Reverse-Engineering Nutrition Through Liver–Brain Co-evolution and the Proto-Liver Origin of Life Framework
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Understanding human nutrition requires linking modern metabolism to its evolutionary and prebiotic origins. Contemporary nutrition science focuses on calories, macronutrients, and dietary patterns, but these frameworks overlook the deeper regulatory logic governing how the body handles energy. This paper integrates two complementary models—the Liver–Brain Co-evolution hypothesis (LBC) and the Proto-Liver Origin of Life (PLOL) framework—to propose that nutrition is fundamentally a redox-management process. The PLOL framework suggests that early life emerged within mineral-based redox buffers, where mixed-valence iron structures such as green rust stabilized environmental electron flow before biological molecules existed. As organic chemistry evolved, only molecules that improved redox stability were retained, forming the basis for cofactors, porphyrins, heme, and modern electron-transfer proteins. The LBC hypothesis extends this regulatory logic into animal evolution. The liver remains the central metabolic controller, while the brain evolved to predict and secure stabilizing inputs. Nutrient value, therefore, depends on how foods affect hepatic redox balance rather than their caloric content. This paper develops a reverse-engineered nutritional model in which: (1) the liver’s redox envelope defines stabilizing vs. destabilizing foods; (2) modern metabolic disease arises from chronic redox mismatch rather than caloric excess; and (3) micronutrients reflect direct evolutionary inheritance from ancient mineral catalysts. This regulation-first framework unifies origins-of-life chemistry, metabolism, behavior, circadian biology, and modern diet-related disease. Figures illustrate evolutionary continuity, liver–brain prediction loops, dietary redox curves, circadian alignment, a redox mismatch disease model, and a regulation-first classification of foods.
Author: van der Merwe, Emile S.
Language: English
Subfield: Food Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7106574491
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: