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 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 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 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.

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Book and Lecture Tour

Join Dr. Daniel Lieberman, author of Fed Up, in Chicago, Houston, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. Sign up for The Leakey Foundation’s newsletter to receive announcements about these events and other content featuring Dr. Lieberman.

Dr. Daniel Lieberman

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. He studies and teaches how and why the human body is the way it is, and the relevance of human evolution to contemporary health.