Posted on 09/09/2007 7:48:53 PM PDT by neverdem
Could people one day evolve to eat rich food while remaining perfectly slim and svelte?
This may not be so wild a fantasy. It is becoming clear that the human genome does respond to changes in diet, even though it takes many generations to do so.
Researchers studying the enzyme that converts starch to simple sugars like glucose have found that people living in countries with a high-starch diet produce considerably more of the enzyme than people who eat a low-starch diet.
The reason is an evolutionary one. People in high-starch countries have many extra copies of the amylase gene which makes the starch-converting enzyme, a group led by George H. Perry of Arizona State University and Nathaniel J. Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported yesterday in the journal Nature Genetics.
The production of the extra copies seems to have been favored by natural selection, according to a genetic test, the authors say. If so, the selective pressure could have occurred when people first started to grow cereals like wheat and barley at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, or even much earlier.
Paleoanthropologists have long wondered what change in the usual primate diet of fruit and nuts enabled the emerging human lineage to support a brain that eventually swelled to three times the size of chimpanzees’.
Neural tissue requires large amounts of energy, and the usual assumption is that humans began to eat meat some 2.5 million years ago when brain volume started to expand. But another possibility is that the extra nutrients came from starch...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That appears to be the title and authors, but I can't find a link even to the abstract anywhere.
Epigenetics at work.
Want to eat all the pasta you want and look like Twiggy? Move to Italy.
That's another phenomena. They're finding copy number variation in the genes here.
It's non Mendelian genetics. That's a paper on it from Nature.
And here I thought we were all evolving to be lard asses. Silly me.
There is a book called “Cook Right for Your Blood Type”
1999 Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo
Based on ancestoral eating habits passed on through blood type.
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Thanks neverdem. Martin -- pingworthy? |
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That must be why I love matza and venison. Sometimes its confusing to be a Texan descended from Polish Jews and Commanches. Do I shoot ‘em, scalp ‘em, or sue ‘em?
“Paleoanthropologists have long wondered what change in the usual primate diet of fruit and nuts enabled the emerging human lineage to support a brain that eventually swelled to three times the size of chimpanzees’.”
Perhaps we emerged by some other means???? Just sayin’....
This does not appear to be an actual scientific paper.
Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation
It's a pdf link to the article. I'm glad that I found your statement. It appears to just be a delay of some sort. IIRC, I tried every way I could to find the abstract at the time. Some papers don't have abstracts. Here's a PubMed link to the abstract:
Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation.
It’s Nature and it’s Letters. Be interesting to see if it makes it to a more formal scientific journal.
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