Ulijaszek ﻿
Journal of Physiological Anthropology(2024) 43:10
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40101-023-00345-0

Journal of
Physiological Anthropology

Open Access

REVIEW

Nutritional anthropology in the world
Stanley Ulijaszek1*   

Abstract
Nutritional anthropology is the study of human subsistence, diet and nutrition in comparative social and evolutionary perspective. Many factors influence the nutritional health and well-being of populations, including evolutionary,
ecological, social, cultural and historical ones. Most usually, biocultural approaches are used in nutritional anthropology, incorporating methods and theory from social science as well as nutritional and evolutionary science. This
review describes approaches used in the nutritional anthropology of past and present-day societies. Issues of concern
for nutritional anthropology in the world now include: understanding how undernutrition and food insecurity are
produced at local, regional and international levels; how food systems are constructed using social, biological and biocultural perspectives; and obesity from a biocultural viewpoint. By critiquing framings of present-day diet in an evolutionary context, nutritional anthropology asks ‘what should be eaten?’, rather than ‘what can be eaten?’, and ‘howcheaply can people be fed?’.
Keywords Nutrition, Food, Anthropology, Diet, Evolution, Ecology, Biocultural
Background
Nutritional anthropology is concerned with understanding human subsistence, diet and nutrition fromboth comparative social and evolutionary perspectives.
Diet and subsistence have been of interest to anthropologists in reporting on the life of different societies
since the late nineteenth century, while studies of nutrition in social context began in the 1930s [1], with studies of hunger, land use and diet in Northern Rhodesia
by Audrey Richards [2, 3]. Studies of diet, subsistence
and nutritional health became increasingly ecological insubsequent decades [4], especially with the emergence ofevolutionary ecology as a discipline [5] which stimulated
biological anthropological approaches to human evolution foregrounding nutrition, foraging and subsistence[1]. These and other social and human evolutionary foodand nutrition-related fields came together as nutritional*Correspondence:
Stanley Ulijaszek
stanley.ulijaszek@anthro.ox.ac.uk
1
Unit for BioCultural Variation and Obesity, School of Anthropology
and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford, Englandanthropology in the 1980s [6]. Using integrated biocultural approaches, nutritional anthropology also took
within its remit ecological investigations of undernutrition [7] and obesity [8, 9], as well as study of localised
food systems [10], food security [11], infant feeding andadaptation [12], the political ecologies of dietary change
and nutritional health, in the contexts of globalisation,
migration, inequality [11] and colonialism [13]. Nutritional anthropology has thus developed a varied set of
approaches to the entangled and changing relationshipsof humans, and the societies they live in, with food andnutrition.

Patterns of dietary change
In nutritional terms, humans are the sum total of theirevolutionary history and more recent epigenetic andsocial past, as well as their present-day social, culturaland biological life histories. Human societies have undergone many transformations, most of which have included
transitions in diet and nutritional health, and nutritional
anthropologists have documented such changes in manysocieties [7]. For most of their evolutionary past, humans
have been foragers, subsisting on plants, fungi, Protista,
bacteria and animals gathered and hunted in the wild,© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to theoriginal author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images orother third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of thislicence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Ulijaszek ﻿Journal of Physiological Anthropology(2024) 43:10

