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

Daniel Lieberman is coming to the Natural History Museum of Utah on Thursday, October 22, for a talk called Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well. He's a Harvard professor and the founding chair of the university's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and the whole thing is built around his new book, Fed Up.

If you've spent any time looking at the food landscape lately, you know how loud it gets. Lieberman spends the book wading through the confusion of today's thousands of factory-made foods and diets—paleo, Mediterranean, low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie, intermittent fasting, vegan, vegetarian, and carnivore. He pulls from evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, and medical science to trace the story of human diets from seven million years ago to the present. His main point is a bit of a cold shower for the wellness industry: our ancestors didn't evolve to choose their food to lose weight or to live to 100, but to eat almost anything they could find to survive.

Lieberman is a heavy hitter in his field. He's the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Science at Harvard and sits on the Scientific Executive Committee of The Leakey Foundation. He's best known for his research on the evolution and biology of long-distance running—including barefoot running—and on the evolution of the human head. He's published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and four books, so this isn't just a casual take on nutrition; it's coming from someone who spends his life thinking about how we became what we are.

The talk runs from 7 PM to 8:30 PM at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City. Tickets were free for a limited number of seats with registration required, though the event is now sold out.