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

How many times a day do you ask the question, “What should I eat?” Are you confused and 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, bestselling 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 to survive.  By telling the fascinating story of diets from 7 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.  Join nutritionist and Commonwealth Club Nutrition, Food & Wellness Forum Chair Patty James for a lively conversation with Lieberman about separating evolutionary fact from dietary fiction—and how understanding where we came from might help us make better choices about what we eat today. 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. 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 (including barefoot running) and the evolution of the highly unusual human head. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and four books, including 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.