It Is All Interconnected – A Brief, Comparative Planetary Limits and Lifestyle Medicine Analysis of Production, Diet and Lifestyle During Three Stages of Human History

This interdisciplinary article examines interconnected issues of human and planetary health related to diet, disease, social organization, agricultural production, resource depletion and environmental damage. Largely egalitarian diets and lifestyles characterized prehistoric hunter-gatherer cultures. The Roman Empire serves as an example of the ultimate direct outcome of the Neolithic Revolution. As with the interconnected Mediterranean World of the Roman Empire in the second-third centuries CE, pandemic disease has likewise struck our third stage, the modern industrialized United States, in two centuries running. Prophylactic medical techniques, however, have brought these outbreaks under control more rapidly. The hyperabundant products of modern agriculture and the advances of highly technological medical care have extended lifespans of twenty-first century Americans far beyond those characteristics of the two earlier eras. Certain interconnected human and planetary limits, however, appear to have been reached. Recently, US life expectancy has “shockingly declined†to a mere 76.4 years amidst an upsurge in diet-linked chronic diseases.