Weird Things Humans Do
Things That Seem Normal, But are Not
We do a lot of strange things, and unfortunately for our health, they often lead to illness. As a whole, our memories are short, we think that the things we do every day are the things that humans have always done, but this is just not true.
To determine what we should do, we often look to other people for help; scientists call this “social proof”. Social proof is fine when everyone around you is acting in accordance with their health and their happiness, but as you might guess from all the unhealthy people you see every day, this just isn’t the case. We have slowly moved from healthy living habits to destructive habits and the movement has been so slow we have barely noticed it. I’ve gathered together some of the weird things humans do that can seem perfectly normal because everyone else is doing them, but are not.
If you are looking to improve your health, you might want to steer clear of what everyone else is doing.
- Not Sleeping When We Are Tired: Look around you: dogs, cats – even the mice in your walls – all lie down and sleep when they are tired. We don’t do that. What do you do if you are tired? If you are like a lot of us, you reach for coffee. Animals don’t do that, they lie down and sleep when they are tired. There are actually two issues here: the first is that amount of sleep you need and the second is sleeping during the day. It can be a bit hard to determine what is normal for the amount of sleep we need, but looking at animals, they are sleeping much more than we are and they tend to break up their sleep into smaller chunks. You might need eight hours of sleep, but maybe your number is six or ten hours. You should also consider adding a nap into your routine. Next time you think you need a pick-me-up from your coffee cup, try a short nap. I’m a big fan of the nap and try to catch one every day; it is the best way I know to “reboot” my brain for an afternoon in front of the computer. Here is a great page for information on napping and a no nonsense guide to napping.
- Not Relaxing: You relax don’t you? You go home, sit in front of the television and relax. Right? That is not what I’m talking about. You, your body, your mind, and your soul need a time out. I’m not talking about sitting in front of the television, but true relaxing, just hanging out and doing nothing. To understand what I mean by relaxing, try picturing a day at the beach. The beach seems to be one place in our society where it is okay to just sit and do nothing (if you didn’t pack in toys, radios…). Try to set aside a small portion of your day for pretending you are on the beach. Just sit and stare at the clouds or your ceiling or whatever. Do nothing, just let your mind wander. If you are into prayer or mediation, this is a great time to practice that.
- Eating Grains:
I know what you are thinking when you read this: of course it is normal to eat grains; the government recommends that grains make up most of our diet, it has to be normal. But, once again, eating grains seems normal because everyone is doing it, but grains are not optimal food for humans. Humans have only been munching on grains – in any large amounts – for the last 7,000 years. Sure, that sounds like a lot of time, but it actually is not. Our bodies have not adapted to the large amount of carbohydrates we put into them. High blood sugar which results from eating grains is responsible for more ill health than smoking cigarettes (see my book Sugarettes). Try replacing grains with fruits and vegetables at every meal. You will be astonished at how much better you feel. - Wearing Shoes: Putting shoes on your feet seems pretty normal, right? Actually, your foot is incredible complex and wearing shoes all the time can be harmful to your feet. I suggest you spend at least part of the day waking around without shoes. A great trick is to get a plastic bucket and fill it with small stones (like pea gravel) spend ten or 15 minutes just standing in the gravel. It gives your feet a massage and rebuilds many of the muscles that have atrophied due to shoe wearing. There are also shoes from Terra Plana called Vivo Barefoot shoes that have a Kevlar bottom so that your feet can have the barefoot experience while still looking like a normal shoe.
- Being Inside: We live most of our lives inside and this is just not healthy. Not only is the air pollution inside a home or office often much worse than outside, we are also not getting enough sunlight. We have grown afraid of the big bad sun and have forgotten that it has a lot to do with our health. Yes, you should not be out in the sun long enough to get a bad burn, but skin cancer has a lot less to do with our exposure to sunlight than previously thought. It appears that skin cancer may have much more to do with the lack of essential nutrients than sun exposure; some research suggests that it is the lack of sunlight that causes cancer. We get vitamin D from sun exposure and that vitamin is so essential to our health that you should consider supplementing if you are not getting enough (I like cod liver oil for vitamin D supplementation).
