Are We Focusing on Diet for Health?

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There's probably multiple diets that we can do well on. But the bigger issue is that, why are we focusing on diet for health, right? Because the so called niandertal diet, or the pale lithic diet, people seemd to think it's this one thing. So let's talk about the kind of the history of of thi scientific attempt to understand diet nutrition and where we went wrong.

Shermer and de Salcedo discuss: her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 27 • her long-term psychological strategy for living with a serious illness • what “eating like a pig” actually means • our 70-year-old “diet detour” • the obesity crisis • how dietary studies are conducted • the baseline health of lab rats • static vs. dynamic metabolism • diseases you can treat, manage, or prevent with exercise • cholesterol and statins • why exercise is more important than diet • how you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Anastacia Marx de Salcedo is a food writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Slate, the Boston Globe, and Gourmet magazine and on PBS and NPR blogs. She’s worked as a public health consultant, news magazine publisher, and public policy researcher. She is the author of Combat-Ready Kitchen and lives in Boston, MA.