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millions of years the human body has evolved and changed in order to adapt to changing environments. But the problem is that ever since we developed language, our cultural systems have exploded. The rate at which our culture has become more and more complex is unprecedented. Through our enormous intellect and our cultural ability to share knowledge, we have founds way to adapt to harsh and changing environments without the need of evolution. And this presents a problem. As presented in the first paper, most Western mothers no longer breast feed, but instead use a bottle and often replace the breast milk with formula. This was a very interesting article, as it gave a lot of facts and figures, and I can honestly say that, thanks to this article, my children will probably be breast fed. However, I think this article makes too many generalized conclusions. It "markets" breast feeding as the "end-all cure-all", a sort of miracle tonic. If you took everything in it at face value, we'd have a cure for cancer, anemia, depression, osteoporosis, and SIDS. It's like you were saying that people with short hair tend to have higher levels of cancer than people with long hair, so as a result you should let your hair grow long. I know I'm overstating it a bit, but that's just the general impression I get from it.

Getting back to the problem of evolution, as stated in the second article humans as well as most animals evolved the ability to store excess energy in the form of fat for use in times of famine. However, in today's society, especially the affluent ones, this has become a great problem. We have a constant supply of food and we spend most of our time trying to find ways to get out of physical activities. If we can drive instead of walking, then we will. This article seemed a little scattered to me, as it was long and brought in many different topics, but I found it to be very interesting. There was one specific comment that I really loved that basically talked about how funny it is that we suffer from an obesity epidemic in a world that is starving. In the social structure and obesity section, there was one comment that I found particularly interesting. It basically said that among the daily stresses of poverty, poorer people may find food to be the most common avenue of pleasure and psychological relief. Growing up in a very poor area, I was able to see first hand how this could be true. I used to work in a grocery store and every time the first of the month rolled around and food stamps were issued, crowds of people flocked to the store to buy food. And they didn't just buy a little food, they spent every penny they had sometimes buying as much as four carts full. Using food as an outlet, it's easy to see how this