If only they didn't call saturated fat "heart-stopping" that would be quite a fine article.
Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#32> it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet Elephants evolved in the same environment, are vegetarians, don't cook their food, and have the largest brains of any land animal.
Yet elephant brains have half the number of neurons as humans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_ne...
Perhaps the caloric requirements of a brain are driven by the number of moving parts. The article suggested a "calories per neuron" metric.
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#33Why are we giving airtime to this sort of junk science?
Observing the present and inferring about the past without a testable hypothesis is not proof of anything. It is storytelling. Gorillas didn't evolve into humans, we probably have a common ancestor and if we had more evidence on that common ancestor we could probably come up with what actually happened. The article and the research connected to it is nothing short of speculative fiction aimed at getting funding with a catchy headline.
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
This conflates at least four issues: 1. Is is healthy to eat meat? 2. Is it right to eat meat? 3. Is it healthy to eat sustainable organic meat? 4. Is it right to eat sustainable organic meat? Accepting that the 'meat industrial complex' is bad doesn't automatically imply vegetarianism/veganism. In particular, I'm thinking of Joel Salatan's brand of sustainable agriculture and permaculture.
I think every single one of those questions is missing yet another 'question' - that is, how much meat? From a naive min-max approaching to building your diet, it generally pops up that -some- meat is super useful. Simply by doing that you ease all sorts of constraints on your diet, and allows you to optimize your veggies/grains for other stuff, instead of desperately trying to get all your iron and B12 in. Even from…
A crucial question. I don't really know of any calculation that's looked at total food energy production based on sustainable production plants vs. animals.
I think we can safely assume the optimal balance is neither all plant nor all animal, but I am in no position to hazard a guess as to what the optimal balance is.
We're so far off from sustainable production of either plants or animals that the question isn't on most people's radar.
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#35Hopefully folks reading this article won't take it to mean that humans still need to continue consuming large amounts of meat. Maybe it was necessary to eat meat and hunt to evolve large brains, but the negative economic & ecological impacts of eating meat are pretty well-documented by now. I am thinking here of the "meat industrial complex" that powers a lot of large commercial meat production, not the friendly sust…
I've always wondered if the food industry needs a serious SV-style disruption, meat-industrial complex is what led to overweight/obese and people with unbalanced hormones (fyi, industrially-farmed poultry are injected with Estrogen for them to fatten)
With various negative aspects such as that, combined with negative ecological effects there exists a huge market ripe for disruption.
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#36The "sorry vegans" remark seems silly. Let me remind any meat-eater (including myself) that some of the greatest minds in history, including Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and possibly Isaac Newton were vegetarians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetarians
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
This conflates at least four issues: 1. Is is healthy to eat meat? 2. Is it right to eat meat? 3. Is it healthy to eat sustainable organic meat? 4. Is it right to eat sustainable organic meat? Accepting that the 'meat industrial complex' is bad doesn't automatically imply vegetarianism/veganism. In particular, I'm thinking of Joel Salatan's brand of sustainable agriculture and permaculture.
Resolving this is challenging. I've been on a ketogenic diet for the last several months, and while intellectually I recognise that eating mostly plants is more sustainable and has a lower carbon footprint, I have also never felt healthier than while eating larger amounts of fat and meat. My blood sugar is normalised, I generally have more energy and endurance and have effortlessly lost weight in the process. I also…
Being on a keto diet doesn't mean you must eat a lot of meat. A keto diet is perfectly compatible with vegetarian\vegan diets.
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#38Have there been vegans claiming that veganism is natural, and that this is somehow a reason to be vegan? Because that would be dumb. Veganism is an ethical stance, after all, so I'm not sure on what basis that argument would even rest. Also, archaeologists who don't know about nutrition should probably not talk about nutrition as if they did. There are plenty of non-animal sources of B12, including soil (you know, wh…
When it's found in "soil", it's due to bacteria and small animals (insects, mites) that are in the soil. Any B12(-like) substances that are in plants (e.g., spirulina) are unlikely to be in a form that's bioavailable to human beings. Vegans have to take B12 supplements of some sort or eat foods that have been fortified with B12. That's just a fact.
>When it's found in "soil", it's due to bacteria and small animals (insects, mites) that are in the soil.
I'm not sure what your point is.
>Any B12(-like) substances that are in plants (e.g., spirulina) are unlikely to be in a form that's bioavailable to human beings.
Yes, this is true.
>Vegans have to take B12 supplements of some sort or eat foods that have been fortified with B12. That's just a fact.
Modern vegans do need to take supplements, yes. The question is whether vegans in the ancestral environment would have gotten sufficient B12 from eating unwashed vegetables and roots. As far as I know, research is lacking on that point, but it is plausible.
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#39The "sorry vegans" remark seems silly. Let me remind any meat-eater (including myself) that some of the greatest minds in history, including Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and possibly Isaac Newton were vegetarians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetarians
It might seem pedantic, but it is important to note that vegan and vegetarian diets are two separate things. While it is true that all vegans are vegetarians, not all vegetarians are vegans.
Re: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains
#40Hopefully folks reading this article won't take it to mean that humans still need to continue consuming large amounts of meat. Maybe it was necessary to eat meat and hunt to evolve large brains, but the negative economic & ecological impacts of eating meat are pretty well-documented by now. I am thinking here of the "meat industrial complex" that powers a lot of large commercial meat production, not the friendly sust…
> Our brains are big enough now after generations of evolution. Err... bigger isn't always better, but I won't say no to a bigger noggin. > Time to put those big brains to use so we can figure out how to continue the existence of the human species. I wasn't aware we were heading toward extinction? There are billions of us, you know? > I really doubt it'll be by continuing to eat lots of cows. I like chickens, turkeys…
> Err... bigger isn't always better, but I won't say no to a bigger noggin.
There is evidence that our heads would have kept growing if it wasn't for the fact that it makes it pretty likely that women will die in childbirth. So instead evolution got around this by having us born earlier, which is why we're basically born as fetuses compared to most animals. But there's a limit to that too of course.