Sedentary urban life is a novel environment for humans, who spent more than 99% of their evolutionary history as physically active hunter-gatherers. Recent reports suggest that many common chronic disease outcomes in industrialized populations, such as cardiovascular disease and obesity, are relatively rare in subsistence populations. Understanding how ecology interacts with lifestyle by examining diet, physical activity, parasite and pathogen load, and immune activation can provide insight into mismatches between post-industrial urban populations, and subsistence populations. This collaborative project will begin by building complex systems pathway models to look at the relationship between social, ecological, and immunological variables of interest and their link to metabolic pathology. This project uses an exploratory approach to appreciate the distinct pathways through which social factors may influence disease risk, consequent from the different ecological contexts (and thus environmental inputs) that vary between populations.