What should people eat?

[Skull Pilot]

This thread is inspired by the argument that vegetarianism is actually good for you.

I propose that a vegetarian diet is at odds with our physical and mental needs and that it antithetical to our evolution.

From NPR of all places

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPR

Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

Until, that is, we discovered meat.

"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.

That period is when cut marks on animal bones appeared — not a predator's tooth marks, but incisions that could have been made only by a sharp tool. That's one sign of our carnivorous conversion. But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.

So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, "we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and hyenas." That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas were.

But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle — piped up and said, "Please, sir, I want some more."

Carving Up The Diet

As we got more, our guts shrank because we didn't need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello.

"If you look in your dog's mouth and cat's mouth, and open up your own mouth, our teeth are quite different," she says. "What allows us to do what a cat or dog can do are tools."

Tools meant we didn't need big sharp teeth like other predators. Tools even made vegetable matter easier to deal with. As anthropologist Shara Bailey at New York University says, they were like "external" teeth.

"Your teeth are really for processing food, of course, but if you do all the food processing out here," she says, gesturing with her hands, "if you are grinding things, then there is less pressure for your teeth to pick up the slack."

Our teeth, jaws and mouth changed as well as our gut.

A Tough Bite To Swallow

But adding raw meat to our diet doesn't tell the whole food story, according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham. Wrangham invited me to his apartment at Harvard University to explain what he believes is the real secret to being human. All I had to do was bring the groceries, which meant a steak — which I thought could fill in for wildebeest or antelope — and a turnip, a mango, some peanuts and potatoes.

As we slice up the turnip and put the potatoes in a pot, Wrangham explains that even after we started eating meat, raw food just didn't pack the energy to build the big-brained, small-toothed modern human. He cites research that showed that people on a raw food diet, including meat and oil, lost a lot of weight. Many said they felt better, but also experienced chronic energy deficiency. And half the women in the experiment stopped menstruating.

It's not as if raw food isn't nutritious; it's just harder for the body to get at the nutrition.

Wrangham urges me to try some raw turnip. Not too bad, but hardly enough to get the juices flowing. "They've got a tremendous amount of caloric energy in them," he says. "The problem is that it's in the form of starch, which unless you cook it, does not give you very much."

Then there's all the chewing that raw food requires. Chimps, for example, sometimes chew for six hours a day. That actually consumes a lot of energy.

"Plato said if we were regular animals, you know, we wouldn't have time to write poetry," Wrangham jokes. "You know, he was right."

Tartare No More

One solution might have been to pound food, especially meat — like the steak I brought. "If our ancestors had used stones to mash the meat like this," Wrangham says as he demonstrates with a wooden mallet, "then it would have reduced the difficulty they would have had in digesting it."

But pounding isn't as good as cooking that steak, says Wrangham. And cooking is what he thinks really changed our modern body. Someone discovered fire — no one knows exactly when — and then someone got around to putting steak and veggies on the barbeque. And people said, "Hey, let's do that again."

Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits — cooking killed some pathogens on food.

But cooking also altered the meat itself. It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "The second thing is very clear," Wrangham adds, "and that is the muscle, which is made of protein, is wrapped up like a sausage in a skin, and the skin is collagen, connective tissue. And that collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."

As for starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them easier to digest too. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food.

Yes, cooking can damage some good things in raw food, like vitamins. But Wrangham argues that what's gained by cooking far outweighs the losses.

As I cut into my steak (Wrangham is a vegetarian; he settles for the mango and potatoes), Wrangham explains that cooking also led to some of the finer elements of human behavior: it encourages people to share labor; it brings families and communities together at the end of the day and encourages conversation and story-telling — all very human activities.

"Ultimately, of course, what makes us intellectually human is our brain," he says. "And I think that comes from having the highest quality of food in the animal kingdom, and that's because we cook."

So, as the Neanderthals liked to say around the campfire: bon appetit.

I welcome intelligent discussion of this article and the topic in general. I would ask that you please support your positions with some sort of reference material.