ancestral hominins having been able to subsist on a diversity of food resources from a wide range of trophic levels.
The emergence of cooking in the Paleolithic Period transformed dietary quality [14], making foods more digestible and palatable while reducing their potential toxicity.
Fundamental to the survival and success of prehistoric
humans were their abilities in finding and competing forhigh-quality foods in most environments (meat, honey,
eggs and berries, for example) as well as their developing food processing techniques which allowed food to bemade more digestible [7].
The transition to agriculture in the Neolithic period
saw widespread adoption of crop planting and animalhusbandry in several centres across the world, more orless concurrently [15]. The intensification of food production at this time was associated with reduced dietary
diversity, increased work loads in subsistence, specialisation of economic production, and inequality [7]. Seasonality, whether of rainfall or temperature, or both, which
had earlier guided subsistence patterns for hunter-gatherers, came to systematise work patterns for agriculturalists according to the types of plants and animals they
domesticated [1]. This set the pattern for agricultural
production that has persisted to the present day, evenwith many technological changes that have come sincethen.
Permanent, year-round settlements were a feature of
the new agricultural societies, with people living together
in close proximity allowing existing pathogens to intensify their infection of humans, and for animal-borne diseases to cross the species barrier into humans, creating
new ecological problems which related to nutrition, in
the form of undernutrition-infection interactions [16].
Population settlement allowed humans to live in a morematerial world than ever before, allowing the ascriptionof value to goods beyond their immediate functional
value, also mobilising them for marking social distinction. Food, the most primary of symbolic goods, is likely
to have been used symbolically as well as materially, especially in relation to meat [17]. The social use of foods has
continued to the present day, is found in all societies, andis often related to nutritional health [7]. For nutritional
anthropologists, understanding the deep social embeddedness of food as a symbolic good enriches interpretations of how nutritional health is produced in society.

Past diet informing the present
Modern food systems carry vestiges of the past, thedominant products of agriculture now eaten in theworld being mostly a small number of cereal types andanimal species, selected by the practices of traditionalfarming and animal husbandry, and more recently by
scientifically-informed production. Humans have used

Page 2 of 5

their technological abilities to harvest, process and consume a very wide range of food-yielding plants and animals in a globally extensive range of environments [18].
Inter- and intra-individual dietary flexibility has deep
evolutionary roots, and has permitted survival and success in many contrasting circumstances. Understanding
how foraging strategies have shaped survivorship, healthand well-being as well as reproductive success among
past hominin and human populations has helped understandings of human eating practices and feeding behaviours now. Since human form and function change slowly
and must be able to respond to rapidly altering dietarycircumstances, one approach in nutritional anthropology places emphasis on evolved predispositions thatare either adaptive or become maladaptive with changing contexts. Energy has usually been the major limiting factor in foraging, and the study of energy-linked
reproductive fitness has helped identify how the drivefor macronutrient consumption has shaped (and continues to shape) overall diet quality [19]. The preference forenergy-dense foods (often dense in protein too, as withmeat and fish) for assuaging hunger would have reinforced the importance of energy-dense foods in the pastand contributed to their attractiveness in the present day.
Understanding the evolution of the human diet informs
debates concerning what humans should eat now. The
idea of the ‘Stone Age diet’ (also known as the Paleo Diet),
was first put forward by Eaton and Konner [20], whoargued that what people ate in the Paleolithic Period, inwhat has been considered to be the environment of evolutionary adaptedness [21], was more closely attuned tohuman dietary and nutritional needs than at any period
since. By collating and quantifying nutrient intakes ofcontemporary hunter-gatherer groups using the Human
Relations Area Files [22], and showing how similar averaged estimates of intakes of such groups are to the USArecommended nutritional guidelines of the 1980s, Eaton
and Konner [20] proposed that dietary recommendations
for good health should be based on the Paleolithic ideal—thus, the Stone Age diet. The ideas underpinning theStone Age diet have gained popular traction since thenbecause they offer the prospect of being able to consume
a natural diet that humans are viewed to be best adapted
to, and which is therefore assumed to be the mosthealthy. Nutritional anthropology has critiqued suppositions that underpin the Stone Age diet, using evolutionary and ethnographic frameworks. As an idea, the Stone
Age diet has stimulated critiques of present-day nutritional norms and contemporary industrialised diets [23],food guide pyramids for the US prior to the 2000s having been deconstructed as representing political, rather
than health, interests [24]. Diverse diets in the Paleolithic
Period are likely to have allowed the intake of quantities

