Your Gut Has a Home. Modern Life Took It Everywhere.

Most people think health problems come from eating too much of the wrong food.

That’s partly true. But it misses something quieter and more important. 
For most of human history, food came from nearby.
It was seasonal.
It repeated year after year.

And the human body adapted to that consistency. Not just the human body —the trillions of microbes that live inside us did too. They learned the local plants.The fibers common to the land. The rhythms of scarcity and abundance.

Health wasn’t optimized.
It was stable.

Then life changed faster than biology ever had to. Urbanization didn’t creep in over centuries. It arrived in decades. People moved from villages to cities. From one country to another. From one food system to a completely different one.

Calories became abundant. Food became global. Convenience replaced tradition.

The benefits were obvious. So were the tradeoffs. Your microbiome evolved for a place. But modern life doesn’t stay in one place for long. When people relocate, their bodies come along easily. Their microbes don’t always adjust as smoothly.

When people relocate, their bodies come along easily. Their microbes don’t always adjust as smoothly.

A gut trained on one environment suddenly faces another.
Different fibers.
Different starches.
Different processing.
Different additives.

Nothing is “wrong.” But something is unfamiliar. Biology tends to struggle during unfamiliar transitions. Over time, patterns begin to show up. As traditional dietary patterns fade, microbial diversity often shrinks with them.

And when diversity declines, so does resilience.This doesn’t cause disease overnight. It changes probabilities. Metabolic regulation becomes less efficient. Inflammation rises more easily. Cardiovascular risk creeps upward. Diabetes becomes more common.

These conditions feel modern because they are. They aren’t just diseases of excess.
They’re diseases of mismatch.

Urban life solved many problems. It improved safety. Expanded opportunity. Increased access to food.

But progress often works this way.
It fixes yesterday’s problems
while quietly introducing tomorrow’s.

The microbiome was never consulted in that tradeoff.

What we call “lifestyle disease” is rarely about bad choices. It’s about fast change. Biology prefers slow, predictable environments. Modern life delivers the opposite.

What we call “lifestyle disease” is rarely about bad choices. It’s about fast change. Biology prefers slow, predictable environments. Modern life delivers the opposite.

And the gap between those two realities is where many health challenges now live.

This doesn’t mean we should romanticize the past. It means we should recognize a simple truth: Health isn’t only about what you eat. It’s also about what your biology learned to expect.

And expectations, once set over generations, take time to change. 

Modern life gave us incredible freedom. But freedom often comes with adjustment costs. The body pays some of those costs quietly —
long before we notice them. Understanding that doesn’t fix everything.
But it does explain a lot.