ABSTRACT
When defining the factors of a healthy lifestyle that aims at preventing a disease like cancer, a logical approach is to compare individuals that get the disease with those that don't. Cancer, which might be considered a disease of civilization, has consistently been reported to be very rare among uncivilized hunter-gatherer societies [1-4]. This observation makes sense from an evolutionary perspective from which it is reasonable to assume that the lifestyle factors that protect our genome against tumorigenesis have been selected for early in the history of the genus homo when humans lived as hunter-gatherers [5]. In particular, the time since the neolithic revolution, which meant the transition from foraging and nomadism to agriculture and settlement, spans a fraction less than 1% of human history. Thus, the switch from the "caveman's diet" consisting of fat, meat and only occasionally roots, berries and other sources of carbohydrate (CHO) to a nutrition dominated by easily digestible CHOs derived mainly from grains as staple food would have occurred too recently to induce major adoptions in our genes encoding the metabolic pathways. This is even more the case
for the changes that occurred over the past 100 years, in particular the switch from labor in the field to a sedentary lifestyle and an increase in the consumption of easily digestible CHOs with high glycemic indices (GIs), leading to diseases of civilization that are strongly associated with the socalled Western way of life [6]. Despite a large heterogeneity in regional occupation, modern hunter-gatherers share certain lifestyle factors that are not frequently met in Westernized societies, including regular physical activity, sun exposure, sufficient sleep, low chronic stress and the lack of foods that would also not have been available to our pre-neolithic ancestors. While there is already compelling evidence for the beneficial roles of regular physical activity and sufficient vitamin D in the prevention and treatment of cancer, the influence of the altered nutritional patterns in the Western diet is less clearly defined.
