Chronic disease didn’t suddenly become “normal” because our genes got worse. Our genes largely stayed the same, but our world changed fast and our bodies are still trying to keep up. Mark Pettus and Dr John Bagnulo unpack Paleo Deficit Syndrome (PDS), a powerful framework in ancestral health and evolutionary medicine that helps explain why obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune issues, and neurodegeneration keep rising even as healthcare gets more sophisticated.
We zoom out beyond the usual reductionist lens and pull in evidence from anthropology and real-world populations that still live closer to ancestral patterns. We talk about the Hadza, research from the New Guinea Highlands that challenges the “aging equals decline” storyline, and why old photos from the early 1900s can look more like hunter-gatherers than today’s sedentary norm. Then we connect the dots with epigenetics, showing how quickly the environment can reshape outcomes, sometimes within a single generation.
To make it visceral, we walk through Robert Sapolsky’s observations of “junk food monkeys” and the striking health shifts seen in the Pima people after a rapid change in food and lifestyle environment. We also get candid about why these insights stay niche, and why “lifespan” is a distraction if healthy lifespan is collapsing.
We’ll post the papers and slide deck on our website so you can follow along, and we’ll continue this as a two-part series. If this perspective helps you rethink your own health trajectory, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.
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