The Nutritional Ecology of Human Obesity

Summary

Nutrition has exerted a powerful influence on human evolution and history, and continues to play a central role in global challenges such as food security and obesity. However, the complexity of nutrition presents considerable challenges for researchers to unravel its grip on human affairs. In this talk I will introduce an approach called nutritional geometry that has been developed to aid this process. Nutritional geometry differs from conventional nutritional models in acknowledging that nutrients do not act alone, but interact extensively in their influence on humans. I illustrate this in the context of human obesity, showing how nutritional geometry has provided new insight into the ways that recent changes in human nutritional ecology have interacted with evolved human traits to generate this major global problem.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Death of Primitive Economic Man: Nutritional Archaeology for the 21st Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage