The body of modern women seems to be the epicenter of an intense conflict of interest.

On the one hand, they will have their reproductive capacity, on the other hand, their health.

“Many women make a great effort to follow what they’re told as a healthy lifestyle. They don’t smoke, they don’t cut fatty foods from their diets, they cut back on sweets, they don’t take the stairs instead of the elevator, and they walk to work.”

“When they get breast cancer, a heart problem, or osteoporosis, they often blame themselves and wonder: ‘What did I do wrong?’« points out biological anthropologist Grazyna Jasienska’s book The Fragile Wisdom.

But the truth is, there’s no point in blaming yourself.

While the author admits that there are practices that are totally harmful and should be avoided, we should not blame ourselves for getting sick.

And he tells BBC Mundo there are many factors that interfere with this process. For example, “it could be genetic, it could be due to some kind of interaction, an accident in our physiology.”

Jasienska, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Poland, is trying to understand why it can be so difficult to prevent diseases in women.

In the description of his book, Harvard University Press He summarizes the essence of what he calls the conflict of interest in the female body as follows:

“Female physiology evolved to facilitate reproduction, not to reduce disease risk.”

Therefore, the researcher goes back several thousand years to look for answers.

a priority

“The past helps us understand what is happening to women today in terms of health and physiology,” she says in our interview.

Our evolutionary legacy carries weight when it comes to cancer and reproduction.

“Evolutionarily, pass on genes to the next generation always more important to be healthy,” he says.

“Of course you have to be healthy to get through them, it’s an important part of the process, you have to find a mate to survive, to reproduce”, but “whatever” will be “more important than anything else” that happens to the organism to support this transmission.

For example, she explains that the likelihood of breast cancer in women increases in association with “lifelong exposure to estrogens,” hormones that are extremely important for pregnancy.

“The higher the lifetime exposure, the higher the risk of breast cancer.”

“One might ask: why natural selection, the main mechanism of evolutionary change, doesn’t make us different If estrogen is this bad for your health when it comes to breast cancer, to stop such high estrogen production?”

The answer is direct: because estrogens aid in reproduction.

“It doesn’t matter what detrimental consequences high estrogen has for life, as long as it promotes gene transfer to the next generation.”

Natural selection “don’t care” about women’s health as much as their reproductive abilities.

“Estrogens, a group of female sex hormones, are known human carcinogens. While these hormones have essential physiological functions in both women and men, they have also been associated with increased risks of certain cancers.”

US National Cancer Institute

more menstrual cycles

The professor investigated the dramatic change in the number of menstrual cycles.

“In the period we call the Stone Age, women only 100 cycles throughout their lives.”

There is no certainty as to why. It is believed to be because they matured later, although it may have affected them to enter menopause earlier.

“The first menstrual period was much later than what women experience now, we don’t know how much later, but maybe around 16 years old.”

This variation added several years of menstrual cycles to the lives of women who developed around the ages of 12, 13.

Also, because our ancestors had more children, pregnancy and breastfeeding have an effect on menstruation.

This is “modern women’s 450 cycles For life instead of 100″.

“It’s a huge difference when you consider exposure to estrogen,” because these ovarian hormones play a regulatory role in the menstrual cycle.

According to the professor, the way these cycles develop has also changed. For example, they have higher levels of hormone production than in the past.

We find that “when it comes to estrogen exposure and modern life, we have more cycles and a different quality” and that means “more exposure to hormones.”

“Breast cancer cells have receptors (proteins) that bind to estrogen and progesterone that help them grow.”

American Cancer Society

Price

“Whatever you do in life, there will be some costs associated with it. If you focus on reproduction physiologically, it will come at a cost,” says the professor.

For example, you will not be able to assign the same level of energy that you dedicate to reproduction to other functions of your own organism, and this can cause other aspects of your health to suffer.

“The immune system will suffer because you invested energy in reproduction. The risk of contracting an infection will increase and therefore other aspects of the immune system will be affected.”

“In a way, you accumulate damage during your reproductive years by the fact that you’re in this role.

