Food, Science, and the Human Body

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.

You'll compare and contrast food-related crises from mass starvation to the obesity. You'll explore food trends and ideas, from the Mediterranean and MIND diets to the farm-to-table movement and the controversy surrounding GMOs. You'll bust common myths about how food acts on the body and mind. And you gain powerful scientific insights that will always be there in the back of your mind, every time you get hungry.

All Lectures:
1. Paleo Diets and the Ancestral Appetite
2. Our Hunter-Gatherer Past
3. Stones, Bones, and Teeth
4. Did Meat Eating Make Us Human?
5. Insects: The Other White Meat
6. Was the Stone Age Menu Mostly Vegetarian?
7. Cooking and the Control of Fire
8. The Neolithic Revolution
9. The Changing Disease-Scape
10. How Foods Spread around the World
11. The History of the Spice Trade
12. How Sugar and Salt Shaped World History
13. A Brief History of Bread
14. The Science and Secrets of Chocolate
15.Water: The Liquid of Life
16. Beer, Mead, and the Fun of Fermentation
17. Humanity's Love of Wine
18. Coffee: Love or Addiction?
19. The Roots of Tea
20. The Fizz on Soda
21. Food as Ritual
22. When People Eat Things That Aren't Food
23. Food as Recreational Drugs
24. Food as Medicine
25. The Coevolution of Genes and Diet
26.The Scoop on Poop
27. The Gut Microbiome
28. Brain Food
29. You Are What Your Mother Ate
30. Civilization: Diets and Diseases
31. What the World Is Eating
32. The Overnutrition Epidemic
33. World Poverty and Undernutrition
34. Should the World Eat Meat?
35. Should We Be Powered by Plants?
36. The Future of Food