Food, Science, and the Human Body

Course Overview

Join an award-winning anthropologist for an exploration of the evolution of the human diet and its relationship to our bodies.

What foods did the human body evolve to eat, and why? How does the food we eat affect our genes and our minds? What foods are (and aren’t) optimal for our everyday health? How can we use cutting-edge science to end world hunger?

In these 36 lectures, get eye-opening answers to these and other perplexing questions about the evolution of the human diet and its relationship to our bodies. Bringing together insights from a range of fields including history, anthropology, nutrition, economics, biology, and sociology, this exciting partnership between The Great Courses and National Geographic lays bare what science can teach us about food.

Taking you far beyond the supermarket and the laboratory, these lectures cross cultures, span time, and hop around the world from the most underfed to the most overfed human societies. Bringing a broad range of disciplines to these lectures, Dr. Crittenden offers an intriguing and illuminating catalog of some of the most pressing questions and concerns.

Course Content

• Paleo Diets and the Ancestral Appetite (31 min)

2. Our Hunter-Gatherer Past (31 min)

3. Stones, Bones, and Teeth (29 min)

4. Did Eating Meat Make Us Human? (28 min)

5. Insects: The Other White Meat (29 min)

• Was the Stone Age Menu Mostly Vegetarian? (29 min)

• Cooking and the Control of Fire (29 min)

• The Neolithic Revolution (30 min)

9. The Changing Disease-Scape (29 min)

• How Foods Spread around the World (30 min)

• The History of the Spice Trade (29 min)

• How Sugar and Salt Shaped World History (29 min)

• A Brief History of Bread (28 min)

• The Science and Secrets of Chocolate (30 min)

• Water: The Liquid of Life (30 min)

• Beer, Mead, and the Fun of Fermentation (30 min)

17. Humanity’s Love of Wine (30 min)

18. Coffee: Love or Addiction? (29 min)

19. The Roots of Tea (28 min)

• The Fizz on Soda (30 min)

• Food as Ritual (28 min)

• When People Eat Things That Aren’t Food (29 min)

• Food as Recreational Drugs (32 min)

• Food as Medicine (31 min)

25. The Coevolution of Genes and Diet (30 min)

• The Scoop on Poop (31 min)

• The Gut Microbiome (30 min)

• Brain Food (29 min)

• You Are What Your Mother Ate (29 min)

• Civilization: Diets and Diseases (31 min)

• What the World Is Eating (25 min)

32. The Overnutrition Epidemic (29 min)

• World Poverty and Undernutrition (31 min)

34. Should the World Eat Meat? (33 min)

• Should We Be Powered by Plants? (32 min)

36. The Future of Food (36 min)