Why Diets Always Fail: Harvard Professor Exposes Food Myths | Daniel Lieberman (E439)
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Why do diets fail according to evolutionary biology?
Every serving of meat increases your risk of dying in a given year by I think thirteen percent. What there's no such thing as an optimal diet. There's no magic bullet diet. There's no diet that solves every problem. When you diet, which is to basically eat less fewer calories than you're spending, what happens? We get hungry. And food companies are making a fortune. So they add all these additives. So you combine all these products. You have foods that we love, that we crave, and the manufacturers know exactly what they're doing. We're victims, right? I mean there's so much prepared food and it's so cheap. All you need to know is how to press a button. I think the best diets aren't actually diets why not?
Daniel, welcome back to High Performance. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. So how would you answer that first question? What if the problem isn't that we don't know enough about diets, but we've misunderstood what humans were actually designed to eat? Well, I
mean I think it's a it's you you hit it the nail on the head. I mean We evolved to to get our food, right? I mean, if you're a hunter, gatherer, or a farmer, you spend your life working to to get your food and to grow your food. And all of a sudden we're in this really weird environment where you walk into a supermarket and there's thirty thousand, forty thousand different kinds of food. And now we now we have to choose our food. And we never evolved to do that. And then We get sick from the food that we eat, and now we have to lose weight. And we never evolved to lose weight either. And so we're we're now asking people to do things that we were never evolved to do. And then we blame them and shame them for making the wrong choice or or being confused, um, as as if there's something wrong with them.
So so I think, you know, uh an evolutionary perspective can help all of us sort of think better about. Food and diet and health and and uh how to be kind of nicer to each other.
I really wanna dive straight in with a question that It's very interesting and you've just said and I've never heard anyone else say it on our show before, including I think when we spoke last time, maybe you did, but you said we never evolved to diet. Yeah. So I feel like I mean, I'm forty seven. Damien is fifty bob, fifty one. I feel young'uns. But we but we true, but we are both in a sea of middle aged men trying to diet the weight off us, feeling like we're failures, wondering like we are struggling. And then you see him and say, Well, evolutionary we weren't even designed. to go onto diets to lose weight. So we're trying to force our bodies to do something that they were never designed to do in the first place.
Correct. When you when you diet, right, which is to basically Eat less than you're sp eat you know, eat eat less fewer calories than you're spending, right? You're what are you what happens? We get hungry, right? And and hunger is one of the most fundamental adaptations to prevent us to lose weight. When when you when you're losing weight, your body mounts a whole suite of of responses. These are deep-seated, profound adaptations. to prevent us from losing weight. So, you know, when you when your fat cells, for example, produce a hormone called leptin. And when you when you when you decrease the amount of fat in your body, your leptin levels drop, your hypothalamus in your brain says, uh oh, you're losing fat.
And it makes you hungry. When when you when your stomach is empty, your stomach produces a hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. When your and your intestine doesn't have food, it produces neurotransmitters that send signals to your brain to tell you to eat. So you're No wonder we're failing. So no wonder so we're because we never evolved to do this because we lived in environments for millions of years where people struggled to get enough food. Um and and body fat plays an incredibly important role in our evolutionary biology. Humans are unusually fat creatures. So we evolved to have a lot of fat and to store a lot of fat, but we never evolved to have the abundance that we have today.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do diets fail according to evolutionary biology?
0:03–8:09
2
How does our body’s hormonal response make weight loss difficult?
8:09–16:56
3
What are the “mismatch” and “hypermatch” concepts in modern nutrition?
16:56–24:49
4
How does the hedgehog‑vs‑fox metaphor explain diet thinking?
24:49–33:38
5
What did the raw‑food diet experiment reveal about satiety and practicality?
33:38–43:23
6
Why is the Mediterranean diet considered the most evidence‑based option?
43:23–51:24
7
How can cooking at home improve health compared to ultra‑processed foods?
51:24–59:04
8
What practical questions should we ask ourselves before each meal?
59:04–1:07:07
Speakers
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