Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization
John J. Ratey, Richard Manning
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0316246093
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The scientific evidence behind why maintaining a lifestyle more like that of our ancestors will restore our health and well-being.
In GO WILD, Harvard Medical School Professor John Ratey, MD, and journalist Richard Manning reveal that although civilization has rapidly evolved, our bodies have not kept pace. This mismatch affects every area of our lives, from our general physical health to our emotional wellbeing. Investigating the power of living according to our genes in the areas of diet, exercise, sleep, nature, mindfulness and more, GO WILD examines how tapping into our core DNA combats modern disease and psychological afflictions, from Autism and Depression to Diabetes and Heart Disease. By focusing on the ways of the past, it is possible to secure a healthier and happier future, and GO WILD will show you how.
known as sucrose, is really about half glucose and half fructose, the latter so named because it is the dominant sugar in fruits. (And it’s present in most fruits in laughably small amounts, compared with the sugar in, say, a glass of Coke, or even apple juice. That’s the issue.) The dominant industrial food process of our day is, in fact, simply a replication of this reduction, breaking down the starches of corn into sugars as high-fructose corn syrup. And even high-fructose corn syrup is, like
indeed an adjustment to our civilized, tamed world. We enter the world programmed to dream of the wild, but civilization takes those dreams away. But just as important, the gender differences are alike among both hunter-gatherers and the civilized. In both cases, aggression and animals loom larger in the dreams of men. Antti Revonsuo, who compiled and analyzed this large body of research in an important paper, concludes that this is really about something other than fear and trauma. Rather, it
moment, to see where that comes from. Thomas described a scene as much about being awake as it was about being asleep, which makes perfect sense if you happen to be a !Kung sleeping outside among lions, and through most of evolutionary time, humans did indeed sleep outdoors among predators. But there is actually some math at the root of this casual observation, calculations that Worthman has done. This is based on well-known and established variations in sleep patterns that remain fixed in modern
refined apelike features, a tweak here, a tweak there—new shades, not new colors. Yet the evidence from endurance running makes a very different case. Humans are a radical departure from chimp design. In their pivotal paper about this in the journal Nature, Bramble and Lieberman analyzed the whole issue in terms of running versus walking—a way of challenging the common assumption that humans are built to walk, not run. All apes can run, sort of, but not fast and not far, and certainly not
was gone. These changes were no longer an intervention or therapy or cure. They had become my life. Indeed, I am giving you the barest of outlines of my life during the period, and much that I have left out may in fact be relevant: my solid marriage; the fact that I live in Montana, a wild place; that my work schedule is my own; that I have a dog who runs with me; and that I play music with friends. All of this is relevant, too, and maybe even more so. This is why we can’t serve up recipes for