The thing this article drives home, to me, is that in "impoverished" circumstances -- i.e. an environment where there is not a surfeit of resources -- the external environment serves to regulate the body, health, and longevity. In Western(ized) cultures, cultures of plenty, we shift from being regulated (and controlled) primarily by our environment, to having to regulate ourselves. Learning that self-discipline, as a culture and a species, is an arduous process, and as we've seen, the affluent and educated tend to have a leg up in doing so.

I think it could be a more productive conversation if we treated "diseases of affluence" as ones that required different human responses than the diseases we've faced in the past -- the search for the pathway to instilling the requisite behaviors for healthy survival seems to me like a better expenditure of energy than simply bemoaning progress's ills.