The book “Evolution Rx” is written by Dr. William Meller, a board-certified internist who runs a medical practice composed of three medical centers. He applies knowledge of human evolution to find solutions to health problems.
Here are some notes from the book:
• Fossilized skulls of early humans show broad flat molars typically free of cavities. Since cavities result from bacteria that feed on sugars, this indicates that they rarely ate sweet foods.
• Meat was the main course for our early ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years.
• Homo sapiens got around half their calories from meat and fat, almost 40 percent from roots and vegetables, and 10 percent from fruits and berries.
• Hormones of satiety (such as leptin, ghrelin, orexin, cholecystokinin, neuropeptide Y, and agouti-related peptide) only work when we eat fat and protein.
• When eating too many carbs, excess sugar builds up in the blood and is converted into fat. The result is obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and arthritis.
• Cholesterol is needed by the body to make essential steroid hormones.
• Without adequate protein and fat in their diets, children grow more slowly, have weaker bones, build less muscle, have delayed brain growth, and have lower IQs.
• An effective way to suppress appetite is to eat more protein and fat, which stimulate the hormones that make a person feel satisfied.
• Many patients are able to halt the symptoms of diabetes by dramatically decreasing the amount of carbohydrates in their diet.
• Coughing irritates the throat. A better alternative is to swallow or sip a small amount of fluid.
• Medications like aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen short-circuit the body’s natural ability to develop a fever and can extend the time a person is contagious.
• When a person has a fever and feels hot, drinking enough fluids will help them get better.
• Quarantine is expensive, inconvenient, and may deprive some people of their civil rights for a short period – but it’s a minuscule price compared to the devastation of a pandemic.
• Experiments in mice show that a chronic herpes virus stimulates the immune system.
• More than a third of all people in the world have a parasitic infection called toxoplasmosis, which can cause infected people to take more risks and to act more promiscuously than uninfected people.
• Enabling drug users to have access to clean needles and those engaged in high-risk sex to use condoms would have put a quick end to the spread of HIV.
• Every time we take an antibiotic we are helping bacteria evolve by promoting more resistant strains.
• Bacteria can be infected and killed by using viruses called bacteriophages.
• Food allergy reactions occur within an hour after eating and typically within minutes. Symptoms of food intolerances usually begin many hours later.
• More than 90 percent of food allergies stem from peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, and soy.
• A lack of exposure to viral infections among children may account for the rise in asthma.
• A study that gave worm eggs to patients with Crohn’s disease led to 21 of 29 patients going into complete remission.
• Several studies show that longer breast-feeding and withholding wheat products until after 6 months of age protect against developing celiac disease later in life.
• After alcohol, acetaminophen is the second-leading cause of liver failure and death.
• A review of fish consumption found that there have been no cases of human mercury poisoning from eating fish ever reported in Britain or the United States.
• People who eat two servings of fish per week live longer and have significantly fewer heart attacks than people who don’t.
• Pregnant women who eat more fish have children with higher IQs than those who don’t.
• Genetics make some smokers more susceptible to disease than others. That’s why only 15 percent of long-term heavy tobacco smokers get cancer and only 30 percent of long-term smokers get emphysema.
• Several studies with more than 80,000 participants proved that fiber does not prevent colon cancer.
• Eating well without overeating, quitting smoking, decreasing the number of menstrual periods, and getting vitamin D from the sun can decrease the risk of most common cancers by 90 percent.
• Cavemen had legs like soccer players and torsos like wrestlers.
• Patients given erythropoietin become less depressed.
• Doing the opposite of what happened to cause an injury is the way to heal. Shortening or relaxing the muscle passively immediately decreases pain and allows the natural healing process to work. Putting a muscle or tendon in its shortest position will help it heal with the least amount of scar tissue.
• Doing knee bends will strengthen the quadriceps and help prevent falls and hip fractures.
• According to orthopedic surgeon Carol Frey, not wearing shoes strengthens feet and helps prevent fallen arches and other common foot problems.
• Research by Ron Pope shows that stretching hinders athletic performance and increases the risk of injury. Warming up improves reaction time and balance, but stretching negates that benefit.
• A technique to reduce back pain is to gently arch the back, pushing the waist forward while keeping the shoulders balanced over the feet.
• A study on identical twins found that the twin with higher blood levels of vitamin D had a 5-year increase in life expectancy.
• One study found that men with high vitamin D levels were half as likely to have heart attacks as men with low levels.
• Even squamous and basal cell skin cancers occur less frequently in people who have regular moderate sun exposure.
• Melanomas appear to be an inherited risk.
• Aldara stimulates the immune system to recognize actinic keratosis and basal cell skin cancer cells as damaged and triggers a natural inflammatory response to remove them.
• A study of older people taking vitamin D supplements found that they reduced their risk of hip or vertebra fracture by one-third.
• 85 percent of seasonal affective disorder patients get better when exposed to UV light from sunlamps.
• An intake of 2,000 IU of vitamin D a day reduces the rate of colon cancer by 50 percent.
• An intake of 3,500 IU of vitamin D a day reduces the rate of breast cancer by 50 percent.
• Vitamin D helps prevent heart disease, vascular disease, cancers, macular degeneration, high blood pressure, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, and chronic inflammation.
• Fatiguing yourself makes it easier to sleep.
• Breast-fed children have higher IQ scores and have fewer allergies, ear infections, diarrhea, and colds. They are also less likely to develop diabetes, obesity, celiac disease, and sudden infant death syndrome.
• Exercise and sunshine help relieve depression.
• Salt plays a role in only about 10 percent of cases of high blood pressure.
• Most people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels.
• Roughly 85 percent of heart attacks happen to those who either smoke, have high blood pressure, are obese, or have diabetes.
• Cholesterol acts as insulation for nerve cells.
• Millions of people have very high cholesterol but no heart disease.
• A high-carbohydrate diet contributes to nearsightedness. A study of hunter-gatherers in Vanuatu found that those who ate the traditional diet of fish, yams, and coconuts maintained good eyesight even after receiving 8 hours a day of formal education.
• A study found that people who consumed a lot of calcium are half as likely to get kidney stones as those getting much less.
• Life expectancy shrank after the beginning of agriculture.
• A study of 10,000 women taking estrogen found that the total death rate was lower among those taking hormones
• Research by Michael Ristow shows that taking supplemental antioxidants cancels out the life-span-increasing benefits of healthy diets, exercise, light alcohol intake, and other factors. Supplements decrease cells’ production of more effective natural antioxidants.
