TTC Video Food, Science, and The Human Body

TTC Video – Food, Science, and the Human Body
Lecturer: Alyssa Crittenden, Ph.D.

Throughout history, our evolution as a species has been inextricably linked to the foods we eat. It’s a relationship that goes back nearly 2.8 million years to our roots as hunters and gatherers. And it continues to the present day in the form of debates over good nutrition and the future of food on an overpopulated planet.

Food has led to the rise of epic civilizations. It’s shaped-and been shaped by-watershed moments in human history, from the dawn of animal husbandry to the industrial age of mass production to the 21st-century farm-to-table movement. Most importantly: It’s led to the amazing behavioral and nutritional flexibility of the bodies we have.

Understanding our current-and future-relationship with food warrants a look back in time to the roots of food and food culture, and its intersection with science.

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

A Multidisciplinary Approach

“We all spend countless hours thinking about, buying, preparing, consuming, and digesting food,” says Dr. Crittenden. “Our long evolutionary relationship with food is often hailed by anthropologists as one of the key milestones in human history.”

More than Just Nutrition: From wine and beer to chocolate and spices, food has numerous social, cultural, and spiritual roots. Bread, for example, helped defined social status. The lightest bread was reserved for elites, while dark and heavy bread was for everyone else. Also, white bread was thought to be distinctly “American” in the early 20th century.
Bizarre Foods: Not everything human beings eat is universally considered food. Entomophagy, the practice of eating bugs, has been around for most of human history. Placentophagy, the eating of the placenta by a mother, is still practiced. And eating psilocybin mushrooms for their hallucinogenic qualities dates back to the Aztecs.
A World in Your Gut: Of all the body’s microbiomes, the gut has the greatest number of bacterial species that play a vital role in our health (from metabolizing our food to defending us from pathogens). Scientific data supports the idea that these gut microbes are “fellow travelers” in human evolution.

Pressing Questions and Concerns

Bringing a broad range of disciplines to these lectures, Dr. Crittenden makes Food, Science, and the Human Body an intriguing and illuminating catalog of some of the most pressing questions and concerns we have about what we eat, how we eat it, why we eat it, and how we’ll continue to eat it in the coming decades. Throughout the lectures, you will:

Bust common myths about how food acts on the body and mind, and come away with insights you can apply to your own everyday dinner plate.

Insights for When You’re Hungry

Dr. Crittenden has spent her entire career absorbed by the questions and issues examined throughout Food, Science, and the Human Body. “My fascination with the relationship between people and their food is one of the reasons that I’m teaching this course,” she says.

An anthropologist whose focus is on behavioral ecology and nutritional anthropology, Dr. Crittenden brings insights from her own research (among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania) to these lectures. Her research has won multiple awards and has been published in top-tier journals and highlighted in magazines, including National Geographic and Smithsonian.

This topic will continue to be of importance as long as human beings exist. And the information in Food, Science, and the Human Body will continue to resonate in your mind, every time you get hungry.