Challenges make a thing use its greatest capacity to complete a task or, even, to fulfill its purpose. Lacking a challenge, the thing might change its function or go away entirely, leading me to suspect that challenge is crucial to purpose.
Humans’ inclination to displace life’s challenges off of the body and onto a tool has shaped us from the beginning- most especially when it came to the challenge of eating.
Primatologist Richard Wrangham explains that the transition to cooking our food fundamentally shaped our bodies into what we are working with today, e.g. smaller mouths, smaller guts, punier teeth than apes. We have come to rely heavily on food processing (cooking, fermentation etc) for digestion.
So for better or for worse the human form was shaped in large part by processing our food, making digestion easier and leaving extra energy for thousands of years of other inventions, which are continuing to shape us in ways we don’t yet know. Which brings us to…the appendix!
The irony of the appendix is that it turns out to be much more functional to us than we thought, but may well be on its way out after all.
Scientists are continuing to find evidence that reveals the appendix as a useful organ, and not, as Charles Darwin assumed, just a remnant from past preference of plants. Studies from the last few years has show the appendix to be an evolved organ that houses good bacteria waiting to repopulate the gut after the system is flushed due to the presence of harmful microbes.
This use has been hidden from us since increased use of sterilization, clean drinking water and non-threatening foodstuffs has meant that survival in an industrialized world may be possible without an appendix. In fact the presence of the appendix seems to do more harm than good in clean conditions as they are finding a relationship between the inflammation of the appendix, which leads to its removal, and the fact that it is under-used.
As explained by researcher William Parker, Ph.D. (more from him here)
“Several decades ago, scientists suggested that people in industrialized societies might have such a high rate of appendicitis because of the so-called “hygiene hypothesis,”…This hypothesis posits that people in “hygienic” societies have higher rates of allergy and perhaps autoimmune disease because they — and hence their immune systems — have not been as challenged during everyday life by the host of parasites or other disease-causing organisms commonly found in the environment. So when these immune systems are challenged, they can over-react….
This over-reactive immune system may lead to the inflammation associated with appendicitis and could lead to the obstruction of the intestines that causes acute appendicitis…Thus, our modern health care and sanitation practices may account not only for the lack of a need for an appendix in our society, but also for much of the problems caused by the appendix in our society.”
So, what should we do with our vermiform organ? Use it or lose it? “The function of the appendix could be rendered obsolete by cultural changes…” says Parker. “[Such changes have] left our immune systems with too little work and too much time their hands – a recipe for trouble.”
Cooking our food fundamentally changed the human body, and increased sanitation of food and drink seems to be on the way to do the same. But to just accept the obsolescence of this functional organ as a part of our ongoing evolution seems flawed. We can’t guarantee current conditions (not to mention that most of the world doesn’t experience such conditions) and we still are just discovering the power of the microbes in our gut as fighters of all sorts of disease; it seems hasty to just discount the thing entirely, though we often do since the appendectomy is the most commonly performed emergency operation in the world.
So, we should put it to use right? Parker posits that we should start challenging our appendix and the immune system generally with the tasks they are supposed to tackle. A completely great idea! However, I think he is looking to the problem for the solution…”If modern medicine could figure out a way to do that,” Parker says “we would see far fewer cases of allergies, autoimmune disease, and appendicitis.”
I think this dilemma provides a lovely analogy to the situation currently faced by the whole human body. We have these perfectly useful systems, well-adapted to deal with challenges of daily life for the last 499,950 years, give or take. Modern society has taken it upon itself to relieve us of these challenges, only to find out that they are entirely necessary!
In the case of the gut, we might try trusting our microbes to deal with the challenges they are capable of facing. Instead, we should rely on modern medicine to bottle up and feed us those very challenges it helped us/told us to avoid?
I say, start with what we have and use it as its meant to be used. Drink raw milk, dig in the dirt, eat fermented food, even get sick! Resist the obsolescence of the human body and challenge it to its fullest extent.
In that spirit, after the challenge of a long trek on foot (and embarking on the challenge of marriage) and a long break from the blog, I look forward to recounting the adventures and the lessons, along with continued thoughts from home kitchen. No longer the itinerant one below (for now anyway).
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