Harvard Science Book Talk: Daniel E. Lieberman, "Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well"

Daniel E. Lieberman—bestselling author of The Story of the Human Body and Exercised, and founding chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University—cuts through all the confusing and contradictory advice on diet and wellness to ar­gue that there can be no simple, definitive answer. Drawing from evolutionary biol­ogy, physiology, anthropology, anatomy, medical science, and history, Lieberman examines, with brio and wit, the history and health effects of food from before the invention of cooking up to today’s industrially produced diets. He shows how we evolved to eat almost anything, and by evalu­ating and trying many of these diets (raw food, Paleo, Mediterranean, Blue Zone, intermittent fasting, Atkins, DASH), he helps you understand why none is flawless though some are better than others.

Lieberman explores the costs and benefits of cheap, energy-rich, tempting, and often unhealthy ultra-processed foods; the tangled roots of weight gain; how diet influences obesity, heart disease, and cancer; and the claims of benefits offered by high- and low-fat diets, meal replacements, inter­mittent fasting, carnivorism, vegetarianism, and veganism—while also showing how over centu­ries most cultures evolved ingenious ways to grow and cook healthy, delicious food.

This fascinating and entertaining sci­ence-based book on nutrition, digestion, and health will teach you how to be well fed instead of fed up with dietary hucksterism.

Daniel Lieberman is the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University and a Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He is also a member of Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities. At Harvard, he teaches a variety of courses on human evolution, anatomy, physiology, and health. In addition to more than 200 peer-review articles, his three previous books are: The Evolution of the Human Head (Harvard University Press, 2011), The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease (Pantheon, 2013), and Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding (Pantheon, 2020). Photo Credit: Antonia Prescott

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