Diet and disease in transition: How the changing lifestyles of former forest hunter-gatherers highlight the consequences of biodiversity loss on human health
Résumé
Through history, forests dwellers have had to adapt to permanent changes of forest ecosystems that, in essence, are dynamic. However, the changes that forest peoples face today are much more brutal and radical than those they have faced in the past. As deforestation, drastic modification of resource availabilily and the invasive influence of cash economy occur more rapidly, social, cultural, economic and political systems become increasingly difficult to accommodate. The choices made by foraging societies are no longer validated by experience, and may be costly in terms of ecological success. Diets and diseases are sensitive inclicators of the ecological and cultural costs that former hunter-gatherers -like the African Pygmies and the Punan of Borneo -actually pay to get their share of modernity. ln relation to human health, recent hunter-gatherers serve not only as models or how humans lived when their lifestyles and their genetic endowment were more nearly in harmony. Assessing hunting and gathering ways of life is of vital importance to general human health. The cumulative experience of foraging societies can usefully be viewed as a benchmark for present-day efforts to promote health and prevent disease, even in the world's industrialized countries.