Ulijaszek ﻿Journal of Physiological Anthropology(2024) 43:10

of most micronutrients at levels several-fold greater thanthe US recommended daily allowances of the 1980s andof Reference Daily Intakes of the present time. According to the proponents of the Stone Age diet, these higher
intakes may be much more in tune with good health thanthe minimum requirements recommended for mostnutrient intakes in most guidelines for nutritional health.
Against this, the setting of minimum levels of nutrient
intakes for populations has helped many countries attain
good or acceptable food security, by underpinning foodproduction goals and creating the conditions for theindustrialisation of food based on scientific principles.
There have been various reformulations and assessments of the Stone Age, or Paleo, diet [25, 26], and it
has continued to be a focus for evolutionarily-based critique of present-day industrial foods [7]. Developmentsin paleoanthropology, population genetics and epidemiology have increased certainty about evolutionary
processes related to diet, the time-frames in which they
took place, and how they inform our knowledge of contemporary human diet [27, 28], and anthropology of foodand nutrition continues to feed the debate about what
humans should eat and how [29].
Since the Paleolithic Period, cooking would have continued to help establish regional and local traditions,preferences and eating behaviors with population expansions across the world. Some early cultivated crops anddomesticates, such as squash and maize in Mesoamerica,
chickpeas in the Middle East, rice and pork in Southeast
Asia and taro and banana in New Guinea, remain distinctive elements of the cuisines of these regions to thepresent day. Understanding how foods have been taken
up and used by different groups since the origins of agriculture and how diets have become increasingly cosmopolitan in the past few hundred years are key issues
for understanding diets, food security and patterns of
nutritional health now. Most recently the consumption
and social use of novel foods has also become an area ofinvestigation for nutritional anthropology [30].

Food and nutritional health
The anthropological understanding of food in its socialand ecological contexts offers an alternative perspective
to the functionalist one of food as a vehicle for the delivery of nutrition. It shows how food production, supply
and consumption are all highly political [24], and how
poverty and inequality manifest themselves in undernutrition [31] and overnutrition [32], respectively. Undernutrition and obesity often sit side by side within thesame communities, and/or households, in what has been
described as the dual burden of under- and over-nutrition [33].

Page 3 of 5

Phenotypic plasticity, manifest in phenomena such as
low birth weight, growth faltering and subsequent catchup growth [34], enables the exploitation of changing andchangeable environments for food while minimisingmortality due to hunger. While fundamental to humansurvivorship and success in the past, phenotypic plasticity has become maladaptive in many parts of the world
now, where epidemiological and nutrition transitions
have been taking place, where plastic responses to poor
early life environments leave people more predisposed
to chronic disease later in life [35]. The ‘developmental
origins of health and disease’ concept hypothesises thatchronic diseases that develop later in life originate in thefetus by environmental programming [36]. Epigenetic
regulation during fetal programming [37] prepares anindividual for the environment they expect to enter atbirth and beyond, but when there are changes in nutritional circumstances, chronic disease in adult life is often
the result. Humans can respond to changing dietary andnutritional circumstances through genetics (via natural
selection), phenotype, via developmental plasticity, andepigenetics (by a balance of both). Removal of dietaryenergy stress and uncertainty, as has taken place in manysocieties, turns these adaptive processes toward pathology. An area of promise for nutritional anthropology liesin understanding how social processes can shape genetic
expression [38] in the construction of nutritional healthand disease [36].
Undernutrition and obesity are both manifestationsof extreme energy imbalance at ecological, societal andindividual levels. In past populations and among societies practicing traditional subsistence now, fluctuations inenergy balance have been, and continue to be the norm,
especially with seasonal swings in food availability [1].
Non-seasonal, long-term food shortages were also experienced in the past, reflecting ecological stress due to arange of factors including climate change and over-foraging of resource areas. Long-term positive energy balance
is not usually found in nature, but nor is obesity. Modern
human populations, with assured food supplies and controlled reproduction, are able to express an uncommon
trait, that of prolonged and extreme body fatness, often
to the point of pathology [39].
Political-economic factors frame nutritional health at
local and individual levels by determining what foods
are available to buy, and at what prices, economic
inequality being a major determinant of what can andcan’t be consumed. The industrialised food system has
penetrated most parts of the world now and promotes
consumption often in ways that promote poor nutritional health, as the foods that the industry producesin greatest volume are energy-dense and usually highin refined carbohydrates including sugar, and fat [40].

