Author: Dana Gibson

Obesity is not a personal failure. It is a predictable outcome of a human body that evolved for seasonal scarcity, cold exposure, and high physical effort now living in a world of constant caloric abundance, indoor warmth, and motorized ease. In evolutionary medicine, we call this a mismatch disease: a condition that arises when an…

Your immune system is not broken. It is bored, underemployed, and living in a condo that is far too clean for its own good. The phenomenon has many names: the hygiene hypothesis, the old friends hypothesis, biome depletion, or, in the language of evolutionary medicine, a mismatch between the microbial world our immune systems evolved…

It was the Saturday after Christmas. The emergency department at a Saguenay hospital was running the kind of controlled chaos that only Réveillon season produces. A fifty-three-year-old man—let’s call him Marc—arrived with his wife, who was translating between panic and French. During the family meal, Marc had laughed mid-bite of tourtière, inhaled a fragment of…

Evolutionary mismatch is the gap between the environment our bodies were built for and the one we actually live in. When it comes to food, that means the distance between a diet of wild plants, game, fish, and seasonal scarcity, and the 24/7 availability of ultra-processed, hyper-palatable, shelf-stable products. For readers in Quebec, this is…

She sat across the desk in a Saint-Laurent clinic, hands folded in her lap, and told me her lower back pain had started six weeks ago. Two minutes later: four months. Then, on and off since the previous winter. Her spouse beside her frowned. “I thought you said it started after we moved the couch.”…

I was standing in the checkout line at a Montreal IGA last Tuesday, watching a man ahead of me unload his haul: a family-sized bag of ketchup-flavored chips, a two-litre bottle of bright orange soda, a box of Jos Louis, and a shrink-wrapped tray of processed cheese slices. He caught my eye, shrugged, and said…

The Ghosts of Our Dietary Past Picture a time traveler from 18th-century New France, bewildered in the fluorescent glow of a modern Quebec City supermarket. After the initial shock of electric lights and piped-in music, their gaze would inevitably land on the bread aisle. Rows of uniformly sliced, plastic-wrapped loaves, engineered to stay soft for…

Evolutionary mismatch is the gap between the environment our bodies were built for and the one we actually live in. When it comes to food, that gap is a canyon—between the wild, fibrous, seasonal stuff that shaped human metabolism over two million years and the ultra-processed products that now fill the centre aisles of every…

Last March, a Cree elder in Eeyou Istchee told me about a caribou migration corridor his community had tracked for generations. The route, he said, followed a specific ridge line because the animals preferred wind-swept ground where crust ice thinned first in spring. He drew it on a napkin during a community consultation. Three months…

Our bodies are still living in the Pleistocene. That’s the quiet, unsettling truth behind every sugar shack feast and every late-night poutine. The environment we’re built for—one of seasonal scarcity, fibrous roots, and the occasional lucky find of honey—has been steamrolled by a world where calories are cheap, hyper-palatable, and engineered to be irresistible. Here…

Imagine a fur-clad hunter from 50,000 years ago stepping into a Montreal supermarket in January. The meat counter might look vaguely familiar. The fish on ice, maybe. But the rest? Aisles of glowing boxes, bags that crinkle, bottles of liquid that taste sweeter than any berry he’s ever foraged. His body, honed by millennia of…

Every time I walk through Marché Jean-Talon or one of those gleaming Metro supermarkets in Montreal, I feel a quiet, ancestral dissonance. The bins of brightly packaged snacks, the endless aisles of sugary drinks, the bread that stays soft for two weeks—none of it is inherently evil. But from the perspective of a human body…