Having someone else grow our food is going to kill us

Now that simple statistic represents the greatest change in the history of human behaviour since Homo erectus first began to walk upright about 1.8 million years ago.

We moderns, called Homo sapiens (the brainiest ones), evolved about 200,000 years ago, now being able to walk, think, and to run which is a dangerous combination enabling us to kill, tame and dominate all other species.
Recently this success has lead us away from the farm and into the city and even into space. But how intelligent is Homo erectus when our brain is so big and our foresight so poor?

Our bodies were designed to move, to hunt, to farm and to harvest, and not to sit down. So now that we don’t grow our own food, asking others to do it for us, Homo sapiens have disconnected totally from our food supply.
We ultra modern Homos (H. horizontalis or H. sedentariensis?) now drive cars and sit at desks and this lack of motion is beginning to take its toll on the average life expectancy.

The healthiest people don’t go to the gym!

The healthiest people, i.e. those with the best longevity, don’t go to the gym, they live far away from big cities.

“They don’t pump iron or run marathons or join gyms … they live in environments that nudge them into moving without even thinking about it … they grow gardens, walk throughout the day and minimise mechanical conveniences.” Andrew Merle

It’s no surprise that the people who live the longest are the furthest distance from our highly-urbanised, modern lifestyle – the big cities. It is the Okinawans, who inhabit a small southern island off the Japanese main island of Honshu, that have the longest life expectancy.

Social scientists attribute this to at least four factors; their cooperative and caring relationships, their positive attitude to life, their incredibly healthy diet as well as gardening, says Dan Buether, writing for National Geographic.
Of course one cannot be that exact about the causes, it’s probably a combination of all of them.

Vigorous and healthy into old age

The most important ‘plus’ for Okinawans is not just that they are long-lived, but they tend to be vigorous and healthy right through into old age (no nursing home for them!).

Gardening is a widespread hobby in Okinawa, providing three of the most important elements of excellent health; exercise, sunlight and nutritious food.

Seventy percent of their diet comes from the high-antioxidant carbohydrate, purple sweet potatoes, with vegetables and rice accounting for over 82% of their diet with almost no fats, red meat, and surprisingly just a little fish. The wisest of the old follow a rule, ‘Eat only till you are 80% full’.

Gardening is the hobby of longest-livers

The other longest-livers around the world, as described by the highest number of centenarians, are from rural rather than urban parts of Sardinia, Greece, Costa Rica, and a Seventh Day Adventist colony in California.

What is notable is that all of these longest-livers come from mainly energetic outdoor communities where gardening is the major hobby and there is less pressure to consume modern, processed food, particularly sugar.