There has been a vast increase in short blog-like articles that promise to condense a year’s worth of gradute study on a subject into a 500 word essay. The marriage of this promise, corporate jargon, and the explosion large language models (LLMs) has resulted in a lot of junk on the internet. Sentence length is getting shorter, less complex, more homogenous, and clarity is suffering. These claims I am making are not supported by any data, at least not at the moment and as far as I can tell, but I think we can all feel it. At the height of human technological advancement I have never felt more confused when talking with colleagues or reading articles online. Maybe this is an indictment of my personal comprehension skills, you’ll have to forgive me for thinking this is likely not the case. Perhaps the circle’s I frequent are too technically advanced for me and discuss topics that I don’t have the capacity to understand. While this is not impossible, I find if I can’t even find the words to ask a question about what I am not understanding there’s often a larger issue at hand. There seems to have been an odd merging of terse, vague business corporate language into our everyday lexicon. I don’t know how, but what I do know is that I find reading emails, blogs, or books that are riddled with this type of language mentally exhausting. I miss writing scholarly articles. Articles that are required to have a set structure and that will be critically appraised. Articles that are tasked with evaluating the insights of scholars on a specific subject. Articles that I have to continually revisit and revise because I wasn’t quite able to get my point across. Articles that you must cite with evidence to support your claims. I did a lot of this writing during my undergraduate and graduate days and dare I say this was some of the best writing I have ever done. One of these pieces is what I would like to share with you today.

The writing below is the culmination of critiques that I was tasked with writing over the length of a quarter in my graduate program at Central Washington University. The work that I was critiquing is called The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Dr. Daniel Lieberman. Lieberman explores how the human body evolved from life as hunter-gatherers, making it poorly adapted to modern environments, and which contributes to common chronic diseases that are rising today like obesity and diabetes. Lieberman argues that understanding our evolutionary history can help us improve our health by realigning our lifestyles with our biological heritage. To be frank, I drew many issues with the book. In an objective sense, I thought Dr. Lieberman had simply missed the mark in his appraisal of our historical and cultural context in many respects which resulted in questionable conclusions. In a subjective sense, I was reading many prominent 20th-century libertarian free-market economists in parallel like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell which certainly colored my reading of the proposed policies negatively. It is easy and ever so tempting to want to go back and retroactively temper some of my statements that were made, but that would be dishonest. I think one of the reasons I appreciate this work of mine so much is because I didn’t try to pander to a prominent researcher, nor needlessly tear something down for self-gratification. I was just trying to communicate the ideas that were rattling around in my head as clearly as I could. Like Lieberman, at times I may have missed the mark, again I ask for your forgiveness. If you’ve kept reading thus far I can only assume you also feel the exhaustion of reading current vague corporate laiden pieces. I hope this will be balm for those wounds.

-Jon

For this assignment, I would like to do a brief review of a few of the claims made in chapter 10, The Vicious Circle of Too Much, as well as provide an overall critique of the book and share some of the notes that I have taken throughout. I’ll do my best to keep this critique to two pages, but there are many topics I want to address in the most complete way I know how.

Overall Critique

I want to begin this critique by stating that I very much did enjoy reading this book, however, I believe science and critiques should be strict in their appraisal because it only benefits the authors being critiqued. I understand that it may be the intent of Dr. Lieberman that this book is accessible and enjoyable to a wide host of readers which I commend and fully appreciate, but I think throughout most of the book he is simply too verbose in his explanations. Words that might be thought to add flair to his prose only extend explanations of topics that are already difficult to understand unnecessarily. As a result, what could have been discussed in a paragraph takes 3 pages, which results in a book that is much longer than it needed to be. An example of this extended to his figures can be found in the first four chapters that pertain to the evolutionary history of Homo Sapiens. The same figure of a human standing next to an ape is displayed 4 different times each highlighting a slightly different distinction between the two. In my opinion, grouping all of these figures into one that highlighted all of the differences and referencing this figure would have been a better approach.

The Vicious Cycle of Too Much

As of late, I have been made privy of the insulin-dependant model of fat storage as a way to explain the growing rate of obesity in humans that has occurred in the last 3 decades. I want to begin with the statement that I am not an expert in metabolism and nutrition in the slightest sense, and don’t want to give the false impression that I know what the literature suggests with regard to human nutrition. However, I do see some apparent inconsistencies that I would like to address.

