Eat Like the Animals: what nature teaches us about the science of healthy eating

Animals from cockroaches to baboons in the wild instinctively mix a healthy, balanced diet. Why can’t we? In this lecture I describe my 35-year research journey with colleague David Raubenheimer to discover the answers to this question. Our scientific detective story involves (among other things) a mediaeval woodland in Oxford, biblical African swarms, cannibal Mormons crickets, a new explanation for the human obesity epidemic, the gift of a Picasso painting, and the establishment of a cathedral to multidisciplinary research in Australia. We show that mixing a nutritionally balanced diet relies on a small number of nutrient-specific appetites, which are universal across the animal kingdom. We discover that we too have these appetites, but they have been hijacked in the modern industrialized food environment, causing the epidemics of obesity and the serious diseases that come with it. We need to listen to our appetites and to place them in a whole-food environment where they can guide us towards a healthy balanced diet - without the need for apps or diet fads.

Stephen Simpson is Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre at Univ. Sydney and is the Executive Director of Obesity Australia. He has pioneered major developments at the interface of nutritional physiology, ecology, and behaviour. His groundbreaking discovery of the mechanisms that induce swarming in locusts (studies which span neuro-chemistry through to consequences for individual behaviour and population ecology) has immense practical and conceptual benefits. He has also developed a novel class of state-space models for nutrition. His Geometric Framework (GF) powerfully integrates ideas in this field and, although it arose from extensive experiments on insects, is now being applied in a wide variety of contexts, including the search for dietary causes of human obesity. He was awarded the AAS MacFarlane Burnet Medal in 2022 in recognition of his taxonomically broad and cross-disciplinary research on nutrition, including profound contributions to dietary causes of obesity and aging in humans.