Posted on 11/25/2012 12:20:00 AM PST by nickcarraway
High caloric intake enabled brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically
Vegetarian, vegan and raw diets can be healthy — likely far healthier than the typical American diet. But to continue to call these diets "natural" for humans, in terms of evolution, is a bit of a stretch, according to two recent, independent studies.
Eating meat and cooking food made us human, the studies suggest, enabling the brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically over a period of a few million years. Although this isn't the first such assertion from archaeologists and evolutionary biologists, the new studies demonstrate, respectively, that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least 1 million years before the dawn of humankind.
Shhh, don't tell the gorillas
At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human brain consumes 20 percent of the body's energy at rest, twice that of other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.
One study, published last month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the brain sizes of several primates. For the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times more massive than humans — have smaller brains and three times fewer neurons. Why?
The answer, it seems, is the gorillas' raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating only plants to provide enough calories to support their mass.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
***Actually, human “pass through” time is more like carnivores, who digest and pass through their foods quickly.***
I challenge that statement! Last week I had nothing to eat all day. That evening I ate some Vienna Sausages with Jalepeno peppers in them. Four hours later they came through and were still HOT!
Years ago, after word got out that some Eskimos had killed a whale for food, some Vegans went to Alaska to try and talk the Eskimos to eat a vegan diet. They were laughted out of camp.
I've been a carnivore (or,more accurately,an omnivore) my entire life and I've never had to smoke marijuana,"medical" or otherwise,for any pain,*ever*.The only real pain I've ever had was hip pain and a hip replacement was the only thing I needed.
Vegan. Never met one that didn’t have serious medical issues they didn’t dismiss as having nothing to do with being idiots. They are usually in very poor health.
I've never met a vegan who didn't use some sort of "medical supplement" -- pot or nicotine. Usually pot.
While it's hard to be healthy as a vegan, it can be done as a vegetarian who also eats egg and milk products. A friend of one of my kids is that kind of vegetarian, and she's a healthy athlete.
Sure, because you are introducing the proteins needed. I know a number of non-meat eating people that use dairy products just fine.
yup, they are one extreme — but the heavy-duty meat diet that we have isn’t completely healthy either. There’s a balance
For one believes he may eat all things, but he who is weak eats only vegetables. Rom. 14:2.
Vegetables are what food eats.
Well said. It is also interesting to note how many vegan products are made to resemble and (purportedly) taste like their meat analogs. What fuels this desire for “meat like” products? Might I suggest that we are programmed to eat meat, at least in moderation.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
The "heavy-duty meat diet" that we have, has increased our lifespans. Can't suck that much. Remember, we all die of something. Dying of heart disease at 75 doesn't necessarily mean we are eating a bad diet.
I disagree. By heavy-duty I mean what has lead to obesity, not having meat per se. A steak or a burger a day is not healthy for most of us and especially those of us with sedentary lives, however there’s nothing wrong with having these, even the greasiest ones every now and then. OF course any sign of government mandating what you should or shouldn’t eat and I’m going to go out and pig myself on what they say we shouldn’t :)
Given the way our blood sugar levels correlate to obesity. You are better off eating a 700 calorie cheese burger, than eating a 700 calorie cinnamon roll. I generally feel the best and lose weight when I cut out grain based foods and sugars. I then eat more meat than usual and also more vegetables than usual.
But each to his own, is the best policy (or lack of policy, as it were).
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks nickcarraway.To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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I dont know why people here keep repeating this nonsense. It is not hard to be healthy as a vegan. I've been doing it for years and feel great. I believe the alternative is what leads to long term health issues.
Your statement is interesting.
Many cat breeders have found their breeding stock stays healthier when fed a raw food diet. Evidently potency drops when felines are fed cooked food as opposed to raw. And forget about feeding kibble! The dry food is only for the convenience of pet owners, or just for an occasional meal.
That gets into some interesting variables.
That is, cats are both carnivores and their physiology is very different from humans, or canines, for that matter.
As carnivores, their metabolism is oriented to raw meat, and feeding them anything else will likely cause problems.
Humans and canines, however, are omnivores, mostly meat with some carbohydrates, but though we have been eating (more than optimally) too many carbs for thousands of generations, we still haven’t fully adapted to healthfully eating more than a minimum amount.
But this is yet again different from the increased nutritional availability of cooked food vs. raw. Better nutrition makes for an interesting paradox, in that people have more energy to get more food, but don’t need as much food, so more energy is committed to reproduction. And you start getting into Malthusian curves.
The last variable is parasites, which weaken the system. Humans used to be infested with a litany of parasites, but over time, we have eliminated so many that we have even more energy. And it is now suggested that our immune systems had adapted to all these parasites, and is confused by their absence, which results in several auto-immune diseases.
But back to feline physiology for a while. Cats are so completely different from humans and canines that many drugs you would think would be universal for mammals, aren’t. For example, when cats are given an injection of morphine, they do not get a sedative/painkilling effect. Instead, it is like injecting a dog or human with amphetamines. Morphine will turn a friendly house cat into a shrieking ball of fangs and claws.
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