In a former life, I ran a rather successful online symposium for professional researchers in human nutrition (the archives of which can be found here). About half the members held doctorates, mostly in fields such as biology, anthropology, archaeology, and medicine. I'm also proud to say that a number of professional scientists met each other there for the first time, and wound up collaborating and sharing their research in ways that might not otherwise have happened.

How I managed to put that together is an interesting story in and of itself. But the thrust was discussion of the evolutionary roots of human nutrition. It might surprise you to learn, for example, that there's substantial evidence that cereal grains--especially "whole grains"--are not particularly "natural" foods for humans to eat.

My friend Dr. Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, who is one of the pre-eminent researchers in the burgeoning field of human nutrition, was a big part of what made the group successful. I'm thrilled to say that he has finally written a popular book on the subject. He's not only a true scholar and a genuine research scientist (with numerous peer-reviewed papers to his credit), but he's also a hell of a guy. I suspect that this book is going to change a lot of the ways we think about nutrition in the upcoming decades.