Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Health
Which diet is right for you? Wrong question.
Quiz based on Daniel Lieberman’s new book looks at food fads through evolutionary lens
Humans didn’t evolve to shop for food that has been collected, packaged with nutritional information, and arranged by category in brightly lit supermarkets. In fact, we didn’t evolve to choose our food at all.
In his new book, “Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals about Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well,” Daniel Lieberman, Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, explores how our ancestors evolved to eat almost anything they could hunt, gather, or grow in whatever habitat they happened to find themselves. Which makes the modern American diet’s embarrassment of riches a real conundrum. Should we eat low-carb or low-fat, vegan or strictly animal products?
In “Fed Up,” Lieberman argues that most diets cling too firmly to one “big idea” and that they can, and should be, much more flexible. Lieberman helped us develop this quiz based on the book to help us make sense of it all.
1. The Paleo diet recommends eating like “hunter-gatherers,” with a focus on lean meats, fruits, and vegetables. But what is actually true about how contemporary hunter-gatherers eat?
2. Anthropologists look to contemporary hunter-gatherer societies to learn about our ancestors with similar lifestyles — including their diet. Which of the following plays a surprisingly large role in the diet of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer society in Tanzania?
5. Which of the following compounds do humans not manufacture on our own?
7. The combination of rice and beans, a staple of cultures around the world, hits what important nutritional metric?
9. About how much of the average American’s daily caloric intake is made up of ultra-processed foods?
10. What percent of dieters manage to keep the weight off after their diet ends?
