Sublime

ancestors were remarkably healthy. They were as tall or taller than modern Americans and Europeans, which is a sign they ate a very nutritious diet. They were virtually free of cavities and bone malformations that are common with malnutrition. Despite a lack of medical care, they had remarkably low infant mortality rates, yet had better than 10

While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats – such as the Kalahari Desert – work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only

In other words, typical hunter-gatherers are about as physically active as Americans or Europeans who include about an hour of exercise in their daily routine.

in The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100, the economist Robert Fogel noted that “the energy value of the typical diet in France at the start of the eighteenth century was as low as that of Rwanda in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year.”

Crucial to the long success and ultimate failure of hunting-and-gathering bands is the fact that they had to operate on a very small scale over a very wide area. Foragers could survive only where population densities were light. To see why, think of the problems that larger groups would have posed. For one thing, a thousand hunters parading

How much protein do we actually need? It varies from person to person. In my patients I typically set 1.6 g/kg/day as the minimum, which is twice the RDA.

There is a popular belief that Kenyan runners do much more training at moderate and high intensities than do elite runners from other places, but the hard data does not support this myth. In 2003, top French exercise scientist Veronique Billat collected training data from twenty elite male and female Kenyan runners. A subsequent analysis of the