2015 Review Round-Up: Nonfiction: Too Much of a Good Thing, Lee Goldman

Too Much of a Good Thing: How Four Key Survival Traits are Now Killing Us
Lee Goldman, MD
ISBN: 9780316236812
Interesting study of big systemic medical problems, and how they're actually ancient survival traits.
Read December 2015

Here's the four, because I know you're curious.
1) Obesity: fat craving and hoarding.  We used to need all those calories to survive, now they're making us fat and diabetic

2) High Blood Pressure: salt craving and dehydration.  We are able to store and retrieve water for a very long time compared to other mammals, but the tradeoff is liver damage and high blood pressure.

3) Anxiety/Depression: fear/aversion mechanisms.  They used to keep us alive when a rustling branch could have been a tiger, or a sign of an incoming hailstorm.  Now they force people to relive trauma and to be overly anxious or beaten down.

4) Strokes/Heart Attacks: clotting mechanisms.  Once upon a time, we were surrounded by a world that made us bleed pretty often.  Especially childbirth, which without overactive clotting, would have doomed the species.  Now we're often within hailing distance of a hospital, and the clots themselves are killing us.

The first three quarters of the book, where he dissects these four sets of biological phenomena, is really fascinating, and I wish he would have stopped there, but I imagine the publisher or his editor demanded that he provide a solution (there isn't one) which he attempts in a sort of half-hearted coda about altering genetics or behaviors or both.  I get why it's there (the book is a bit of a downer, to be completely honest - so scientifically interesting, but a downer) but it really throws the book off stride and makes the finish a lot weaker than it could have otherwise been.