How do environmental mismatches contribute to high blood pressure?

In the field of Darwinian medicine, high blood pressure is understood as a consequence of mismatches between the environments in which humans evolved and the environments they occupy today.1

For the vast majority of human history, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, a lifestyle characterized by high levels of physical activity and a diet significantly different from that of modern industrialized societies. Because natural selection shaped the human body for this ancestral way of life, modern shifts in living habits—such as sedentary behavior, excess weight, and high dietary intake of sodium—create a biological mismatch.213

This discordance contributes to hypertension because the body’s physiological regulatory mechanisms are not optimized for the modern abundance of salt or the lack of physical exertion. While heredity plays a role, these environmental factors are primary drivers of the condition in developed countries, leading to increased risks for serious cardiovascular complications. Darwinian medicine highlights that these vulnerabilities arise because our bodies remain adapted to an ancestral environment that no longer exists.13