Human Diet

There are key behavioral traits that humans had in their environment of evolutionary adaptiveness that creates the eating patterns we experience now.  One key difference is the risk and energy early humans put into getting the food.   With the advent of cars and grocery stores, humans expend less energy to get more food than would be available in their environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.  As a result, the calorie intake exponentially exceeds the calorie expenditure used to get food.  The human body also evolved to hold large energy reserves for times when food is scarce.  In our novel environment, this means our body is designed to hold onto the food we eat.  If we exceed the amount of food we should intake, we are designed to retain the energy as fat which increases our vulnerability to obesity.  In our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, our central nervous system has evolved to crave “palatable, energy-dense food”.  Because our novel environment put these types of food in easy access, there is nothing stopping us from over-indulging.  All these eating patterns humans evolved to have were designed to capitalize on high energy food and maximization of energy storage.  With the availability of food in the novel environment, it is important to recognize these behavioral patterns and make choices to fight these behaviors.