The Tsimane people live in the Bolivian jungle and eat a diet of monkey, piranhas, peccary, wild harvested nuts and fruit, and plantain, rice, and corn from small gardens. Although they are plagued by a variety of jungle diseases and parasitic worms, their average age of death is around 70, and they currently hold the record for the lowest incidence of cardiovascular disease of any group of people on the planet.
Recently some medical researchers convinced about 700 of these folks to take a two day trip to a clinic downriver and undergo high-tech x-ray scans of their coronary arteries, where they were found to have an average “arterial age” almost 30 years younger than the typical denizens of Western civilization.
Although the researchers can’t determine which part of the Tsimane lifestyle is responsible for their heart health, diet, exercise, the general lack of stress, some other variable, or some combination, cardiologist and author, Randall Thomson, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying “Obviously the Tsimane are achieving something that we are not.”
Stop. Heart health is an achievement? Let’s think about that for just a moment.
Doesn’t this have things backwards? The Tsimane are not trying to be healthy. They are just doing what they do, what they have always done: living their lives in a manner similar to that of their ancestors and their ancestors before them. They aren’t worried about their cholesterol. They don’t count their carbs. They don’t have a gym membership or a Fitbit recording their daily steps. Their health is not something that is achieved. It is a side effect of living a traditional lifestyle.
Wait, that’s not quite right, is it? I’m so metabolized into the civilized frame that I fell for it once again myself. Health is not a side effect of anything. It’s lack of health that is the side effect.
The cardiologist’s simple statement provides a window into the warped, carnival mirror perspective that civilization imposes on everything it comes in contact with. There are two main distortions on display in this particular story. The first is technological: that everything can ultimately be reduced to a mechanical system. Cardiovascular health can be “achieved” by assembling the right combination of behaviors. Second, that civilization is the default state for humans. The authors were a little too quick to emphasize that life is not all peaches and cream for these folks. Living in the jungle is hard work and fraught with danger and gross parasites. We can’t have anyone getting any ideas about going Tarzan here. The only thing we want from the Tsimane is to identify the specific causal factors involved in their superior heart health so that we can incorporate those things—and only those things, and only if they aren’t too onerous—into our (incomparably superior) civilized lifestyles.
The reality is the Tsimane haven’t achieved anything. They are healthy because they are living an authentic human lifestyle. It is corporate consumer industrial civilization that has done the achieving, and heart disease is only one among many of civilization’s noteworthy achievements.
