Claude Marcel Hladik

• Taste and Obesity
  

Claude Marcel HLADIK (born in Paris in 1936) has, for about 30 years, been conducting field studies on the diet of wild primates — lemurs, monkeys and apes — analysing the composition of available foods in the natural setting of 38 primate species. He has been a research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a senior research scientist at the CNRS in France, and, in 1998, was nominated Professor at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where his wife, Annette Hladik, is conducting botanical studies on plant species and foods available to primates in tropical forests. In the research results they have published together, they have emphasized the evolutionary importance of tubers of wild yams (Dioscorea spp.), because the energy available in the non-toxic and abundant forest yam species is probably the key factor that allowed the development of a large brain in Homo species.