First World Problems - Baba Brinkman

Twenty first century Homo sapien

Livin' it up, packin' weight on my waist again

Like a boss with the visceral fat

Rockin' a Rick Ross body instead of a six pack

Rippin' open a crisp snack, drinkin' a six pack

Of high fructose soda, livin' a mismatch

Our ancestors were Africans

Most of them died from infectious pathogens

Hunting, gathering, violence, accidents

Frequent negative energy balances

But the habitat that they adapted in

Ain’t like 2015, back in the day

They hunted meat and ate nuts and seeds

Fibrous fruits, tubers and crunchy greens

They slurped up whatever they could and saved it

As body fat, no surplus wasted

Evolutionarily adapted

To walk ten clicks per day on average

Five or six pounds of sugar per year

We ingest a hundred pounds up in here!

Livin' large and sedentary,

scoopin' the Ben and Jerry’s

Cemeteries full of people with teeth full of dental caries

Yeah, so raise up the libations

To the fruits of civilization!

Osteoporosis, OCD, scurvy, diabetes

First world problems

Hypertension, anxiety,

impacted wisdom teeth

First world problems

Atherosclerosis, myopia,

Chron’s disease

First world problems

The non-infectious, chronic,

mismatch list is long indeed

First world problems

The military industrial complex

In your blood stream responds to bomb threats

We always had a belly full of intestinal worms

That’s our «natural» state where selection’s concerned

Now we’re so hygienic,

we’re out of tune

Attackin' ourselves,

call it «auto immune»

We beat back cholera, polio, small pox

But chronic diseases are tougher to outfox

Fewer loopholes,

evolution moves slow

As far as food goes, we crave fruit rolls

Instead of fruit, overdose on glucose

Sucrose, the emperor’s edible new clothes

Fabulous opulence,

gastroenterologist

People buy rich food,

ask an economist

It took a while to evolve lactose tolerance

How long will it take to adapt to McDonald’s then?

So many products,

simple starches

Mismatches everywhere,

fallen arches

Women’s liberation!

Babies, havin' less of them

Extra periods full of cancer-causing estrogen

Who knew?

Too many, too few

Too clean, too comfortable, too new

We got a genome livin' in the stone age

But there’s no goin' back to the old ways

Osteoporosis, OCD, scurvy, diabetes

First world problems

Hypertension, anxiety, impacted wisdom teeth

First world problems

Atherosclerosis, myopia, chron’s disease

First world problems

The non-infectious, chronic, mismatch list is long indeed

First world problems

Time for the epilogue

What can we do to not hurry death along?

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants

Jog until you gotta hold up your pants

Seek to understand and hence empathize

There’s more to it than just diet and exercise

Metabolic imprinting is also relevant

Pregnancy, neonatal, early child development

Environmental-genome interactions

Yeah, these bodies are phenotypically plastic

And we moderns are livin' like kings

Nice food, nice drink, nice linen, nice things

And most of the illnesses that dispatch us

Are past-present evolutionary mismatches

Now take that perspective and be sensible

‘Cause seventy percent of these deaths are preventable

First world problems