What our evolutionary history can teach us about eating well

September 24, 2026

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5 min read

What Evolution Really Tells Us About Eating Well

Professor Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, opens with a disarmingly simple observation: "We never evolved to choose our food." For millions of generations, humans ate whatever they could hunt, gather, or grow. Now we walk into supermarkets with 30,000 to 40,000 products, many engineered to be irresistible but unhealthy, while simultaneously drowning in contradictory dietary advice. "I teach this stuff, and I'm confused," Lieberman admits. His book FedUp tries to cut through the noise by asking what evolutionary history actually reveals about eating well—and the answers are more nuanced than most diet gurus would like.

There Was Never One "Paleo Diet"

The popular paleo diet rests on a seductive premise: eat like our ancestors did, and you'll be healthy. But Lieberman points out that our ancestors ate radically different things depending on where they lived—deserts, forests, highlands—and when they lived. "There was no one paleo diet. There were dozens, hundreds of paleo diets." Early humans were "nature's ultimate omnivores," eating anything that moved or grew and wasn't poisonous.

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What you'll learn

1 (02:04) **Introduction: The modern food dilemma** - Host Jason Goodger sets up the problem: thousands of supermarket products vs. our evolutionary past, and introduces guest Professor Daniel Lieberman.
2 (05:26) **What early humans actually ate** - Lieberman debunks the "one paleo diet" myth by describing the diversity of ancestral diets.
3 (07:48) **The game-changer: cooking food** - Lieberman explains when and why cooking became central to human evolution.
4 (09:37) **Meat eating and its trade-offs** - Lieberman traces the origins of meat in our diet and examines its modern health implications.
5 (13:00) **Low-carb diets: the theory and the struggle** - Lieberman explains the scientific logic behind low-carb diets and why they often fail in practice.
6 (17:07) **Low-fat diets: the 80s mistake** - Lieberman recounts the low-fat era and why it backfired.
7 (19:59) **Why we store fat so easily** - Lieberman reveals the evolutionary reasons humans are "fat creatures" and why losing weight is a biological battle.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

These days, supermarket shelves are filled with thousands of different products all vying for our attention; the options are almost endless. However, if we look back in time, we find that our early ancestors simply ate what they were able to hunt and gather and eventually farm. Thanks to the huge number of options we now have available, many of us choose to follow diet plans of various kinds, be it veganism, low-fat, low-carb, or the paleo diet, but what can we learn from evolutionary history about what we should really be eating if we want to live longer, healthier lives?

In this episode we’re joined by Prof Daniel Lieberman, an author and evolutionary biologist based at Harvard University, to talk about his latest book, Fed Up – What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet and Eating Well.

He tells us why many of us find it so difficult to eliminate certain foodstuffs from our diets over the long-term, how humans evolved to store more body fat than other mammals, and why the good news is that humans are perhaps nature’s ultimate omnivores.

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