You're doomed. Or maybe not.

The Hungry Brain:

Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat

by Stephan Guyenet

Looking at the raving reviews that the publisher chose to post on the back cover, I see that the Paleo Diet people read no further than the first couple of chapters. And that's sad!  It's like a person who goes to the Smithsonian and only looks at the Anasazi pottery from Arizona. Yeah, it's there, but there's a whole lot that comes after it!

Whether or not farming started 12,000 years ago or as early as 23,000 (interesting article -- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150722144709.htm), I take offense at the notion that we need to be eating like our prehistoric ancestors. We've evolved physically (ex: LCT gene), socially (ex: fermentation), and microsopically (the average lifespan of a gut bacterium is less than one day).  But I won't harp on my personal peeve any longer--that would really do the book an injustice.

He's covered a lot a ground, deeply and widely, and he writes so well this flows like a mystery novel. 

...imagine an infant trying to grab the tail of a cat sitting in front of him. He's not coordinated enough, and he mostly flails around, sometimes touching the tail but having a hard time grasping it. Suddenly, by chance, his arm and hand move in just the right way... With practice, his brain refines the movement, until he can terrorize the cat at will.

And who can resist a chapter heading like, "The United States of Food Reward."  Be sure not to miss this one very important point:

Our current food system is less than a century old--not nearly enough time for humans to genetically adapt to the radical changes that have occurred.

A century.  100 years--not 12,000. He's not talking about the Paleolithic Era vs. 1950 A.D., he's talking about the modern world where you can have a breakfast burrito and iced mocha at the gas station; a thickburger, fries and 32-ounce drink at the fast food drive-through; a frozen pizza plus a six-pack of beer at the grocery. Toss in a gallon of Rocky Road for me, too.

...our own innate food preferences are commercially exploited by concentrating and combining the properties we find most rewarding, resulting in foods that are more seductive than what our ancestors would have encountered. Creating an obesity epidemic wasn't the objective; it was just an unfortunate side effect of the race to make money.

We're not helpless slaves to our environment, and he includes ways to avoid the traps we lay for ourselves.  My favorite:

High-reward foods tend to increase food intake and adiposity, while lower-reward foods tend to have the opposite effect. This suggests a weight management "secret" you'll rarely find in a diet book: eat simple food.

This isn't just a cute quote--it's fully backed by research in his book. Later, after explaining the influence of genes on our food choices, he concludes with the gentle reminder:

A century ago in the United States, people carried the same genes we do today, yet few people had obesity. What has changed isn't our genes, it's our environment--our food, our cars, our jobs.

...As Francis Collins, geneticist and directory of the National Institute of Health, is fond of saying, "Genetics loads the gun, and environment pulls the trigger."