The Nature of Nutrition: A Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity

I got this book hoping to use it in revising my nutritional anthropology book EVERYONE EATS. I'm well grounded in nutrition, so I figured this would be a boring review. What a surprise. The book had me on the edge of my chair. Most of it was new. Not all of it was--I had read many of the studies when they first came out--but the authors' framework let me look at everything with new eyes. Their synthesizing idea is the Geometrical Framework, basically plotting protein and carbohydrate and sometimes other nutrients to get a graph of the optimal diet for a particular animal (across whatever nutrients the authors are looking at). This is not totally new. It bears a certain resemblance to the linear optimization models and multidimensional scaling long used in some nutrition subdisciplines. Also, they charge optimal foraging theorists with looking only at bulk calories, but at least in anthropology we have been looking at protein and minerals for quite a few years now. But their use of the Geometrical Framework to deal with Darwinian and ecological questions involves some innovative thinking. Most of what was new and fascinating to me, though, was their work on insects. I study people, and tend to think of insects more as things people eat (more in southeast Asia and Africa than in the US, perhaps) than things that are, themselves, eating. But insect nutrition turns out to be as diverse and amazing as everything else about insects. Insects choose their optimal diets when given a choice, and as they age and go through metamorphoses they change their needs and thus their preferences. They sometimes have to trade off egg production against longevity. Natural selection has given them an amazing ability to sense what plants or animals are best for them--sometimes their own dead are best and they become cannibals. Other life-forms, from mice to slime molds, are also good at choosing optimal diets (and of course we know that plants take up the right nutrients too). The details of choice make fascinating reading. The application to humans is that the modern diet (whether industrial fast food or traditional peasant subsistence) runs heavily to starch, and in modern cities to fats and oils. We thus wind up with less protein than optimal (around 15%), and the authors argue that we want to optimize our diets and thus have a hidden hunger for protein. Hence a lot of overeating and a lot of modern obesity. They admit there are other issues, notably lack of exercise, which has perverse metabolic effects as well as the obvious calorie-expenditure problem. And many serious meat eaters are overweight (as any barbecue party will show). Still, I am convinced that they have a point, and we need more research in this direction. Everyone interested in nutrition should definitely look through this book.

As a layman (engineer) this book was heavy going, but worth the effort. The first believable scientific approach to nutritcian I have come across. The most important book I have read for many years.Most of the conclusions are deduced from a graphical approach. It was most frustrating that the graphs used did not reproduce clearly in Kindle.

This is a great book by an intellectual leader in the field of nutrition. Stephen Simpson created the Protein Leverage Hypothesis to explain how subtle changes in the modern food supply has led to overeating and the obesity epidemic.

Exhaustive and brilliant. Mandatory reading for any serious scholar of nutrition and feeding biology.

excellent book!

Excellent text. Very important in understanding what we eat and why.

In 2003, David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson quietly proposed a novel solution to the mystery of the obesity epidemic and coined the term “protein leverage” to re-frame the question of human obesity in terms reflecting animals interacting with their ecology to get the nutrition they need. I say “quietly” because, despite actively searching the obesity literature and attending a wide array of conferences on nutrition science, I’d never heard the term until seven years after their first paper on protein leverage came out. In a series of observations, experiments articles, Simpson, Raubenheimer and colleagues have shown that many species, including humans, regulate food intake by how much protein is needed to maximize health and reproduction. The idea of “leverage” is used to explain the fact that small changes in protein availability can trigger large changes in animal behavior. When protein becomes less available, fruit flies will hold off on mating, humans will overeat and crickets will become cannibals.In 2012, the two scientists finally put together the major findings regarding protein leverage into a beautiful, readable book titled The Nature of Nutrition-A Unifying Framework from Animal Adaptation to Human Obesity. While the geometric framework is still the centerpiece of their theory, the depth and breadth of the book bring even non-visual and non-mathematical readers to the understanding that protein may be the key to understanding the cause of our weight problems.This book radically changed my thinking and writing about human obesity. My new book, "What Is Fat For?" relies heavily on the protein leverage hypothesis as a challenge to the currently dominant "Carbs are Bad" over-simplification that is happening in weight counseling. Buy The Nature of Nutrition! Read it. Buy it for a smart friend of yours. Buy it for your doctor. Get it in your library . . . this book needs to be read!

Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer bring together disparate strands of animal behaviour into a readable but detailed account of the motivations that drive appetite and nutrient-selection. There is a lot of information about insect nutrition, but this reflects the authors` earlier research and illustrates that insects and mammals are not so different. This also helps to balance the tendency to concentrate on mammals in a lot of nutritional research. Overall an excellent book.