Cambridge Book Talk – Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well
Harvard Science Center, Cambridge, MA
Free admission (or bundle with a book)
October 7 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
How many times a day do you ask the question, “What should I eat?” Are you overwhelmed by the thousands of factory-made foods supermarkets sell? Or the abundance of diets (paleo, Mediterranean, low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie, intermittent fasting, vegan, vegetarian, carnivore) claimed to optimize your health and manage your weight?
In this talk and his new book, Fed Up, best-selling author and Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman tackles this confusion. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, and medical science, he explores how our ancestors never evolved to choose their food to lose weight or live to 100. Instead, we evolved to eat almost anything in order to survive.
By telling the fascinating story of diets from seven million years ago to the present and using myth-busting science to evaluate today’s most popular diets, Lieberman explains what everyone needs to know to make wiser, kinder choices about what to eat. This talk will help you understand why no diet is flawless, though some are better than others.
Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and the Leakey Foundation welcome Daniel E. Lieberman—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—for a discussion of his new book, Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well. The presentation will take place in Hall D of the Harvard Science Center, located at 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge.
Book sales and signing
RSVP for free to this event or choose the “Book-Included” ticket to reserve a copy of Fed Up and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing.
About the speaker
Daniel Lieberman is the Edwin M Lerner II Professor of Biological Science, founding Chair of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and a member of The Leakey Foundation’s Scientific Executive Committee. Educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities, he studies and teaches how and why the human body is the way it is, and the relevance of human evolution to contemporary health. He is best known for his research on the evolution and biology of long-distance running and the evolution of the highly unusual human head. At Harvard, he teaches a variety of courses on human evolution, anatomy, physiology, and health.
He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and four books: Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well (Knopf, 2026), Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding (Pantheon, 2021), The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease (Pantheon, 2013), and The Evolution of the Human Head (Harvard University Press, 2011). He is also an avid runner and loves to cook.
Partners and sponsors
The Leakey Foundation’s participation in this program is generously sponsored by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
