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Most of the chronic diseases that plague us now result from living in modern environments.16,17,18,19 This does not mean we would be better off in the environments of our ancestors. Life back then was worse than just nasty, brutal, and short. Imagine having an infected impacted wisdom tooth in a time without dentists. Even minor infected wounds caused death or the slow loss of a limb. The standard treatment, pouring boiling oil on the wound, was only sometimes effective. When steel tools made amputations possible they were swift, because there was no anesthesia. Pregnancy with a large baby meant an agonizing death. Then there was simple starvation. We are far healthier than our ancestors were.
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Randolph M. Nesse (Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry)