Lyrics First World Problems - Baba Brinkman

First World Problems

Twenty first century Homo sapien
Livin' it up, packin' weight on my waist again
Like a boss with the visceral fat
Rockin' a Rick Ross body instead of a six pack
Rippin' open a crisp snack, drinkin' a six pack
Of high fructose soda, livin' a mismatch
Our ancestors were Africans
Most of them died from infectious pathogens
Hunting, gathering, violence, accidents
Frequent negative energy balances
But the habitat that they adapted in
Ain’t like 2015, back in the day
They hunted meat and ate nuts and seeds
Fibrous fruits, tubers and crunchy greens
They slurped up whatever they could and saved it
As body fat, no surplus wasted
Evolutionarily adapted
To walk ten clicks per day on average
Five or six pounds of sugar per year
We ingest a hundred pounds up in here!
Livin' large and sedentary,
scoopin' the Ben and Jerry’s
Cemeteries full of people with teeth full of dental caries
Yeah, so raise up the libations
To the fruits of civilization!
Osteoporosis, OCD, scurvy, diabetes
First world problems
Hypertension, anxiety,
impacted wisdom teeth
First world problems
Atherosclerosis, myopia,
Chron’s disease
First world problems
The non-infectious, chronic,
mismatch list is long indeed
First world problems
The military industrial complex
In your blood stream responds to bomb threats
We always had a belly full of intestinal worms
That’s our «natural» state where selection’s concerned
Now we’re so hygienic,
we’re out of tune
Attackin' ourselves,
call it «auto immune»
We beat back cholera, polio, small pox
But chronic diseases are tougher to outfox
Fewer loopholes,
evolution moves slow
As far as food goes, we crave fruit rolls
Instead of fruit, overdose on glucose
Sucrose, the emperor’s edible new clothes
Fabulous opulence,
gastroenterologist
People buy rich food,
ask an economist
It took a while to evolve lactose tolerance
How long will it take to adapt to McDonald’s then?
So many products,
simple starches
Mismatches everywhere,
fallen arches
Women’s liberation!
Babies, havin' less of them
Extra periods full of cancer-causing estrogen
Who knew?
Too many, too few
Too clean, too comfortable, too new
We got a genome livin' in the stone age
But there’s no goin' back to the old ways
Osteoporosis, OCD, scurvy, diabetes
First world problems
Hypertension, anxiety, impacted wisdom teeth
First world problems
Atherosclerosis, myopia, chron’s disease
First world problems
The non-infectious, chronic, mismatch list is long indeed
First world problems
Time for the epilogue
What can we do to not hurry death along?
Eat food, not too much, mostly plants
Jog until you gotta hold up your pants
Seek to understand and hence empathize
There’s more to it than just diet and exercise
Metabolic imprinting is also relevant
Pregnancy, neonatal, early child development
Environmental-genome interactions
Yeah, these bodies are phenotypically plastic
And we moderns are livin' like kings
Nice food, nice drink, nice linen, nice things
And most of the illnesses that dispatch us
Are past-present evolutionary mismatches
Now take that perspective and be sensible
‘Cause seventy percent of these deaths are preventable
First world problems