Maybe Better Health Starts with Living a Little More Like Our Ancestors

Originally written in Chinese. This English edition is translated and lightly adapted from the original.

Lately, I’ve been coming back to one idea: If we want to be healthier, maybe we need to live a little more like our ancestors—at least when it comes to the basics.

Homo sapiens have been around for roughly 300,000 years. Agriculture is only a little over 10,000 years old. The Industrial Revolution happened just a few centuries ago. Smartphones, electric lights, cars, and an endless supply of ultra-processed snacks are practically brand new on that timeline.

Evolutionary medicine has a useful concept for thinking about this: evolutionary mismatch.

The basic idea is that our environment can change much faster than some of the biological systems that developed under very different conditions. Sometimes, our surroundings and our bodies don’t line up especially well.

That doesn’t mean humans stopped evolving, or that every modern health problem is an evolutionary mismatch. And it definitely doesn’t mean prehistoric life was automatically healthier. Without modern medicine, infections, injuries, and many other threats were far more dangerous.

Still, I find this framework useful. What if, before searching for the next health hack, we looked at the ways humans lived for most of our history? We might rediscover some surprisingly simple fundamentals.

I’d start with three things: food, light, and movement.

1. Food: Eat more things that still look like food

What did our ancestors actually eat? The answer depends enormously on geography, climate, and time period. Some groups relied heavily on animal foods. Others ate more roots, grains, fruits, or other plants.

So I don’t believe in one perfect “ancestral diet” that everyone should copy.

But there’s an obvious difference between much of human dietary history and modern food environments: for a long time, people ate mostly recognizable foods, not industrially engineered snacks designed to be effortlessly appealing.

Meat, fish, eggs, fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, roots, and, later, the grains that became staples in many cultures. None of this is mysterious.

Today, it’s easy to replace a meal with something convenient, heavily marketed, and packaged. If that becomes the default, nutrient-dense foods and fiber can gradually get pushed out of the diet.

And this is about more than calories or weight.

The gut communicates with the immune system and the brain through complicated biological pathways. Dietary fiber and variety can influence the gut microbiome, and different people respond differently to different foods.

That’s why, when someone constantly feels uncomfortable after eating, I don’t think the first question always needs to be, “Which probiotic should I buy?”

Start by looking at the basics. Are you eating enough vegetables, fruit, and protein? Are there foods that consistently bother you? Are snacks replacing real meals? Persistent symptoms, of course, deserve proper medical evaluation rather than endless self-experimentation.

Get the foundation of your diet right before searching for something to add on top of it.

My favorite practical rule is to eat more foods you can recognize immediately.

Beef looks like beef. Eggs look like eggs. Potatoes look like potatoes. Fruit looks like fruit.

This isn’t an argument that all processing is bad. Plain yogurt, tofu, and frozen vegetables are processed too, and they can absolutely be part of a healthy diet. What I’m trying to reduce are foods that are easy to overeat while contributing relatively little nutritional value.

2. Light: Let daytime feel like daytime again

For most of human history, the pattern of daily light was pretty simple: bright days and dark nights.

Our circadian system still relies heavily on light as a signal for what time it is.

Modern life makes that surprisingly easy to reverse. We spend much of the day indoors, often in lighting far dimmer than natural daylight. Then, at night, we turn on every lamp and stare into our phones and laptops.

We sometimes live in a world where the days aren’t very bright and the nights aren’t very dark.

That’s why I like one uncomplicated habit: get outside shortly after waking up.

You don’t need to bake in the sun or pursue a tan. Have a coffee outside, go for a short walk, or simply spend a little time in daylight. Outdoor light is generally a much stronger daytime signal than typical indoor lighting.

If you have time around sunset, step outside again and notice how the light changes. Later, dim your lights as the evening goes on.

I look into things like melatonin and blue-light glasses too. But I increasingly think it’s worth getting our daily light exposure and sleep schedule in order before obsessing over tools and supplements.

Make the day feel like daytime and the night feel like nighttime.

3. Movement: Exercise shouldn’t be an optional add-on to life

For earlier humans, physical activity was inseparable from ordinary life.

Walking, carrying, squatting, climbing, and running weren’t scheduled as exercise sessions. They were simply part of surviving and getting things done.

Today, the opposite is possible.

You can order food without leaving your apartment, take a car everywhere, have almost anything delivered, and spend an entire day studying or working at a desk.

Yet our muscles still need to be used. Our bones respond to appropriate loading. Our cardiovascular system benefits from regular activity. Movement isn’t merely a bonus you earn after everything else is done; it’s closer to basic maintenance.

That doesn’t mean everyone should train like a bodybuilder.

I think three habits are a great place to start:

1. Walk more and weave movement into everyday life.
2. Break up long periods of sitting.
3. Do some strength training each week, alongside cardio you enjoy—whether that’s cycling, running, lifting, or playing soccer.

I love lifting and playing soccer. But I don’t want people to think exercise is punishment, or something you can only begin once you’re chasing a perfect physique.

Your body is meant to be used.

Maybe the basics are the real health hack

After all of that, the takeaway is only three things:

Eat nourishing, recognizable foods.

Use daylight and darkness well.

Move your body every day.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here.

But that’s exactly why it’s easy to overlook. We keep looking for complicated, expensive, high-tech solutions while neglecting the things that matter most.

In my ongoing series, The Human Manual, I want to keep exploring one question: How can someone living a modern life take better care of the fundamentals of being human?

We’ll talk about sleep, nutrition, exercise, skin, hair, supplements, and everyday habits. The point isn’t to pretend we live in the Stone Age. It’s to find a way of living in modern society that works better with our biology.

Maybe better health isn’t about adding more and more. Maybe it’s about getting a few essential things right.

Eat well. Live well.

This is Protein Kitchen. Let’s keep learning and improving together.

Further reading

• Applying an evolutionary mismatch framework to understand disease susceptibility — PLOS Biology (2023)
• WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour