Genius Foods

dramatic increase in the availability of starch and sugar
(from wheat and corn, for example) created tooth decay and
obesity, a loss of height, and a decrease in bone density. By
domesticating animals and crops, we inadvertently
domesticated ourselves.
The advent of agriculture fed a vicious spiral of
behavioral demands that changed the very nature of our
brains. A hunter-gatherer had to be self-sufficient, but the
post-agriculture world favored specialization. Someone to
plant the wheat, someone to pick it, someone to mill it,
someone to cook it, someone to sell it. While this process of
hyper-specialization eventually led to the industrial
revolution and all its conveniences like iPhones, Costco, and
the Internet, these modern trappings came with a flip side.
Fitting an ancient brain into a modern environment may be
like fitting a square peg into a round hole, as evidenced by
the millions of Americans on antidepressants, stimulants,
and drugs of abuse. A person with ADHD, whose brain
thrives on novelty and exploration, may have been the
ultimate hunter-gatherer—but today this person struggles
with a job that requires repetition and routine (the authors
can—ahem—relate).
The confluence of this dietary shift and the relegation of
our cognitive duties caused our brains to lose the volumetric
equivalent of a tennis ball in a mere ten thousand years. Our
ancestors from five hundred generations ago would have
lamented our restrictive existences, and then apologized to
us for engineering our cognitive demise. Forget about
leaving the next generation with lower standards of living,
student debt, or environmental destruction—our ancestors