Genes that helped humans survive scarcity may become harmful in an environment of constant food abundance.
This does not mean there is one “thrifty gene.”
It means human metabolism evolved to protect against hunger, starvation, hypothermia, dehydration, and seasonal food shortage. Extra sugar that might appear was stored for use in the future. The only long term storage cells in humans are fat cells
The modern diet creates the opposite environment. There is now far too much sugar being consumed every day.
For most of human history, food was not always available.
The body needed ways to:
Those systems helped people survive.
Today, many people live in a food environment built around:
Survival biology can become overactivated.
Instead of protecting the body, it may contribute to:
Different populations experienced different histories of migration, famine, farming, pastoralism, colonization, and food access.
That is why the transition to modern processed food may affect populations differently.
The pattern is especially important when looking at:
The thrifty gene idea is not a complete explanation.
It should not be used to blame ancestry or culture.
Modern metabolic disease is also shaped by poverty, food systems, colonization, stress, medical access, urbanization, and aggressive marketing of processed food.
The body’s survival systems were built for scarcity.
The modern diet creates constant abundance.
That mismatch may help explain why metabolic disease has risen so quickly in many regions of the world.
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