As far I understand it, and how it was explained in Dr. Lieberman’s book, the reason that people are storing more fat and storing it into visceral fat is that we are eating more foods that are high in sugar, which causes a spike in insulin and causes this sugar to be stored in fat cells. I think the biggest piece of evidence to the contrary is that the rate of obesity has been rising at a rate that is closely related to total calories, and the portion of these calories that are from carbohydrates has been decreasing over the last 20 years (Makarem et al., 2014). Furthermore, the amount of sucrose, lactose, and fructose consumption has also been going down, with overall sugar consumption remaining constant (Makarem et al., 2014). I can submit that the consumption of processed foods and foods that are high in carbohydrates can result in people becoming hungry sooner, but this would still favor the apparent conclusion that this leads to an increase in calories consumed which results in weight gained. Again, I cannot speak to whether insulin does or does not affect the partitioning of excess nutrients when secreted, but from an outsider looking in, it looks fairly obvious that the rate of obesity is closely linked to overall calorie consumption.

Towards the end of this chapter, Dr. Lieberman begins to make the claim that being obese does not necessarily lead to worse overall health outcomes. As evidence of this, he cites a study that concluded that one-third of people who were overweight showed no signs of metabolic disturbance (Wildman et al., 2008). Following this statement, Dr. Lieberman cites another study that showed that lean men who did not exercise had twice the risk of dying as obese men who did exercise (Lee et al., 1999). With regard to the first statement, it’s common amongst health researchers to try and find novel insights to current data, but I find that the obvious conclusion is often the correct one. The correct conclusion being that two-thirds of people who are overweight do show signs of metabolic disturbance, ergo a person who is overweight is more likely to be unhealthy. With regard to the second statement, it is not trivial to state that physical activity elicits a protective stimulus within the body, however, I believe it would much more enlightening to control for activity amongst both obese and lean individuals and then assess all-cause mortality. I believe that this comparison would paint a much different picture.

Survival of The Fitter

Chapter 13 is the point at which Dr. Lieberman begins to provide his own views on what can be done to taper the increasing rate of mismatch diseases and dysevolution that is occuring. I’d first like to begin by stating that I can tell that Dr. Lieberman really enjoyed writing this section because the clarity of the writing and overall prose was much better than the rest of the book. In addition, I also enjoyed reading this chapter because his diction was so much smoother and easier to read. Dr. Lieberman outlines four different possible approaches: Natural selection, investment in biomedical research, education and empowerment, and changing the environment. I thought the first approach in natural selection seemed plausible, but during this section, Dr. Lieberman points out that many of these mismatch diseases develop in humans after they have already reproduced, which I thought was a great point to make and something I did not fully take into account. The next two sections (biomedical research/education and empowerment) were spot on in that they are very beneficial, and I did appreciate the preventative approach as it pertains to incentivizing community-based activities. In this light, I think of activities like a jog-a-thon that is active yet serves a purpose in fundraising, would do wonders.

Where I begin to draw issue is the final approach “Changing the environment”. The main idea, as I understand it, is that the previous three approaches will not take noticeable effect quickly enough for any real change to take hold; therefore, the government should “change the environment” and encourage people to be healthy through “soft paternalism”. I think it’s worth noting initially that many of the ideas that are put forward by Dr. Lieberman are not examples of “soft paternalism” but simply paternalism. Dr. Lieberman begins by stating that the logic of encouraging humans to act in their own best interest is uncontroversial when applied to children which is true. However, this line of reasoning cannot be extended to adults, ipso facto because they are not children, they are adults who are fully capable of making their own decisions. Dr. Lieberman then implies that consuming excess sugar is just as deleterious to the health of children as consuming alcohol or smoking, a statement that is completely unfounded. We have copious amounts of data indicating that smoking is an independent risk factor for all-cause mortality, as far as I am aware those data simply do not exist for sugar.

Lieberman expands on this topic and the fact that fast food consumption is limited in schools, so why is it any different that it should be limited to children outside of school? I think the obvious explanation for this is that compulsory attendance laws that require children to be in school between the ages of 5 and 18 and be subject to the meals that are provided (if they don’t bring their own meals). There are no compulsory attendance laws for children to attend McDonalds, or any other fast food restaurant for that matter. He follows this idea by suggesting that every soda should come with the label “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Consuming too much sugar causes obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.” A statement that is simply not true. Does consuming too much sugar increase your risk of obesity due to the excess calories, then by extension diabetes, and heart disease? Definitely. Does excess sugar consumption cause diabetes and heart disease? No.

I could discuss more issues that I had with this ending chapter but I will end with this parting thought. It is without fail that proponents of levying taxes on undesirable behaivors do so under the false pretense that they are encouraging individuals to do the right thing, when they are actually discouraging individuals from doing the wrong thing. This is a crucial distinction that must be made, because learning from mistakes made is often a greater learning opportunity than never making them at all. Providing the most accurate and reliable information to the public might not be the only thing a government entity can do, but it is the only thing that can be done that still treats these individuals as autonomous and respectable citizens. It amazes me how those who deem themselves as knowledgeable in a subject believe that knowledge warrants them the power to make decisions for other people who may not be as knowledgable and without their consent, while also being insulated from the consequences that arise if the decision made was wrong.