Alan Perrott writes in the New Zealand Herald about David Reubenheimer, a Kiwi nutritional ecologist who is travelling the world finding out how organisms acquire the nutrition they need to survive.
From this, the scientist hopes to understand our propensity for all things junk food, and the optimum nutritional balance for us.
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“All the same, you may be wondering what all this has to do with bum size. Well, this peed-on professor is a nutritional ecologist, one who is building a career around figuring out how all creatures great and small go about obtaining the nutrients they need to survive.
“It’s becoming a life mission for the 49-year-old. And, once completed, he hopes to be able to explain our unshakeable fondness for eating rubbish. Of course, such knowledge won’t make anyone’s bum smaller overnight, but we’ll at least understand how it got to the state it’s in.”