Fed Up

As we face today’s excess of confusing and often contradictory advice on diet and wellness, 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—gives us a brilliant, no-nonsense book, at once fresh, entertaining, informative, and compassionate, to help us answer a question we never evolved to ask but now must consider several times a day: what should we eat, and why? Contrary to widespread claims, Lieberman argues, there can be no simple, definitive answer. Using lines of evidence 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 definitive, and 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 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. Lieberman also touches upon the evolutionary underpinnings behind what diets have been shown to help people age well while decreasing their risk of heart disease, cancer, metabolic syndrome, dementia, and depression. Food ought to be enjoyed and shared, but for many, choosing what to eat has become confusing and stressful. By telling the story and science of food and diets, Fed Up engagingly empowers readers with the information and concepts they need to make their own choices.