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Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#41
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think fruit, especially the modern stuff, is bad for you. In particular the stuff you want to avoid is. fructose, which is toxic for humans. Fructose is harder on the human liver than alcohol on a gram by gram basis, and over consumption of fructose can cause cirrhosis and fatty liver disease. Edit: source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

"The modern stuff"?

We’ve selectively bred our fruit for a millennia or two to make it significantly larger and sweeter than the versions we evolved with. The advent of pesticides as exacerbated the problem, as pesticide sprayed fruits produce a much lower level of useful anti-oxidants.

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#42

One of the first human foods was actually bone marrow which is basically pure fat. This happened about 2MYA by Homo habilis who figured out that you could use rocks to bust open bones. Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures. One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones. Well it's a massive source of free…

Carnivore diversity was much higher in the Late Pliocene -- which means more frequent and varied scavenging opportunities.

There might have been a very small, precious window where early hominins had the chance for this discovery because of abundance.

[1] Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701477?jou...

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#43

It's still a bit bizarre watching the western world switch form carbs good, fat bad to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade.

It's just the meat industry copying big tobacco's playbook. Whole carbs are fine and an important source of other nutrients and fiber. Refined carbs and sugars are the problem. The scientific evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you is overwhelming.

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think fruit, especially the modern stuff, is bad for you. In particular the stuff you want to avoid is. fructose, which is toxic for humans. Fructose is harder on the human liver than alcohol on a gram by gram basis, and over consumption of fructose can cause cirrhosis and fatty liver disease. Edit: source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing. Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you. I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol. Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it f…

> I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing.

I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says.

> Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.

True and false. The fiber aspect is true, and a strong argument to stay as far away from juice as possible, but the vitamins story is ... mixed. It depends on what fruit you're talking about, where it was produced, and how it was handled.

For vitamins and other micro nutrients I personally think organ meats are highly underrated.

> I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol.

By looking at my source.

> Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently.

This is also true of Fructose. Except unlike Alcohol 100% of it goes to your liver. Also unlike alcohol there are no obvious cognitive effects for fructose, so we're free to consume as much of it without suffering any immediate and obvious consequences.

> If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs ... processed food ... coca cola ...

Take a guess what I also recommend avoiding. But "avoid HFCS and processed food" is well into the "no shit" category of dietary recommendation these days, which is why I don't really bother to talk about it a ton. Whereas there are a large number of people who think that fruit and especially fruit juice is healthy, and I disagree.

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going from a high carb diet to a high fat diet was amazing. "Wait instead of feeling omnipresent urges to overeat and snack, my satiety system actually works? I stop getting dips in energy throughout the day?" Said it before but a diet of bacon and eggs would be superior to the diets of most Americans.

Breakfast cereals are about one of the worst things you can actually eat for breakfast. At best it's just a bowl of wholegrain carbs (e.g. oatmeal, muesli), and at worst just a bowl full of refined carbs and sugar (frosted flakes, Froot Loops). They're so devoid of nutrition that they usually have to fortify it with vitamins and minerals just so that people don't end up malnourished from eating it. You'd genuinely be…

> Breakfast cereals are about one of the worst things you can actually eat for breakfast. At best it's just a bowl of wholegrain carbs (e.g. oatmeal, muesli)

What's the problem with that? They are not supposed to be your sole source of macro-nutrients. If you get your protein and fats in other meals during the day it's perfectly fine.

> They're so devoid of nutrition that they usually have to fortify it with vitamins and minerals just so that people don't end up malnourished from eating it.

You can't end up malnourished from eating cereals, you can only end up malnourished from not eating anything else. And no one is eating only cereals. Anyway, since you yourself said they are fortified with vitamins and minerals, it sounds like they are just fine after all.

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#46

I don't subscribe to New Scientist's trick title or the theories of nutrient limited mammalian brain evolution. Compare brain size of carnivore species with herbivores - there is no overt division in average or max brain size. Generally, herbivorous mammals seem to evolve brains just as large as carnivorous ones. Elephants, orangutans, gorillas grow big brains on a vegetarian diet. If predator diets contain a special…

Brain size to body size matters a lot too. Sperm whales have about 6x the brain we do, but far more than 6x the body to control.

Just looking now.. Mice have similar brain/body-mass ratio as humans. There is no strong (or visible) distinction in brain size between carnivores and herbivores in these comparisons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Compa...

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#47

> “We have no examples today of animals that scavenge but don’t hunt,” he adds. I've seen a number of articles in the last few years talking about how scavenging meat seems to be much more common amongst animals we typically consider herbivores (like deer) than previously realized. There are also a number of opportunistic omnivorous scavengers that rely more on scavenging than hunting it they hunt at all. This claim…

Most ungulates eat their own afterbirth. Sure, that's easier to digest than most carcasses would be, and less likely to spread disease, but it shows that meat digestion is possible.

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#48
post #33

One of the first human foods was actually bone marrow which is basically pure fat. This happened about 2MYA by Homo habilis who figured out that you could use rocks to bust open bones. Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures. One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones. Well it's a massive source of free…

A number of replies to this comment point out that modern animals also eat bone marrow. However, that may have not been the case a couple million years ago. In “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, Diamond points out that animals in Africa are particularly vicious and dangerous due to their coevolution with humans. Animals outside of Africa rapidly went extinct as evolved humans spread to the rest of the world, since they didn’t…

The chances of a highly nutritious, energy dense food being just left to go to waste by nature are practically zero. There are many, many examples of animals becoming highly evolved/specialised to exploit such food sources in habitats that don't feature humans (e.g. the oceans). The GP comment was an egregious example of a "Just-so story".

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#49

I don't subscribe to New Scientist's trick title or the theories of nutrient limited mammalian brain evolution. Compare brain size of carnivore species with herbivores - there is no overt division in average or max brain size. Generally, herbivorous mammals seem to evolve brains just as large as carnivorous ones. Elephants, orangutans, gorillas grow big brains on a vegetarian diet. If predator diets contain a special…

Brain size to body size matters a lot too. Sperm whales have about 6x the brain we do, but far more than 6x the body to control.

I know this is the conventional wisdom but it doesn't really make sense. Controlling a sperm whale's body doesn't seem like a hard computational problem.

Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

#50

One of the first human foods was actually bone marrow which is basically pure fat. This happened about 2MYA by Homo habilis who figured out that you could use rocks to bust open bones. Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures. One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones. Well it's a massive source of free…

Extended simmering (>6 hours) releases much of the nutrients in bones, too - collagen, gelatin, fats, minerals. I frequently slow-cook whole chickens and small bones become so soft they can easily be eaten after about 24 hours. Of course, you don't want to over-do this due to issues like histamine and lead.

I'm been a huge fan of bone broth lately. 9g protein/cup vs none in normal chicken/beef broth - and I find it tastier to boot. (Though it's almost always out of stock at the local grocery store)
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