From Africa's savanna we have become fatsos with feedbags :(

We have come a long way since those early years on the open savanna, and I have my own story to tell.  A familiar topic, yes, and yet I was so taken by the following sentences in this piece in Scientific American (sub. reqd.)

Like our bodies, our brains and behaviors, sculpted in our distant hunter-gatherer past, must also accommodate a very different present.  We can live thousands of miles away from where we were born.  We can kill someone without ever seeing his face.  We encounter more people standing on line for Space Mountain at Disneyland than out ancestors encountered in a lifetime. My god, we can even look at a picture of someone and feel lust despite not knowing what that person smells like--how weird is that for a mammal?

We are one heck of a different species.

Some super-mammal brain we have managed to create over the tens of thousands of years.

We humans will be so much unrecognizable to those savanna inhabitants, but we carry within ourselves many of those traits from a long time ago.

[The] selective demands of food scarcities sculpted our distant forebearers into having a bod that was extremely thrifty and good at storing calories.  Now, having inherited that same metabolism, we hunt and gather Big Macs as diabetes becomes a worldwide scourge.

Back in India, when I was a kid, they used to refer to diabetes as a rich person's disease.  I wonder how much of that was conventional wisdom merely correlating affluence with rich food and diabetes, and how much of that was because of diffusion of scientific knowledge.

This mismatch between our biological drive to get as much calories as possible and the contemporary availability of inexpensive processed simple carbohydrates is becoming a disaster of epic proportions.  Yes, epic proportions here in the US:

The number of obese adults, along with related disease rates and health care costs, are on course to increase dramatically in every state in the country over the next 20 years, according to F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2012, a report released by Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).
For the first time, the annual report includes an analysis that forecasts 2030 adult obesity rates in each state

(click on the map for the interactive version)

The report projects that by 2030--merely eighteen years from now--almost 60 percent of adult Texans will be obese, unless we change our behaviors.

Wall-E made it easy for us to imagine where we are headed; remember this?

I suppose we watched those scenes while gorging on nachos and super-sized drinks!

Maybe the Onion was onto something a few years ago:

Seriously, this kind of consumption in every possible way is what we want to do after all these years of evolution and migration?  What a disgrace, eh!