Why do our bodies do the wrong things so often?

Because life is messy.
And we’re not the only things living on us. Not everything is symbiotic and beneficial.

I think a lot of the problems (though not all) are a product of our lifestyle.

In general:

We do not exercise enough, we eat fast food and get high blood pressure, coronary artery disease and obese. We smoke, stress out all the time and do not sleep enough.

There are HUGE industries making tons of money curing the symptoms of modern lifestyles.

Whenever you have a complex system, things are always going to go wrong. In the old days, you would just die sooner. Now, there are things you can do to stretch out the experience for years, if not decades.

Of course, it would help if we did what the doctors told us: lose weight, eat right, get enough sleep, and exercise.

Because we do the wrongs things to our bodies. Poor food choices; poor exercise habits; poor mental states.

Try driving a car, nonstop, every day for 50 years and see how often something goes wrong. Now multiply the complexity of the human body by 100x. As @Darwin says, we are fortunate to live in an age where we can outlive our reproductive purpose, and many people take it for granted. Just be happy your heart hasn’t stopped beating (though we have implantable defibrillators for that…) or you’ve stopped breathing (though we have machines for that too…)

I am a believer that our environment now is so fake our bodies are trying to tell us to go more natural. There were no asthmatic kids or peanut butter kids when I was little so many years ago!!

@faye – That’s because they died long before you ever met them.

this reminds me of when you try to move just your ring finger, and you cant

@Darwin I don’t know. I know people now who have been diagnosed with asthma who are my age or older. My cousin-in-law is allergic to real nuts but wasn’t as a child. I do think it’s all the fake stuff in our homes. Didn’t the generation before me applaud asbestos?

@rangerr I did it!

@faye I think the point is that many would have died sooner from cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, meningitis, pneumonia, gangrene, or malnutrition. As I said, we are very lucky to be able to live long enough to accrue some of the diseases of old age.

@shilolo Oh yes, I agree with that to some degree but itchy, allergic, headaches? I think lots of that is our plastic lifestyles.

@faye There are many who favor the hygiene hypothesis for the increased incidence of autoimmune diseases. It certainly is feasible.

@shilolo Thanks, I liked that,of course, since it’s my point of view!!!

@shilolo – Then my children will never develop autoimmune diseases.

Because the body is, unfortunately, not perfectly smart. It’s pretty good, but it could be better. :) I think it just goes overboard with too many things. It likes to overreact. Like, pain is supposed to be a warning, but it doesn’t have to be that strong for certain things; it could be lessened a bit. And inflammation is usually taken too far. It could be milder and still accomplish what it’s supposed to accomplish. Now, if only I could be God for a little while…

Then of course there are all those stupid microscopic microbes always fucking everything up and mutating and becoming more powerful and less powerful and disappearing and reappearing. :P

@shilolo My mom is always spoutin’ the hygiene hypothesis. It does seem to make sense to me. I remember I posted a question about that once.

@DominicX It has yet to be definitively proven, and there are a number of critiques. But, like I said, it has its proponents.

Some of those things are what makes our bodies so great. Fever? Yeah, they completely suck..but they also help fight off infection, and we’re lucky to have medication to make us more comfortable during illnesses.
Why they happen in the first place? Who knows. Just nature I guess.

@casheroo Some people do know why fever occurs, or inflammation, or abscess formation ;-)

@shilolo lol, I understand that. I thought they were asking I guess a more philosophical question..like “why does this even happen” not looking for a medical response..kwim?

Because evolution is not a perfect process, and it’s also never finished. One of the reasons we get colds and sinus infections a lot for example is that our sinuses are not fully evolved for walking upright (along with our backs, which causes other problems). If something does not significantly reduce our chances of reproducing (which includes things that may kill us before we get the chance) then it’s not likely to be fixed terribly well in subsequent generations.

Evolution also strikes a natural balance. There’s absolutely no reason that humans couldn’t evolve to have much stronger leg muscles and be able to run twice as fast, but the negative effect of this is that it’d take much more energy to maintain those muscles, meaning you’d need to eat more to survive. Evolution will always tend towards the ideal balance of the outside conditions (so for example, an animal would have enough fur/body fat to be warm enough in winter, but not too hot in the summer). Likewise, our immune systems could be much better, but then you run into problems like women rejecting their mate’s sperm (as it is foreign matter) plus again, you’d have a higher energy requirement.

So yeah, in short… evolution.