Afflictions of Civilization
We Do Not Just Die of Old Age
Growing old is universal and offers a reprieve for no one. Yet, medically speaking, no one ever dies of old age. Death occurs when at least one key system of the body breaks down. And then the rest of the body goes with it.
We all must die of something. To better ponder this certainty, we can get more traction by asking what makes us sick, injures us, or undermines our quality of life while alive? How do we prevent that one critical system from bringing down everything else?
The respiratory system is almost always involved. The immediate cause of death for most of us will be that we have stopped breathing. But a person can just as effectively die of heart or kidney failure or a broken neck. Meanwhile, virtually all the genetic material in the human body may be viable when the critical system fails.
A recent effort to grapple with the cause of death
It turns out that a comprehensive effort has been underway that has been studying the aspects of “what do we die from?” The results have been trickling in over the last few years. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation paid for a massive study by the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation called “The Global Burden of Disease.”
The study looked at causes of death, debilitation, and loss of quality of life for people suffering from 291 diseases in 187 countries worldwide. Further, it looked at changes in those patterns from 1990 to 2010 — a snapshot of change.
The first results, published in the journal The Lancet in late 2012, showed that the world’s top health problems as of 2010 were, in order: Ischemic heart disease, Lower respiratory infection, Stroke, Diarrhea, HIV, Low back pain, Malaria, Chronic obstructive pulmonary (lung) disease, Preterm birth, Road injury, Major depressive disorders, and Neonatal encephalitis.
More revealing was how health problems are related to causes. So, the same study also detailed the top twelve risk factors for death and debilitation worldwide. Again, in order: High blood pressure, Smoking, Alcohol, Household air pollution, Low fruit consumption, High body mass index (obesity), High blood sugar, Low body weight, Ambient particulate matter (air pollution), Inactivity, High salt intake, Low nut and seed consumption.
Both lists are revealing — if not surprising — because of the assumptions they shatter. Note the absence of cancer on the first list. Also, the first list does not include the litany of poverty-related infectious diseases.
More revealing, though, is the second list — the risk factors. This list undermines our concept of disease solely as an infection by a microorganism or some genetic deficiency that needs to be corrected. This second list suggests that “disease” is the wrong word in some cases. What we mean to say is “injury.” Maybe it is time to begin referring to diseases as “afflictions” of civilization.
Damage brought on by the way we live
Every one of the twelve leading risk factors worldwide is an affliction of the civilized manner in which humans live. These are not flaws or failings in the grand evolutionary design of the human body — but, rather, self-inflicted damages brought on by the way we live.
These afflictions are a direct result of forcing humans into conditions that the body design was not meant to accommodate. And every risk factor on the second list is easily and immediately correctable.
Something drastic and catastrophic is happening to humankind and happening fast. Our health is getting worse by the way we live. And the irony of this becomes apparent in a public place like an airport.
What do you hear in an airport? Warnings repeatedly trumpet the threat of a terrorist attack and the need for vigilance. And yet, this imagined threat pales compared to the very poor state of people’s health on display right before our eyes.
Who did this to us? Can you imagine an act of terrorism more damaging and more extensive than this profound injury we have inflicted on ourselves? Other than the climate crisis, worldwide economic collapse, or all-out nuclear war, can you imagine a more significant threat to our future well-being, our future as a nation — indeed the future of our species — than our physical and mental condition brought on by the “civilized” manner in which we live?
Diseases of longevity
Regarding “You have to die from something” — some researchers show their bias in this matter by preferring the term “diseases of longevity” to “diseases of civilization.” They argue that the achievements of Western civilization, especially controlling infectious diseases, make people live longer and give them more time to develop heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.
As noted in one of my other articles on Medium, type 2 diabetes should be a screaming, wailing siren warning our society that something is changing quickly. We are under attack. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle affliction resulting from sugar and refined carbohydrates.
What ails us collectively and individually?
“Afflictions of civilization” is a term that has the power to unravel many of the most critical questions of our time. What exactly is it that ails us collectively and individually? There are a variety of ways to answer this. But the answers sort into a couple of piles — generally these: what kills us and makes us sick while we are alive?
In many ways, it took ten thousand years of gradual evolution to mold us into the shape we are in today. We like to fault modern industrial agriculture and everything that goes with it — overpopulation, a hyper-industrialized food chain, and sedentary living — as underlying the epidemic sweep of afflictions of civilization. But the fact is, these all began millennia ago when humans first domesticated grain.
The advent of agriculture and starch
The effects of the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age pale compared with the advent of agriculture — the single most significant change in two million years of hominid history. So profound were its effects on humanity that it has been said it makes as much sense to argue that wheat domesticated us instead of the other way around.
Civilization is starch. And by extension, diseases (afflictions) of civilization are diseases of starch — either directly or indirectly.
It’s not that starch is new to us. Even our ‘hunter-gatherer’ ancestors had it. But they didn’t have it in abundance — not as a sole source, not in the tidal wave of starches that agriculture would begin yielding ten thousand years ago.
Today, three wild types of grass — rice, wheat, and corn — are the three most dominant forms of domesticated agriculture and human nutrition. And the potatoes domesticated in South America are the fourth. About 75% of all human food derives from those four sources alone.
The advancement of domesticated agriculture and the advent of dense packages of storable starch allowed humans to begin to live sedentary lives. We no longer needed to range far and wide as nomadic hunter-gatherer societies had done for a couple of million years. We could spend our lives in a single place. Or, as this tendency has played out in modern times, in a single chair.
Domestication of plants and animals in centralized locations enabled cities to spring up. Domestication created new sources of protein and new sources of disease because most of our infectious diseases come from domesticated animals, especially chickens and swine.
Grain allowed soft food for infants and a sedentary life enabled women to begin producing children earlier and more often. This is to say that grain significantly accelerated the growth of the human population.
Storage of grain also allowed the accumulation of wealth that almost immediately accrued preferentially to a few individuals. Evidence of disparate wealth is abundantly clear in the archaeological record of the very first agricultural cities. Yet, such wealth is unknown in hunter-gatherer societies — both in archaeological records and contemporary wild people. And by extension in our human civilization — wealth created poverty.
And so, I will talk more about wealth-power-greed, the human population explosion, and world exploitation by the monied elite in my other articles on Medium.
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