I was proud to be chosen as a presenter for the 2012 Ancestral Health Symposium, held in conjunction with the Harvard Food Law Society in Cambridge, MA.

Here’s the long-awaited video of my presentation, “What Is Hunger, and Why Are We Hungry?” It’s information-dense and moves very quickly, so I recommend that you put on your thinking cap and get comfortable. (Note that it ends at about 17:30…the rest is Q&A.)

Here are direct links to the videos: Vimeo version, Youtube version. Please go there and drop a “Like”—and a comment, if you’re so inclined.

My bibliography, including linked references, can be found here.

Thanks are due to Sam Osterling, and the Harvard A/V team, for the finished video.

What’s In It, And Why Should I Watch It?

As I state in the abstract: “People aren’t obese because they enjoy being obese, and diets don’t fail because people dislike being slim and healthy. Diets fail because hunger overrides our other motivations.” Therefore, we cannot possibly understand obesity and the metabolic syndrome if we don’t understand hunger, and how it is modulated by nutrition and human metabolism.

Fortunately, the science of hunger is relatively well-established and well-understood. Unfortunately, it is not well-understood within the ancestral health community, nor within the community of nutrition research at large—which tends to treat hunger as an inevitable consequence of a healthy diet, or mires it in ad-hoc explanations clearly intended to justify a conclusion already reached, usually for political reasons.

Thus, the purpose of my presentation is to summarize and explain the current state of hunger research, so that you can use the framework it provides to inspire and organize your own research, and to address your own issues around hunger. It includes material from my ongoing article series “Why Are We Hungry?” as well as a great deal of new material, which I look forward to exploring in detail in future installments. I’m proud of it, and I hope you find it both interesting and valuable.

Meanwhile, please post your feedback and questions in the comments!

Live in freedom, live in beauty.

JS

As always, you can support my continued efforts to bring you good information, unbiased and uncluttered by advertising, by purchasing a copy of The Gnoll Credo or a T-shirt. Seriously: have you read the reviews lately?