@Colin Shaw (University of Zurich) @Daniel Longman (Loughborough University)
You have everything our ancestors dreamed of. Climate control. Abundant food. Medicine that can extend your life by decades. Access to information that would’ve made you a God in any previous century.
And yet.
Your body is breaking down in ways that shouldn’t be possible.
Autoimmune diseases are skyrocketing. Fertility rates are collapsing. Chronic inflammation has become the default state. Anxiety disorders are epidemic. Your kids can’t focus. Your energy crashes at 3 PM. The medical system tells you this is just “getting older” or “genetics” or “bad luck.”
Two evolutionary anthropologists from the University of Zurich and Loughborough University just published research in Biological Reviews that cuts through all of that. They call it The Environmental Mismatch Hypothesis and it explains why your modern life is literally at war with your ancient biology.
Here’s the thing: they’re describing the exact mechanism I’ve been watching unfold in my body for 16 years.
The Lion That Never Leaves
For hundreds of thousands of years, your ancestors lived with one primary stressor: survival. A predator would appear. Your nervous system would flood with cortisol and adrenaline. Your body would shift into fight-or-flight mode. You’d run or fight. The lion would leave.
Then you’d recover.
This is called acute stress, intense, time-limited, resolvable. Your physiology is brilliantly designed to handle it. In fact, your body thrives under occasional acute stress. It makes you stronger, faster, sharper. The stress response is a feature, not a bug.
But here’s what anthropologists Shaw and Longman discovered: your body has absolutely no evolutionary design for chronic, unresolvable stress.
Because in nature, that didn’t exist.
Today, your body reacts to your boss’s email the same way it would react to a lion. Your nervous system floods with stress hormones. Your immune system shifts into defensive mode. Your metabolism changes. Your reproductive hormones tank. Your sleep becomes fragmented.
But the lion never leaves.
The boss is always there. The notifications never stop. The traffic is perpetual. The artificial light keeps coming. The processed food keeps triggering inflammatory responses. Your muscles stay tense. Your nervous system stays activated.
Your body isn’t failing. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do in response to a threat. Except the threat is permanent.
“Our body reacts as though all these stressors were lions,” Daniel Longman explains in their research. “Your stress response system is still the same as if you were facing lion after lion. As a result, you have a very powerful response from your nervous system, but no recovery.”
No recovery.
That’s the sentence that matters.
The Real Cost: Energy System Collapse
For 16 years, I’ve been watching this unfold in people’s bodies. Not as an academic exercise. As a health coach working with hundreds of people trying to understand why they feel like they’re dying while being told they’re “fine.”
Here’s what I’ve learned: chronic disease is not a mystery. It’s not random. It’s not genetic destiny.
It’s an energy system breakdown.
Think about your cells like power plants. Each one has mitochondria, the actual factories that convert what you eat and breathe into usable energy. When those mitochondria are working optimally, your body regenerates, repairs, heals, and thrives. When they’re not, everything collapses.
Now, what breaks mitochondrial function?
All the things your body has zero evolutionary adaptation for:
Pesticides and herbicides on food your ancestors never encountered
Refined sugars extracted and concentrated in ways nature never created
Processed seed oils engineered in factories
Microplastics from synthetic materials your body can’t process
Constant artificial light that disrupts your circadian rhythm
Chronic stress with no resolution
Processed food designed to trigger dopamine but deliver zero nutrition
Electromagnetic pollution everywhere
Your mitochondria are trying to run 21st-century machinery on 11,000-year-old software while being flooded with toxins no organism on Earth has biological memory of.
The result? Your energy production tanks. Your immune system goes haywire. Your hormones dysregulate. Your cells stop regenerating.
Then you get the diagnosis: autoimmune disease, infertility, depression, metabolic syndrome, chronic fatigue.
But those are symptoms. The root is always the same: energy system dysfunction.
The Paradox That Should Terrify Us
Here’s what Shaw and Longman documented that hits differently: we’ve created unprecedented wealth and health care, yet both survival and reproduction the two metrics evolution actually cares about are degrading.
Sperm counts have declined 50% since the 1950s.
Global fertility rates are collapsing.
Chronic inflammatory disease is epidemic in industrialized nations.
We’re living longer in some metrics (better trauma care, antibiotics) while simultaneously becoming less viable as a species. We’re becoming dependent on medicine and technology just to maintain baseline function.
That’s not progress. That’s a slow-motion biological collapse masked by convenience.
The Part They’re Missing (And Why It Matters)
Shaw and Longman’s research is brilliant. They point to the mismatch and suggest solutions: “rethinking our relationship with nature” and “designing healthier cities.”
Those things matter. But they’re structural changes that take decades.
What they don’t address because they’re anthropologists, not nutrition scientists is that you don’t have to wait for society to redesign itself.
Your body can start recovering today.
Here’s why: unlike the larger environmental toxins you can’t always control, you have complete control over what enters your body through food.
This is the principle I’ve been living for 16 years:
“If it’s not made by Mother Nature, it’s not going on my plate.”
This isn’t extremism. This isn’t a diet trend. This is basic biology.
When you eliminate the foods that didn’t exist in your evolutionary environment, refined sugars, refined salt, processed oils, dairy (in the form humans consume it), grains (processed and cooked) you stop poisoning your mitochondria. When you stop poisoning your mitochondria, they can do what they’re designed to do: produce clean energy.
When your cells can produce clean energy again, everything changes. Your immune system rebalances. Your hormones regulate. Your body can finally regenerate instead of just surviving.
This isn’t a theory. This is what 16 years of documented personal transformation looks like. This is what I see repeatedly in people who actually commit to aligning their biology with their evolutionary design.
The Real Question: Are You Going to Wait?
Shaw and Longman end their research with a call for systemic change. It’s necessary. Cities need to be redesigned. Green spaces need to be prioritized. Environmental toxins need to be regulated.
But you have a choice that doesn’t require waiting for policy change.
You can choose to stop living in an evolutionary mismatch with your own body.
You can eliminate the five slow poisons that don’t exist in nature.
You can reconnect with food as medicine, not as convenience.
You can prioritize sleep, movement, and time in natural spaces the things your nervous system actually needs to recover.
You can stop being a case study for what happens when humans ignore their biology and start being proof that the body has an extraordinary capacity to heal when you finally give it what it needs.
Your body isn’t failing you. It’s screaming at you in the only language it has: symptoms.
The question is: are you going to listen?
Your body was designed for nature. Your life is on the grid. The mismatch is killing us slowly. But you don’t have to stay sick waiting for the world to change.
What would happen if you changed first?
I’m launching my comprehensive health manifesto “IN NATURE WE TRUST: A Comprehensive Guide to Energy Based Health Transformation” later this year. It’s 70,000 words documenting exactly how to realign your biology with your evolutionary design.
But you don’t have to wait. I host monthly webinars for the Raw Foodiest Family where we dive into these principles together. If you want to understand how energy system dysfunction shows up in YOUR body and what to do about it, join us.
Because the real question isn’t whether you can survive the modern world. It’s whether you’re willing to thrive despite it.
– Axay Shah
Raw Food Guru
RawFoodiest.com
IN NATURE WE TRUST