The story of the human body daniel lieberman chapter 2
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When I heard you speak in Seattle recently, you said something to the effect of: “We evolved as endurance athletes, but also to take advantage of every opportunity to rest and relax, and we evolved with low-carbohydrate, low-fat diets, but also to crave sugar and fat.” And now we have way too much sugar and fat - and way too little exercise.Ī. But you can’t just look back in time and say, “Alright, we were adapted to live the way people lived 50,000 years ago in Africa.” Our bodies are a jumble of adaptations. I don’t want to harp on the paleo diet, because I have a lot of friends who follow the paleo diet. One has to be thoughtful about how one applies evolution to living today. Furthermore, just because something’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s good for you, and just because something’s recent doesn’t mean it’s bad for you. Just because our ancestors ate it doesn’t mean that that’s optimal. I think the paleo diet is based on some good science and some good ideas, but there are also some assumptions there which I question. I think, to be honest, it is a bit on the silly side. Right now I’m sitting in a chair, right, and I’m staring into a computer screen, and you know, we’re definitely not adapted for those things.Ī. It is pretty clear, for example, that we’re poorly adapted to being extremely sedentary, or to eating lots of sugar. We’re very poorly adapted for some of the modern environments which we’ve created. You write in your book about “mismatch” diseases that arise from the fact that our present-day environments and lifestyles are so different than they were through most of human evolution.Ī. I caught up with Lieberman recently for a conversation that ranged from the paleo diet to Fruit Roll-Ups to the similarities between the obesity epidemic and climate change. Still, a look back at where we came from can tell us a lot about where we’re headed, he says - and how we might alter that course for the better. Lieberman is the first to point out that modern living and technology have made our lives better in many ways. Lieberman is much more eloquent and precise about the subject, which he’s explored in great depth in his new book, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Our bodies just aren’t adapted for this stuff. For Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, many of our problems today boil down to this: Through much of human evolution, our ancestors spent their days eating twigs and berries, chasing antelope, and being chased by things with big, nasty teeth these days, the only things we chase are our double greaseburgers and fries - and it’s usually with 32 ounces of corn-syrup-laced soda.