NPR has a fascinating interview with Daniel Lieberman, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, about some of the ways our bodies are poorly matched to cope with today’s modern advances. For example, years ago we didn’t have access to sweet foods like we do now:

We evolved to crave sweet foods. Everybody loves sweet foods. But if you try to eat foods that hunter-gatherers eat or chimpanzees eat, you’d be surprised at how unsweet they are. Most wild fruits are about as sweet as a carrot. So we love sweetness, but until recently, pretty much the only food that we got that was sweet was honey, and honey of course was a special treat — honey was pretty much the only form of dessert in the Paleolithic. But now we have access to abundant quantities of sugar and simple carbohydrates, which we evolved to love because they’re full of energy, but we don’t have the metabolism. We don’t have the bodies that are able to cope with those kinds of levels of sugar, and the result is that we get sick.

Lieberman also shares hypotheses about why stress is different — and more unhealthy — than it was in prehistoric times, and why that stress leads us to binge on comfort foods. Fascinating stuff!