Daniel Lieberman

That is food.

I'm Derek Barris, and today on Conspiruality Book Club, we're discussing Daniel Lieberman's new book, Fed Up, What Evolution Teaches About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well.

As always, you can find us on Instagram at conspirualitypod.

Independently, we're on a number of different platforms.

And so you can successfully be on a high carb, low fat diet or a high fat, low carb diet.

Too much protein and you're gonna run into problems though, and I know that's a big one with the Maha crowd, but that is not a great idea.

So let's close with Daniel Lieberman's ten rules.

Take with them what you will.

What should I eat is a really modern question.

That's Daniel Lieberman.

He is a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

I study human evolution and how and why our bodies are the way they are and how their interaction between our evolutionary history and the world we live in today.

But if you're trying to reduce it by exactly 60 calories a day, well, you're just guessing that you're reducing it by 60 calories a day.

It could be 50, it could be 100, and so on.

That's Daniel Lieberman.

He is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

And when that happens, your he- health starts to come at a, again, at a equilibrium where you say that, "Oh, I am in right balance because I sleep well, I train well, I eat well, and I am fairly okay from brain aspect as well because I can think well, I can write well, I can do things that I am, I am meant to do, and there's nothing that is overburdened, uh, anywhere.

I do not have to think about the diet or, you know, food that I am eating or training that I have to do." Because I, I think Daniel Lieberman puts it very nicely in his, in his book, um, "We are exercised about exercising." So I would take it a step further and say, we are stressed about getting stressed.

[laughs] That's so true.

That is so true.

And you'll see, like, a lot of the protagonists that we will meet in this podcast were from the barefoot running world.

In particular, one guy called Daniel Lieberman.

And so it was in about 2006, '7, I think, that the book was published.

Remember the Born to Run?

[laughs]

... because they change what we did naturally.

And then you can't help but come across them, and as I say, the name that, um, comes up in this conversation was a guy called Daniel Lieberman, who was a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, and he, uh, ended up doing one of the really influential studies on how the foot hits the ground during running and how barefoot is better.

We might get onto that.

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I just, in this last week, interviewed your colleagues, Dan Lieberman and Richard Wrangham.

Oh, okay.

And our conversations focused more on the developing physical makeup of humans over the last few million years.

Is

that because you'll go all fanboy again? Dan Lieberman, that's the chap.

Yeah, of course.

I'm sure Rachel is aware of him.

Why is there so much buzz about it now? And how can we incorporate these exercises into our lives? Today, the science and history of getting strong, why we pursue strength, how resistance training complements aerobic exercise like running or swimming, and how attitudes towards strength training have evolved from ancient Olympians to circus spectacle to long-held fears that big muscles make athletes stiff and slow to the current push for more muscle in the era of GLP-1.

We'll dive into all of this and more with the help of two experts, Daniel Lieberman, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, and Amanda Paluch, a kinesiologist who studies physical fitness at UMass Amherst.

I'm Dena Fine-Marin, and this is 1440 Explores, a show where we unpack elements of our daily lives.

Stay with us.

And though we're all encountering some degree of resistance in our daily lives, thanks to gravity, it's simply not enough on its own.

So that's where weightlifting and lunges come in.

Here's evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman.

When I'm running, my legs are hitting the ground only for a very brief moment of time.

Well, let me ask, shifting another direction and altering, this is kind of interesting.

So I'm going to read you a quote here from Dr. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard scientist and the source scientist for Christopher McDougall's famous book, Born to Run.

Here's the quote.

Right.

Good runners are good athletes first.

So I think of the people that I coach as athletes who specialize in running.

It's I mean, you had that quote from Daniel Lieberman earlier.

It's nothing, you know, good about running in one direction for 26 miles, much less, you know, 100.

Why? This is one of the many questions we explore in this sweeping episode, which tells the story of humanity through what was on the dinner plate.

Our guide on this journey is Daniel Lieberman, professor at Harvard University and founding chair of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

We start the conversation with a topic that feels unavoidable when talking about food with an expert in human evolution, that is the paleo diet.

Daniel Lieberman is someone who has actually studied the diets of hunter-gatherers and the answer that he found was surprisingly different from what the paleo cookbooks would tell you.

There is no one paleo diet, he says, and not everything that people that paleo-litigate was necessarily healthy.

But this is not just an episode debunking a particular diet.

And this episode, as always, is dedicated to you.

Now, let's go.