My Rant on Modern Lifestyle
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By Puxiao Cen, M.D. | Published July 2007

Quite frankly, our current lifestyle is anything but natural. We live in a highly technological, machine aided world. Every aspect of our lives is saturated with electronics, “easy to prepare” food, and entertainment that only requires the physical exertion of sitting on the couch and pressing buttons on the remote control. As a society, our high level of cholesterol and bulging waist-line are the result of modern life.

This modern life is completely different from our prehistoric roots. We are genetically programmed to store and use calories as hunter-gatherers. Over a period of tens of thousands of years, our bodies adapted to survive in a feast or famine lifestyle. We expended a lot of energy every day in the hope of obtaining food, shelter, and protection. However, since it was not always certain that food would be available from day to day, our bodies became very adept at converting the food into fat. In our current lifestyle, we neither have the same variability of food consumption nor the same consistency of activity. Therefore, one way that we can battle our increasing levels of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and so on, we can try to emulate our prehistoric lifestyle of constant activity and reduced daily caloric intake. We can strive to increase your physical activities as much as possible, but we do not walk from home to work, do we? We can attempt to increase the diffi culty of gathering food, but we will not stop going to grocery stores, and instead, gather vegetables, nuts, and berries, hunt wild animals, or even buy land to grow vegetables so that we incorporate the laboring into obtaining food every day, right?

Our best hope to combat our deteriorating health is to align modern life with natural living. By living “naturally”, I mean that we must consume and expend energy similarly to the way hunter-gathers did. We absolutely need to manage: 1) our overall caloric intake; 2) proportion of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats; and 3) remain physically active. I am certain that everyone has had their doctor tell them that they should eat selectively and get more exercise. Even when patients follow this advice, they still need some help from modern medicine to fi ght the damage that modern life has done to their bodies.

One source of help is medication for lipid and cholesterol control. If you have had a heart attack, stroke, or clotted artery in the legs leading to amputation, then the right dose of statin will prevent a second event. Moreover, a statin will also reverse the “natural” result of modern life
which is elevated cholesterol level and will retune the level and the type of cholesterol we should have to resemble that of our hunter-gather ancestors. Statins can help to give you a fi ghting chance against the ravages of modern life and its excess.

We should not rely on medicine to act as an eraser for a lifetime of overindulgence and sloth. We should all focus on maintaining a healthy lifestyle and remember that everything in moderation is sound advice. With this in mind, medicine fi ts into the healthcare system as a valuable tool to help you and your doctor improve your health and both the quality and length of your life.