Plenty of us wish we shared the daily schedule of chimps: Eat, nap, groom, socialize, repeat twice, then sleep for 9-10 hours. If chimps wore Fitbits, each would log about 1900 steps per day. Gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos have similar activity levels.

In humans, taking fewer than 10,000 steps per day is a ticket to increased risk for CVD, diabetes, and reduced lifespan, yet apes are healthy. But why? Don’t we share 97% of our genes with chimps?

According to an article in the January 2019 Scientific American, hominids split off from the ape lineage over six million years ago and did some evolving of our own, eventually becoming far-traveling hunter-gatherers, a lifestyle that requires a lot of intelligence, including the ability to cooperate, and results in higher daily caloric intake and better odds of reproduction. The Hadza of Tanzania, modern HGs, log 11,000 to 17,000 step-equivalents a day–they don’t wear Fitbits either–and they use bows and arrows. Early humans running down our prey may have moved even more.

Physiology adapts to behavior, eventually. Most mammals manufacture vitamin C, but apes and  humans don’t, because our ancient ancestors ate so many fruits packed with vitamin C that our bodies stopped making it. Now we can get scurvy. Ram ventilation in some fish, including many sharks, led to those creatures losing their gill pumps. Now they have to move or die.

Similarly, millennia of excessive exercise led our bodies to incorporate it into our organs and cells:

• We need only seven hours of sleep daily.
• Our brains produce endocannabinoids that create a “runner’s high” in response to aerobic exercise.
• Exercise releases neurotrophic molecules that promote neuron creation and brain growth.
• Our maximum oxygen uptake is 4X that of chimps, and our leg muscles are 50% bigger with more fatigue-resistant muscle fibers.
• Exercising muscles release hundreds of signaling molecules into the body, which reduce chronic inflammation; reduce insulin resistance; shuttle glucose into muscle stores instead of fat stores; cause muscles to produce enzymes that clear fat from blood; improve the our ability to resist infections; lower resting levels of steroid hormones, reducing reproductive cancers; and blunt the morning rise of the stress hormone cortisol.

That last bullet item is new news, a few examples of findings in this relatively new area of research. It also explains why exercise doesn’t do the one thing we wish it would: reduce weight. Since our bodies evolved to require exercise, it doesn’t make them work more, it makes them work better.

The studies also show that volume counts more than intensity. If you don’t want to run, walk, and if you don’t want to walk, stand. Just do it a lot, every day.

My mother at 79 suffers from end-stage renal disease and is bedridden, requiring 24-hour care. Her healthspan was much shorter than her lifespan. Move now for longer health!