He frequently can be spotted loping barefoot or in minimalist running shoes around Cambridge. He’s also a dedicated proponent of barefoot running and, in fact, has been dubbed “The Barefoot Professor” by the Harvard community. Lieberman is, however, a fan of high-fiber, low-glycemic index diets such as the traditional Mediterranean diet that deliver their carbohydrates in slow-release form, reducing the risk of insulin resistance, fatty liver, heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. That coupled with changes in the quality of meat and a sedentary lifestyle might spell trouble for too-avid proponents of Atkins-like diets. The potential effects of a high-meat low-carb diet on modern man, he suggests, are uncertain. Hunter-gatherers, he points out, while certainly meat eaters, were subject to the harsh vicissitudes of their environments, which didn’t always guarantee hot-and-cold running animal protein. Lieberman com-80.mp3 he decried the sometimes facile appropriation of “Paleo” by meat proponents: They distort the historical record to rationalize their proclivity for ordering 16 oz. knowing your body’s evolutionary history helps to evaluate why your body looks and works as it does, hence why you get sick.” Lieberman decries the lack of emphasis placed on evolutionary biology in medical schools: “Just as knowing the history of the Industrial Revolution will not help a mechanic fix your car, why would knowing the Paleolithic history of the human body help a doctor treat your disease?” He adds: “But this way of thinking is deeply flawed and shortsighted. These include increasing susceptibility to autoimmune diseases, orthopedic problems such as back pain and plantar fasciitis, dental problems and digestive ailments.Įven such mental conditions as anxiety, attention deficit disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder can be viewed through an evolutionary biology perspective as once-adaptive traits gone haywire in a modern world.Ĭancer, too, he writes, “is actually an aberrant evolutionary process going on within a body.” Pretty well acknowledged are energy mismatches due to excess food intake and decreased physical activity, which result in obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.īut Lieberman makes a convincing pitch that other common diseases of modern man are due to mismatches between our genes and our increasingly artificial environments. We have achieved seeming success in terms of hegemony over the forces of nature that used to bump off our ancestors, but this has resulted in deleterious evolutionary “mismatches.” Written by Daniel Lieberman, Ph.D., a Harvard professor of evolutionary biology, The History of the Human Body documents the evolution of modern man using the latest anthropological and paleoecological evidence.īut the key premise of the book is that several thousand years ago we became insulated from the usually adaptive forces of natural selection by our superior cultural evolution. īut recently, I came across what I consider the ultimate science-based Paleo investigation with the ambitious title The Story of the Human Body. Paleo books abound, and we’ve covered some of them on our Intelligent Medicine podcasts with professor Loren Cordain (“The Paleo Diet”) and John Durant (“The Paleo Manifesto”). what’s next? Paleo Match (caveman sex)? Paleo Wear (workout skins)? Paleo Survivor (a new reality show)?
These days “Paleo” is all the craze: Paleo Diet, Paleo Bars, Paleo Shakes, Paleo Running.
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