Integrating Evolutionary Medicine into Nutrition Science: Principles, Pitfalls, and Applications

Understanding human evolution is key to understanding our energy and nutrient requirements and the mechanisms that regulate food selection and responses. This knowledge also elucidates why the body is vulnerable to nutrition-related disease and dysfunction, thus guiding dietary recommendations to optimize health in different populations. Evolutionary perspectives are, however, frequently misinterpreted, rendering it difficult for nutrition scientists to benefit from the insights that this approach can bring. In this article, we first describe common misconceptions and pitfalls in some recent applications of evolutionary theory to nutrition. To avoid these problems, we outline how core tenets and concepts from evolutionary medicine-an interdisciplinary field that applies insights from evolutionary biology to human health and disease-can help inform nutrition research. These insights include considering the importance of both ultimate and proximate explanations for evolved traits, along with how vulnerabilities within our evolved biology may increase the risk of nutrition-related problems. We then provide an example of how these principles operate in a relevant field of investigation, namely, the study of how nutrient-specific appetites may drive eating behaviors and health outcomes.