Tagged diet

Epidemic Obesity: Adaptation Gone Wild

Obesity is unnatural, but it’s natural to try for it.

titian_venus_mirrorThis morning I sat on a panel for medical students; the subject was obesity. Nationally, as anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock knows, the picture is not pretty-in fact it’s pretty ugly. By the standard definition, obesity means a Body Mass Index (BMI; weight in kilos over height in meters squared) above 30, and in about 15 years starting in 1990 we went from 22 percent to 33 percent obese.

Now, I don’t care what you call it or Read more

Obesity

Is obesity an epidemic? Is it even a disease? Semantics aside, it’s huge and growing burden.

boys eatingI’m writing this in an airport, and a couple of hours ago as a line of passengers filed past me in the airplane aisle, I noticed, as I often do, that some of them were not just overweight—many are that—but obese. I remembered from yesterday’s news that some airlines are considering charging such people for two seats. It seems unfair, and yet… Read more

Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer

An excellent new study once again takes us back to the future.

Last week’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine carried another powerful vindication of The Paleolithic Prescription, a book co-authored by Boyd Eaton, Marjorie Shostak and me just twenty years ago. Boyd and I fired the first salvo in the same journal in 1985, with an article called “Paleolithic Nutrition.”
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In Sickness and In Wealth

"Maladaptive" habits help the poor cope with their stressful lives, and the best healers don't blame them.

I recently had the privilege of "shadowing" one of the best docs I know as she made hospital rounds at Grady. Grady is one of those places-like Los Angeles County Hospital, Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and Kings County in Brooklyn where I volunteered as a high school kid-
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Back to the Future

Can a looming diabetes epidemic be averted by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

I just got back from a conference at Harvard where I gave an after-dinner talk (at the Harvard Faculty Club, no less) on a subject guaranteed to give everyone indigestion: why our ancestors ate healthier than we do.

I described in words and photos the lives of the !Kung hunter-gatherers depicted at the top of this page, as I and others saw it during two years of field work between 1969 and 1975. I briefly discussed hunter-gatherer studies generally, and I talked about the implications of hunter-gatherer life for us today.

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