 

[xotoxi]

This raises a question: did eating meat make our brains grow? Or did the development of a bigger brain allow us to start catching meat?

Clearly, humans and most primates are not fast enough, strong enough, or fierce enough to kill other animals with our bare hands. Thus, we needed to develop intelligent ways to catch and kill our meat, like traps or weapons. The individuals with bigger, smarter brains were able to do that, while the dumb ones kept munching on berries and nuts.

I'm glad we did...because I LOOOOVE meat!

 

[Skull Pilot]

This raises a question: did eating meat make our brains grow? Or did the development of a bigger brain allow us to start catching meat?

Clearly, humans and most primates are not fast enough, strong enough, or fierce enough to kill other animals with our bare hands. Thus, we needed to develop intelligent ways to catch and kill our meat, like traps or weapons. The individuals with bigger, smarter brains were able to do that, while the dumb ones kept munching on berries and nuts.

I'm glad we did...because I LOOOOVE meat!

That's one of the fun questions. Another is did language make hunting easier or did hunting and the necessary cooperation needed for humans to successfully hunt larger stronger animals actually start the evolution of our brain's language ability?

 

[Douger]

Eat what you grow and trade for things you don't grow.
Think 1930.

 

[RadiomanATL]

I'm a fan of poontang.

 

[Greenbeard]

 

[CrusaderFrank]

What should people eat?

Whatever Michelle Obama tells us to

 

[rdean]

You beat me to it.

 

[HUGGY]

Being the slowest and most un athletic creatures in the food chain for several million years before we developed weapons and convenient fire, we ate leftovers. We most likely ran off predators from their kills and scounged around for the fruits and berries than remained after more adept creatures had thier fill. We probably ate food that today would be considered rotting garbage

 

[Skull Pilot]

Being the slowest and most un athletic creatures in the food chain for several million years before we developed weapons and convenient fire, we ate leftovers. We most likely ran off predators from their kills and scounged around for the fruits and berries than remained after more adept creatures had thier fill. We probably ate food that today would be considered rotting garbage

From the article in the O.P.

Tapeworms are one of the strongest evidence that our ancestors were indeed scavengers. Human tapeworms are more closely related to tapeworms found in wild dogs than any other organism.

Makes you wonder about the relationship between dogs and men and how it really developed.

 

[Metternich]

What should people eat? I thought it'd be obvious, babies of course.

 

[boedicca]

This is an interesting article (read it myself a few days ago).

One bit of irony is that the researcher is a vegetarian. I guess he doesn't believe that animal protein is important for brain health, which is rather silly of him.

 

[boedicca]

There, fixed it for you.

What should people eat? I thought it'd be obvious, BACON of course.

 

[HUGGY]

Being the slowest and most un athletic creatures in the food chain for several million years before we developed weapons and convenient fire, we ate leftovers. We most likely ran off predators from their kills and scounged around for the fruits and berries than remained after more adept creatures had thier fill. We probably ate food that today would be considered rotting garbage

From the article in the O.P.

Tapeworms are one of the strongest evidence that our ancestors were indeed scavengers. Human tapeworms are more closely related to tapeworms found in wild dogs than any other organism.

Makes you wonder about the relationship between dogs and men and how it really developed.

STOP IT!!! You were reading my mind!!! I was just thinking about that very relationship as I wrote my previous post. I believe that humans observed the behavior of wolves and wild canines. They probably saw how the young ones were dependant on the mature members of the pack and figured out that if they replaced themselves as the food providers they could gain the strength of the pack for thier own survival. All humans really needed was the athleticism of the dog to become more formidible.

 

[Skull Pilot]

This is an interesting article (read it myself a few days ago).

One bit of irony is that the researcher is a vegetarian. I guess he doesn't believe that animal protein is important for brain health, which is rather silly of him.

The depths of denial that vegetarians can reach are truly astounding.

 

[uscitizen]

Our ancestors ate anything they could find or catch. bugs, worms, fruits, berries, etc.
They likely developed the first tools to process animals for eating.

Humans did not develop sentience untill they discovered chocolate.