“And of course natural selection doesn’t care much for us in the post-reproductive phase.”

“Reproduction in human females is expensive in terms of energy, nutrients, and metabolic adjustments. Thus, females experiencing high reproductive stress as a result of multiple reproductive events are expected to age faster. However, the evidence for long-term adverse reproductive effects is scant.”

“Many studies have documented that women with intensive reproduction have an increased risk. age-related diseases ».

“In humans, as in other species, natural selection favored traits that were beneficial for successful reproduction, although not particularly beneficial to health in old age.”

Jasienska, reproductive and aging costs in the human female.

grandma hypothesis

But the expert raises the so-called grandmother hypothesis that when women reach the stage where they can’t have more children even though they “cannot pass on genes directly to the next generation,” they do so by helping in some way. their children and grandchildren pass them on.

“In this sense, it can be said that when we are post-productive, natural selection does not kill us immediately because it still has evolutionary meaning.”

“In many species, females live as long as they can, and they manage to do so without natural selection for the rest of their lives.”

“We can live much longer (after that stage) and there’s a lot of discussion about that from an evolutionary biology perspective.”

“Why do we keep us alive for so long if we can’t pass on genes that are the evolutionary biological purpose of life and natural selection?”

The grandma hypothesis is an explanation, he says. “Maybe women still have an evolutionary role.”

Ancestral diet?

The teacher believes that although cancer is also related to the modern lifestyle, there are other factors that can interfere with this disease.

The same goes for other ailments.

Fragile Wisdom He brings up a fact: We hear every day how different diseases can be prevented by living a healthy life, but when we get sick, the feeling that we have somehow failed in our attempt to follow through can be overwhelming.

“What is the right diet? Some people recommend what they call the Stone Age diet,” says BBC Mundo.

“There was no Stone Age diet because there was such a wide variety of diets depending on whether you were in a cold climate, in the desert, or on the beach.”

“There’s this idea that if we eat like our ancestors did, we’ll be healthy and slim and beautiful, but no, it doesn’t work that way because they ate a lot of food and people in general, They evolved to eat a lot of things.”

“I think it was something that happened in evolution: We don’t need a very special diet to survive. We’ve evolved to eat very different things and be good.

And that’s a wonderful thing from our past.”

Do not seek perfection in natural selection

“We’re just human, we can’t be perfect. We also don’t know how we will be, as some health recommendations change frequently.”

And one example of these is precisely diets.

“People tell you one thing: Eggs are really bad, but then another study says they’re good. There’s an article that says coffee is harmful, then there’s an article that makes it great, and that three or four cups a day will make your health better.

“Most of the health messages very confusing«, although others are absolutely obvious and proven: «If you smoke, you are ruining your life and there you can blame yourself».

It is important to try to pay attention to our diet and exercise.

But the truth is, health is very complex: “There are lots of interactions, you don’t have to try to be perfect all the time.”

We have to take care of ourselves and we don’t want to be a burden to anyone, not only for ourselves but also for our families and friends.

“It would be nice to be active and healthy in old age, but if we’re not, that doesn’t mean it’s our fault.”

“We’ll never know if it’s genetic, it could be due to some kind of interaction, an accident in our physiology.”

“Nothing makes any sense…”

Another aspect is physical activity, where our ancestors left us behind.

“Of course physical activity is very good for health. But how much should we do? We don’t know yet. There are many organizations that will tell you three times a week, others that many minutes, some will suggest something else.

But it depends on the needs and health status of each person.

In some of his academic articles, Jasienska recalls the famous quote of the Ukrainian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing makes sense in biology that is not in the light of evolution.«.

Actually, in the text Public health needs evolutionary thinking, The researcher puts it this way: “Nothing in demography and public health makes sense unless it’s in the light of evolution”.

And he believes that “we cannot truly understand the workings of any organism without applying the evolutionary approach.”

As Laura G. Goetz points out in an article in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine: “As fascinating as it is educational, The Fragile Wisdom raises as many questions as it answers in the best possible way.”