Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well

A brilliant, no-nonsense look at two questions we never evolved to ask but now must consider several times a day: what should we eat, and why?

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 E. LIEBERMAN is a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University, where he is the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences and former chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He is best known for his research on the evolution of the human body and its relevance to health.