes is going through the roof, some rates of cancer have actually gone down. But I would not disregard or downplay all the advice to be concerned about what we are eating and drinking.

As I say above, one thing which has changed is lifestyle. We are too sedentary. Also, food vendors (think fast-food chains) and food manufacturers are providing us with unhealthy food. And we are eating in those fast-food places more, and eating more processed food. How much of our food is made from scratch? I for one, can cook and do, at least sometimes; but if you look at my garbage (or what I recycle, to be more correct), it seems as though an awful lot of my food comes in boxes. Not good. Too much sodium, too much artificial ingredients. Have you heard of the dietary advice to never eat anything that has more than five ingredients? There's probably nothing that comes in a box that's got only five ingredients.

All of what I say above is well-established science; but I'm going to plunge ahead into some ideas that are more speculative. Our dietary intake these days has lots of toxins (poisons), in the form of pesticides and chemical additives in our food. It's been at least tentatively suggested by scientific studies that some of these substances, like bis-phenyl A (BPA), found in food cans, for example, are harmful.

The verdict is still out, largely, on what harm some of the man-made chemicals in our food are doing to us. It may be that they make our bodies less able to handle the more natural—and now thought to be "bad"—food ingredients like fat, sugar, and salt. Not to mention causing diseases like cancer, autoimmune diseases, and so on by themselves.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Some Linguistic Musings

First, a couple of words of which the original meanings have been forgotten through maybe several "rounds" of meaning change:

First, jock originally meant 'penis'. Then jock became short for jockstrap, and then it came to mean an athlete through a natural association with jockstrap.

Joystick also originally meant 'penis'. The next meaning was for the control stick of an airplane, and then it came to be used for the similar controllers for video games and so forth.

Scumbag originally meant 'condom'. You can get the "bag" part of it, so guess what the scum part denoted.

Now, maybe what is another subject and not related at all.

Some diseases that people used to talk about (and which presumably doctors used to diagnose) are not heard of at all. The words have totally fallen into disuse.

Chilblains. Defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Ed. as "an inflammatory swelling or sore caused by exposure (as of the feet or hands) to cold."

Ague. Defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Ed. as "a fever (as malaria) marked by paroxysms of chills, fever, and sweating that recur at regular intervals."

La grippe or the grippe. Defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Ed. as "an acute febrile contagious virus disease; esp. influenza."

Now, these are all things that you would expect people would still get. People do in fact get malaria, although it is not common in the U.S. any longer; but it is in fact common in certain warmer parts of the world. Maybe there people still talk about having an ague.

As to the other two words, again you'd think you would still hear the words because people must still get those conditions; but you don't in fact hear the words--ever. I think it's a case of, if you have the word for it, you can get it. Without the word in current use, you won't get it. Sort of a mind-body issue.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein