Natural Selection

So check out this gallery “Time” has published from the book “Hungry Beast”. It chronicles the amount and type of foods families from across the world purchase in one week. What I notice most is two things. The quantity of food varies significantly across countries (check out Chad versus Germany for example) and the more Western the family tends to be, the more processed the food choices become. The Americans, for example have very little fresh produce on their table whereas the family from Ecuador have nothing but fresh produce. It seems economic development comes with a price, more marketing, poor health and the environmental impact of all that packaging.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology which followed up the mortality rates of residents of the town of Sevesco in Italy, twenty-five years after a toxic explosion, has found an alarming trend. The residents, which were exposed to the toxic cloud of dioxin, and then to levels in the soil post-explosion, were grouped according to their exposure levels (very high, high and low levels of exposure) and then cause of death data were collected during that time. Those in the ‘high’ exposure  zones had significantly more deaths from lymphatic and hematopoietic (blood) cancers, diabetes and cardiovascular events (eg, heart attack), providing evidence that toxins in the environment do contribute to the diseases which were previously blamed purely on genetics and lifestlye risk factors such as diet, physical activity and smoking.