As Daniel E. Lieberman , a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University, explains in his book The History of the Human Body , in the United States, medical care for a cardiovascular patient costs an additional $ 18,000 a year.
Consequently, if just 25% more of the population were convinced to be fit, it would save $ 58 billion a year on cardiovascular disease care alone. About twice the annual research budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH): that is, better to be safe .
The power of prevention
Prevention, then, seems like a much more intelligent aspiration, for which we must all fight with greater effort, at least more than simply putting all the eggs in the basket of care or resolution of medical problems .
Prevention is not obsessing over exercise or dieting. Much less entrust oneself to the paleodiet, which is a pseudoscientific construct at all times: there is no ideal and exemplary hunter-gatherer way of life. There is not even the idea of a Paleo diet , because this should be a set of very different diets from each other, as Lieberman points out:
By way of analogy, trying to understand what the human body is adapted to by looking only at hunter-gatherers would be like trying to understand the outcome of a soccer match by looking only at a fragment of the second part.
The most effective prevention would simply happen, according to this study by The Lancet , by eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, not smoking, exercising moderately and not drinking alcohol in excess. Doing this is enough to reduce cardiovascular disease rates by 50% .
For this reason, precisely, developing non-fattening food would not solve one problem but would amplify others, and prevention is smarter than cure, as I explain in the following video: