Track Your Plaque in 50,000 BC 16. June 2007 William Davis (3) Imagine we could send you back in a time machine to 50,000 BC.However, our agreement: no modern tools or equipment. Just your brain, hands, and legs. And your landing spot will be tropical or semi-tropical, the same climate that humans spent much of their evolutionary time in. Not only might you rub elbows with contemporaries like homo erectus and neanderthalensis, you'd also have to fend for your life and survival. To eat, you will have to chase and kill wild game, all with your bare hands or crude tools crafted from sticks and stones. You will have to learn what wild berries, roots, and plants are edible and distingusih them from those that make you retch, make your bowels run, or kill you. You won't be able to cultivate grain, at least for a good long time, since you don't have a community that makes such an undertaking easier.Instead, you are constantly on the run, from the moment you awake until you finally settle back as the sun sets, hopefully with a full stomach, but often empty and growling, anticipating the hunt and forage of tomorrow.You are outdoors all day, except for the period when you hide in your cave or self-made shelter. You wear what little clothing you can make yourself from your kills, a skin or two. Your skin becomes a dark brown, a 5 foot 10 inch male will weigh 140 lbs, a 5 foot 5 inch woman 95 lbs. There are obvious downsides: your teeth will rot, you will be prone to infections, and predators view you as fair game.But the result will be that many chronic diseases of modern life will no longer be worries for you. Heart disease? Highly unlikely. Do you need vitamin D? No, because you are outdoors virtually all day with most of your body surface area exposed to sun. Omega-3 fatty acids? You get those from the wild game you eat, since they have higher omega-3 content feeding in the wild, not eating corn like modern livestock. Since your body fat is minimal, just enough for survival, you don't need niacin.In other words, many of the strategies of the Track Your Plaque program are modern necessities, responses to the "deficiencies" of modern life. Of course, I don't really have a time machine. I also doubt that you wish to hunt wild game every day, forage for plants and roots, run nearly-naked in the sun. You probably also have become accustomed to brushing your teeth and not viewing every animal as a potential threat to your life.Nonetheless, I find this an interesting exercise for understanding the role of all the tools we use in the Track Your Plaque program for plaque control.