Ulijaszek ﻿Journal of Physiological Anthropology(2024) 43:10

In present-day industrialised societies, energy intake
is regulated less by availability and more by cognitive
restraint by individuals, there being very weak physiological homeostatic mechanisms to prevent weightgain. Human eating decisions concerning what to eat,when to eat and how to eat, are powerfully influenced
by social contexts. By eating meals together, humans
embed feeding in social structures based on kinshipand household temporal organisation. Meals are central
to social structure and group identity, and an anthropological understanding of obesity includes the study ofsocial patterning of food consumption [41], as well as
an appreciation of how body fatness is valued in society [42], both of which are concerns for nutritional
anthropology.

Conclusions
Food and nutrition shape many aspects of humanity, including identity, reproduction, sociality, as well as
health and well-being. Nutritional anthropology critiques framings of present-day diet in an evolutionary
context and asks ‘what should we be eaten?’ rather than‘what can be eaten?’ and ‘how cheaply can human populations be fed?’ Informed by evolutionary and biocultural
approaches to human diet, answers to these questions
are important, at this time of global dietary change andunstable food security. Undernutrition and obesity persist in the world and are increasing in many places,
making the understanding of food and nutrition in evolutionary, ecological, and social contexts as important
now as when nutritional anthropology first emerged as a
sub-discipline.
AbbreviationUSA	United States of America
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge all the nutritional anthropologists that came before me, andthe few that I have worked with.
Author’s contributions
SU is the sole author of all parts of this manuscript. The author read andapproved the final manuscript.
Funding
None.
Availability of data and materials
Literature and library sources all obtained by SU.

Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate
None needed.
Consent for publication
Not needed.

Page 4 of 5Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Received: 20 June 2023 Accepted: 31 October 2023

References
1. Ulijaszek SJ, Strickland SS. Nutritional anthropology: prospects and perspectives. London: Smith-Gordon; 1993.
2. Richards A. Hunger and work in a savage tribe: a functional study of nutrition among the Southern Bantu. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul;1932.
3. Richards A. Land, labour, and diet in Northern Rhodesia: an economic
study of the Bemba tribe. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1939.
4. McElroy A, Townsend PK. Medical anthropology in ecological perspective.
North Scituate, Massachusetts: Duxbury Press; 1979.
5. Pianka ER. Evolutionary ecology. New York: Harper and Row; 1974.
6. Messer E. Anthropological perspectives on diet. Annu Rev Anthropol.
1984;13:205–49.
7. Ulijaszek SJ, Mann N, Elton S. Evolving human nutrition. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge: Implications for public health; 2012.
8. Brown PJ, Konner M. An anthropological perspective on obesity. Ann NY
Acad Sci. 1987;499:29–46.
9. Ulijaszek SJ, Lofink H. Obesity in biocultural perspective. Annu Rev
Anthropol. 2006;35:337–60.
10. Pelto GH, Goodman AH, Dufour DL. The biocultural perspective innutritional anthropology. In: Goodman AH, Dufour DL, Pelto GH, editors.
Nutritional anthropology: Biocultural perspectives on food and nutrition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford; 2013. p. 1–10.
11. Goodman AH, Leatherman TL, editors. Building a new bioculturalsynthesis: Political-economic perspectives on human biology. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press; 1998.
12. Sellen DW. Anthropological approaches to understanding the causes ofvariation in breastfeeding and promotion of “baby friendly” communities.
Nutr Anthropol. 2002;25:19–29.
13. McLennan AK, Ulijaszek SJ. Obesity emergence in the Pacific islands:
why understanding colonial history and social change is important. Publ
Health Nutr. 2015;18:1499–505.
14. Wrangham R. Catching fire: how cooking made us human. New York:
Basic Books; 2009.
15. Elton S, O’Higgins P. Medicine and evolution: current applications, future
prospects. Boca Raton: CRC Press; 2008.
16. Ulijaszek S. Transdisciplinarity in the study of undernutrition-infection
interactions. Coll Antropol. 1997;21:3–15.
17. Fiddes N. Meat: a natural symbol. Abingdon: Routledge; 2004.
18. Elton S. Environments, adaptation, and evolutionary medicine: Should webe eating a stone age diet? In: Elton S, O’Higgins P, editors. Medicine andEvolution: Current Applications, Future Prospects, 9–33. CRC Press: CRC
Press, Boca Raton; 2008. p. 9–33.
19. Ulijaszek SJ. Energetics methods in biological anthropology. Yearbook
Phys Anthropol. 1992;35:215–42.
20. Eaton SB, Konner M. Paleolithic nutrition. A consideration of its natureand current implications. N Engl J Med. 1985;312:283–9.
21. Bennett K. Environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). Encyclopedia
Pers Individ Differ. 2018;1(1627):1–3.
22. eHRAF (2023) World Cultures. https://​ehraf​world​cultu​res.​yale.​edu/​subje​
cts?q=​nutri​tion.
23. Pollan M. In defence of food: the myth of nutrition and the pleasures of
eating. London: Penguin; 2008.
24. Nestle M. Food politics. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2002.
25. Lindeberg S. Food and western disease. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford: Healthand nutrition from an evolutionary perspective; 2010.
26. Cambeses-Franco C, González-García S, Feijoo G, Moreira MT. Is the
Paleo diet safe for health and the environment? Sci Total Environ.
2021;781:146717.
27. Ungar PS. Evolution of the human diet. The known, the unknown, andthe unknowable. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007.

