The fact that so many Americans do not do what is good for them represents a paradox that clinicians, nutritionists, and social scientists find difficult to explain. We suggest an evolutionary perspective that can help us understand this paradox. Phylogenetic reconstruction of ancestral dietary adaptations reveal that Homo sapiens have a primate legacy that still influences our current eating habits.
Variety is an essential part of the human diet.
Finally, past selections for extreme sociality mean that today our cultural system easily filters or changes our perceptions of food and influences our likes and dislikes. Recent changes force us to ask what, if any, aspects of our modern industrial diet remain adaptive. Although there is a potential for increase in the variety of foods in the modern food systems, many foods are variation on themes that provide only illusory variety. While an industrial food system has an unprecedented potential to supply us with dietary essentials, it also provides new ways through which food can be used to define us as individuals and members of groups, give us pleasure, reveal our status and gender, and to determine our health. His research has focused on diet and disease in human adaptation.