The advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago and the subsequent scale-up to mass feeding made possible by the Industrial Revolution solved problems of quantity but not quality. Average life span has increased paralleling these changes, due in large part to agricultural productivity, efficient food distribution and preservation, and the development of public utilities. No, it is not modern medical measures that have extended our lives, but rather farmers, truckers and plumbers. The primary products coming from farmers’ fields today - grains and legumes - deliver calories but are not natural human nutrition. The argument can effectively be made that it is the conversion of the human diet to one based on grains that has led to the modern epidemic of chronic degenerative diseases and obesity.Putting Things In The Perspective Of Time If we draw a line 276 miles long representing the estimated time of life on Earth, the time since the Industrial Revolution - about 250 years ago - would occupy only about one inch on the last itsy bit of the entire line. Put another way, if we scaled down the amount of time of life on Earth to one year, our modern industrial times would be less than 2 seconds. Although we have grown up in the new era of fluorescent lights, plastic surgery and Mars bars, these are totally unique circumstances from a genetic perspective. The Genetic Perspective Human genes and those of every other living creature are obviously tuned to the 276 miles, not the last one inch. Think of a fish. Its genes are programmed for life in the water and eating smaller fish. If we attempt to deny this fact by taking it out of the water and trying to feed it lasagna, it will suffer ‘dis-ease’ and die. This extraordinarily simple concept is so obvious it seems elementary for me to even point it out. But few people get it! Instead we eat any sugar-coated thing that will go in our mouths, indeed do try to feed lasagna to farm raised fish and even carnivorous pets, live carpe diem and believe modern medicine can repair whatever goes wrong. A Simple Truth It was only after much independent study, experience and thought that I arrived at the following embarrassingly simple truth: If things are not used according to the way they are designed, they fail and break.Our parents taught us the proper way to use our toys, we know enough to read instruction manuals, and a test for intelligence we all can pass is to not put a square peg in a round hole. Applying these same simple principles is the master key to health. What Our Genes Expect What are human genes programmed for; what does our instruction manual say? Since 276 miles on the time line represent living out in nature and eating natural foods found there, that is the data our genes properly accept… not the new synthetic environment we have created in the last one inch of time. Our genes are encoded with the external world we were designed for. When we are born, our genes fully expect to be dropped onto the forest floor and remain within that context for a lifetime. We should not confuse our origins just because we were born into this new synthetic world.