Ulijaszek ﻿Journal of Physiological Anthropology(2024) 43:10

Page 5 of 5

28. Paine OC, Daegling DJ. The game of models: dietary reconstruction inhuman evolution. J Hum Evol. 2023;174:103295.
29. Chang ML, Nowell A. How to make stone soup: is the “Paleo diet” amissed opportunity for anthropologists? Evol Anthropol. 2016;25:228–31.
30. Evans J, Lorimer J. Taste-shaping-natures: making novel miso withcharismatic microbes and new Nordic fermenters in Copenhagen. Curr
Anthropol. 2021;62(S24):S361–75.
31. Som S, Ulijaszek S, Pal M, Bharati S, Bharati P. Variation in height and BMIof adult Indians. J Biosoc Sci. 2014;46:47–65.
32. Ulijaszek SJ, Pentecost M, Marcus C, Karpe F, Frühbeck G, Nowicka P.
Inequality and childhood overweight and obesity: a commentary. Pediatr
Obes. 2017;12:195–202.
33. Tzioumis E. Adair LS (2014) Childhood dual burden of under-and overnutrition in low-and middle-income countries: a critical review. Food Nutr
Bull. 2014;35(2):230–43.
34. Ulijaszek SJ. The international growth standard for children andadolescents project: environmental influences on preadolescent andadolescent growth in weight and height. Food Nutr Bull. 2006;27(Suppl
5):S279–94.
35. Kuzawa CW. Fetal origins of developmental plasticity: Are fetal cuesreliable predictors of future nutritional environments?. Am J Hum Biol.
2005;17:5–21.
36. Pentecost M. The first thousand days: Epigenetics in the age of global
health. In: Meloni M, Cromby J, Fitzgerald D, Lloyd S, editors. The Palgrave
handbook of biology and society. London: Palgrave Macmillan; 2018.
37. Ramírez-Alarcón K, Sánchez-Agurto Á, Lamperti L, Martorell M. Epigenetics, maternal diet and metabolic programming. Open Biol J. 2019;7(1).
38. Loi M. Social epigenetics and equality of opportunity. Public Health Ethics. 2013;6:142–53.
39. Ulijaszek SJ. Human eating behaviour in an evolutionary ecologicalcontext. Proc Nutr Soc. 2002;61:517–26.
40. Monteiro CA, Moubarac JC, Cannon G, Ng SW, Popkin B. Ultra-processed
products are becoming dominant in the global food system. Obes Rev.
2013;14:21–8.
41. Fischler C. Commensality, society and culture. Soc Sci Information.
2011;50:528–48.
42. Brewis A. Obesity. Cultural and biocultural perspectives: Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick; 2011.

Publisher’s NoteSpringer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Ready to submit your research ? Choose BMC and benefit from:• fast, convenient online submission• thorough peer review by experienced researchers in your field• rapid publication on acceptance• support for research data, including large and complex data types• gold Open Access which fosters wider collaboration and increased citations• maximum visibility for your research: over 100M website views per year
At BMC, research is always in progress.
Learn more biomedcentral.com/submissions