- Drinking Calories: If you think, like I do, that eating foods as close to the way that they are presented to us in nature (non-processed) is the best way to eat, then you have to question consuming calories in liquid form. Think about it, if you go back 10,000 years, how many drinkable foods were available on the planet? Only water (okay, and, breast milk). Drinking calories only becomes a problem when those calories are mostly sugars. Sugars in liquid form are absorbed rapidly into our bodies and create all sorts of havoc including: weight gain, diabetes, heart disease and maybe even cancer. Our bodies are woefully unprepared for calories to come in a liquid form. If you are going to do only one thing for your health, I strongly urge you to stop drinking soda and fruit juice.
- Stretching Before Exercise: Okay, I don’t count this as a major health hazard, but there is a great recent article that shows stretching is not such a good idea for athletes.
- Not Moving our Buns Around: We sit a lot! We sit in cars, we sit at work, we sit on the couch… humans are professional sitters. Our ancestors had far more muscle mass than most of us do today. Muscle mass is one of the keys to not only how long we live, but also to general health and weight loss. You need to get up and move your buns around every day and build up your muscle mass. Walking is perhaps the best exercise you can participate in, but swimming, cycling, running, hiking and anything that gets your heart rate up, are all great. Exercise is so important that you should prioritize it over everything else that you do: exercise is a vitamin, exercise is a drug, exercise is the fountain of youth. There are hundreds of research studies that show that exercise helps with weight loss, depression, anxiety, heart health and works as an anti-cancer activity. Get off your buns and move them around a bit every day.
- Not Going to The Bathroom When We Need to Go: Once again, look to the animal world and find one animal that will stop its urges to go to the bathroom. Ignoring the urge to urinate has been associated with a higher rate of urinary tract infections, but it is especially harmful when you hold on to a bowel movement. Constipation is a major source of illness and increases the risk for hemorrhoids and even certain cancers. Constipation often leads to more constipation. I know it is hard, because of how we live our lives, but try and not ignore your body’s urges.
- Cooking Foods: As I mentioned earlier, it is best to eat foods as close to the way that they are presented to us as possible. When we cook foods, they lose vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients. The most grievous of losses are the loss of essential fatty acids, or EFAs. Most of us don’t get enough essential fatty acids and EFAs are one of the few supplements that I think everyone should take (one again, I would recommend cod liver oil to get your EFAs).
Well, there they are: the Weird Things Humans Do. I’m sure I missed a few; feel free to add them into the comment section. When you look at all the strange things we do you start to realize just how un-normal normal can be. Health is a matter of breaking free of the things most people do and charting a way through the world that prioritizes your health.
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I’m very guilty of “wearing shoes”. I never wanted my kids to wear shoes as infants to impede their physical development and even when we moved out to a rural area they ran around outside sans footwear much of the time (at first). Now, however, with the current state of our fields and areas around the outbuildings we have so many Goathead weeds that they get tracked in to the house (that time of year) and if I’m not villigent about keeping them off the floors we end up stepping on them. Ouch! Even with constant sweeping and vaccuming at least one of us ends up with a goathead injury to the foot once a day. I’ve now resigned myself to everyone wearing slippers for now.
cchiovitti: I think there is always a balance between what we want to achieve and what the realities are. It sounds like you have created a good balance.
Awesome post! I have often pondered the weird human perplexities of many of these. If humans would live more like the “animals” that we are, we would indeed be so much healthier.
Fantastic post! Thanks for sending it to me. It’s great to see others putting the good word out there. The more this is done the more what is now normal will be seen for what it is.
Excellent article! I’m happy to say I don’t do most of these weird things. Relax is what I need to work on. I spend too much time online and my mind can’t shut down.
Thanks for the great post!
Awesome post, these are all great points which are so obvious but often overlooked. I agree on taking naps but its hard in the working environment; there is nothing better to me than a good 20 minute nap on a sunday afternoon but I don’t have the luxury when working….
Very interesting views on what isn’t natural. I agree with all of them. I hate to cook, so now I have a great reason. I don’t like stretching, so waaa..la.. I don’t have to now. I am very happy about this post. Thank-you!
