Powered by Plants: Natural Selection & Human Nutrition

In June 2011, Don Matesz surprised and enraged some of the followers of his “paleo” and low-carbohydrate diet blog with his "Farewell to Paleo" post wherein he detailed both evidence-based and personal reasons for abandoning the meat-based diet. By August of 2014, this post had more than 100,000 page views. In September 2011, Matesz presented a talk – "Ancestral Nutrition: An Alternative Approach" – at the first ever Ancestral Health Symposium at UCLA. That lecture focused on identifying physiological evidence for human nutritional adaptations to either plant-based or animal-based diet and it evolved into this book. Powered By Plants refutes the "paleolithic diet" claim that meat-eating uniquely drove human evolution by reviewing the abundant evidence that a plant-based diet powered human evolution. Challenging anthropologists and advocates of low-carbohydrate and 'paleo' diets who claim that paleolithic meat-eating made us human, Matesz shows that we have numerous heritable anatomical, physiological, and biochemical features primarily adapted to acquisition, digestion, or metabolism of whole plant foods, but lack the heritable features expected as evidence of evolution dependent upon and primarily driven by meat consumption. Powered By Plants surveys human biology from head-to-toe, and, backed by hundreds of references, shows that our sensory, locomotive, manual, digestive, and reproductive systems, and our nutrient metabolism, all have features primarily adapted to a whole foods plant-based diet.