ABSTRACT
The critical requirement for species’ survival is securing nutrients. Surviving organisms either have primarily had characteristics enabling them to withstand all ambient environmental threats to their existence (‘‘stressors’’) or have evolved through adaptability. Foremost among species in the latter group is Homo sapiens. Evolutionary pressure had quantitatively and qualitatively stimulated the development of mechanisms to detect, evaluate, ingest, digest, assimilate, store, and release nutrients to sustain life when humans appeared some 4 million years ago. It is only during the last 150 years that the efficiency of these mechanisms has become maladaptive, driving a life-threatening, civilization-related, global epidemic of a syndrome of metabolic obesity.