~K
How many of these weird things humans do will you admit to: http://tinyurl.com/56z9ky
Another weird thing humans do–drink milk after infancy. Animals don’t drink milk after being weaned but humans continue to produce lactase to digest the milk only because they continue drinking milk. Of course, if you stop drinking milk for awhile (like I did) then you can develop lactose intolerance. And many people are lactose intolerant anyway…
Sneaks’s last blog post..Elvis Ice Cream!
I think you have said the truth. However I prefer if you could give more details on every subject you have touched.
Great post! Maybe you should add “biting your nails” on the list. Just a suggestion.
Funny! I’ve been thinking about a second list lately.
You can’t honestly say that stretching is bad for athletes can you? Did you even read the article about this you posted? Yes stretching is bad…. If you do it BEFORE your workout. After a workout stretching has zillions of benefits for athletes, such as increase is range of motion and strength and lets not forget about how much it helps with recovery. I suggest you make sure what you write is true before it makes it to the final draft. And avoid fruit juices?!?!?! You do know you contradicted yourself when you said replace grains with fruit and then said avoid fruit juices right? Fruit kinda has a lot of juice in it. Also the whole idea of not eating whole grains is kinda of silly, yes they are hard for the human body to digest but that is the point of fiber, it doesn’t pass threw the system quickly so that it can pick up harmful toxins out of the intestine. Zero Stars, all you’ve accomplished with this post is the fooling of hundreds of easily per-swayed people. Please email me with any arguments I’d LOVE to hear them.
Yuri, thanks for your comments. You might have missed the spirit of the post a bit, it was meant to point out some strange things that we do. For example, Imagine for a moment if a cheetah had to stretch before running after an antelope. Clearly we are strange creatures to stretch before we run. But, you are exactly right, stretching has its benefits, although I prefer yoga, when it is done away from exercise.
As far as fruit juice and fruit, there is a world of difference between the two. If you strip away the fiber from a fruit (as you do when you are juicing) you now have a highly concentrated sugar (the fiber in fruit slows down the absorption of the sugars). Fruit juice is a processed sugar but fruit itself is healthy.
To show just how silly eating grains is, imagine that you are in a field of grains and you don’t have any tools in which to eat them; how long do you think you could survive eating the grains straight from the field? The ONLY way we can eat grains is to process them (grind them, boil them…). If you were in a field of apples, carrots, broccoli or even rabbits, you wouldn’t have the same trouble digesting them without tools (although catching the rabbit may be a bit hard).
I thank you for your comments!
Just want to say your article is striking. The clarity in your post is simply striking and i can take for granted you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the ac complished work. Excuse my poor English. English is not my mother tongue.
Nice article, although circa 9- 10,000 years ago there were plenty of drinks. Beer, wine, mead, fermented mares milk, nectar from trees. etc..chocolate drinks from ancient Honduras. Goats milk.
By the way (dr Scott poster above) grain can be eaten raw (yuk) especially before they are dried. Or soak in water. Maybe thats how it was done?
You actually did forget a weird thing or characteristic about us humans. Our intelligence! Have you ever thought about that? Well, I have, I actually pondure about the weirdness of humans almost everyday. Just think about it. Humans, little scrawny creatures have climbed to the top of the global food chain through our intellience, comminication, will-power, stubborness, and the rule of there’s no such thing as can’t! Hey! You have to give us our props.:)
I have to agree, i am concerned too many people want to be like everyone else, and ignore there own personality traits. ie: lack of excersise, alcohol, grainy refined processed foods. And then wonder why they have cancer! Its no joke, They think its ok to bann smoking, what about sugar, chemicals in food that are killing people everyday, depleteing them f vitimans that would prevent cancer, in the first place! then they take more drugs to kill cancer and wonder why they feel even worse?
HA! I WISH I could take a nap every day! I definitely do on the weekends or any time I’m home during the week for whatever reason (holiday, staying home with sick kid, etc.) I wish the United States took a tip from some other companies… SIESTA! Seriously, we should all organize and DEMAND nap time!
I meant “from some other countries…”
Couldn’t agree more!
well we do have some lactose intolerance in our family and we just cut out on dairy products. `”: