If our body is trying to conserve energy by losing muscle mass we’re not using, why does being sedentary ultimately end up being more harmful?
In: Biology
When we think of how humans are in every way we need to realize that we were a tribal species for like… a million years. Actually we were tribal before we were even human. Every thought, action, desire, and manner of our mind and physiology is refined and perfected for tribal life. How we live now is nothing like the life we evolved for, which makes our lives confusing in modern times. For most of human history humans had replicated themselves a bunch of cubs and died before the age of 40. Think about this for a sec. Most chronic diseases, cardio vascular disease, diabetes, cancer, neurological, autoimmune, etc, and other health ailments, occur after the age of 35. With means there was no evolutionary selection pressure giving us genetic defenses against such diseases past about the age of 40.
So basically in our younger lives we can be sedentary, or not, and it won’t really affect our health is such a way that would prevent us from replicating before the age of 40. All these diseases we try to prevent these days is just us trying to live 2-3 times longer than we ever evolved to.
Being sedentary isn’t particularly harmful if you’re just trying to live the “normal” life nature evolved us for where we die before any of these health ailments would get us. Your question is outside the bounds of evolutionary biology since the reason we live long enough to get these diseases has more to do with technology than fitness evolution.
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