The story of the human body lieberman
There were many paleo diets, and just because our ancestors ate it doesn't mean it's better for us. What do you think about the paleo movement, since the back-to-nature idea has moved beyond the farmer and is now the caveman?Īnybody who reads what I wrote carefully will find the critique of the paleo diet in there. I started arbitrarily with the origins of the human lineage when we diverged from apes, but of course we could go all the way back to fish.
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Hunter-gatherers are the end of an even longer story, and we need to know the whole story. It's a constantly moving mosaic, which is why I tried to not just start with hunter-gatherers, where I think a lot of paleo-diet, ancestral-health perspectives begin. There's no one point in time when all of a sudden our bodies became normal or abnormal. And that's only the last 70,000 years.Įvolution is a complicated thing. We invented the bow and arrow, and we stopped having to run. In fact, you could even argue that the bow and arrow is a pretty recent invention. We think of that blissful, pastoral farmer's life as back to nature right? That's actually also abnormal because that's pretty recent. A lot of people might think, oh, I'm going to go back to nature, and what they mean, usually, is to be a farmer. So you’re saying that, basically, the lifestyle that we've come to understand as very normal and commonplace is actually, from an evolutionary perspective, quite abnormal.Ĭorrect. Illustrating that perspective helps us step out of the world we live in and think about it more critically. But just because it's new doesn't mean it's good, either.Ī lot of things we take for granted make us sick. Now, just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad, and I think that's probably one of the problems with a simplistic ancestral-health, paleo-diet view. It's normal to think that the world you grow up in is normal, right? We think it's normal to fly in airplanes, drive a car, eat breakfast cereal from a box, and all the other things that you and I probably do-but actually they're abnormal.
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One of my jobs is to try to look around at the world we live in, and to think about what's really normal and what's abnormal from an evolutionary perspective. And we're just not very well adapted for it.ĭo you look at this from an evolutionary perspective and think, wow, we're really in this bizarre and transformative period? It seems like one of the key turning points has been this idea that, for many generations, humans have been trying to get enough calories, and now we've suddenly entered this period where we have too many calories. This is really a form of cultural evolution. I mean evolution as a perspective helps us inform what's going on, but it's not a traditional kind of evolution, with Darwin and natural selection. But I guess the argument I'm trying to make is that that, too, has an evolutionary basis. It's not an insight that we, as a society, spend too much time treating the symptoms of diseases rather than their causes. And some of the focus of evolution and medicine has been: Why do we get sick?
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OUTSIDE: I wanted to ask you first to explain more about the provocative idea you bring up early in the book, the notion of “disevolution,” which is something we seem to be in the throes of right now.ĭANIEL LIEBERMAN: Well, I'm very interested in evolution and medicine, which forms one of the core themes of the book. We caught up with the good professor to hear more about his new book and the story of our bodies. Lieberman takes on many popular notions, including barefoot running, the paleo diet, epigenetics, and a host of hot topics ranging from obesity and chronic disease to Nanny State politics. But how we best cope with this new reality often is. That humans are poorly adapted to our modern lifestyle of convenience foods, flat screens, and desk jobs isn’t very controversial. The Story of the Human Body hits stores this week