Ghee is considered "Brain food" in Indian culture. It is included in many food items and also in Ayurvedic Meds.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/amp39Gheeamp39-and-its-m...
Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
71–80 of 139 posts
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Wait - I thought hyenas were specifically bone-busting / eating: "Spotted hyenas are some of Africa's most proficient predators. A frenzied scrum of them can dismantle and devour a 400-pound zebra in 25 minutes. An adul…
May be hyenas also adapter over million year period to bust open bones. But i wonder why they did not develop a brain like ours!
Evolution doesn't converge for all species to some single point. It was enough that hyenas got adapted to their environment, and their mutations didn't make much difference towards larger brains.
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#73[deleted]
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Wait - I thought hyenas were specifically bone-busting / eating: "Spotted hyenas are some of Africa's most proficient predators. A frenzied scrum of them can dismantle and devour a 400-pound zebra in 25 minutes. An adul…
May be hyenas also adapter over million year period to bust open bones. But i wonder why they did not develop a brain like ours!
Brains are only developed if there is an advantage and I guess a brain without fingers, our eyes etc isn't maybe as useful as using the fat for energy.
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#75I 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…
Look at it this way:
FIRST -----
It's not a causal relationship, more energy is available -> brains start growing.
There must be evolutionary pressure for brain growth in the first place. Otherwise larger brains are selected against because it's wasteful compared to what the competition does, even if there is more energy. Only if there is such a pressure does the availability of more energy make a difference.
Other species put energy surpluses into things like elaborate but useless physiological features (interpreted as signalling their health to potential female mates), such as large tails or feathers that are either useless or sometimes even actually hinder and have no other function (that we found). So just "more energy" does not point towards any specific development, such as brain size. What happens with it, if anything, depends on other factors.
If a predator species is doing just fine finding food and mates, no need to grow the brain, no matter how much energy there is.
SECOND ------
A huge difference between herbivores and predators is the amount of time they spent on getting food. Herbivores spend pretty much all their time eating. "Meat eaters" spend most of their time resting. The additional energy is used to delay the time between meals. (Herbivore) meat grows a lot slower than plants. Alternatively, there would have to be a lot less predators, and they would have to roam greater distances - which may not work out energy wise when you add it all up. It would be interesting to do some calculations, what happens to energy if you tweak those variables, i.e. a predator species eating significantly more and using the additional energy to sleep less, what are the limitations, what happens to the system, where are the constrains?
Humans eat meat and we also spend most of our time doing something (other than eating). Of course, we managed to get more nutrients and more energy by cooking, putting part of our digestion outside our bodies, so it's not limited to "energy dense meat" vs. "grass", we are much more flexible that way.
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They are only fortified with a couple of vitamins that society has decided is the most important for not causing the whole population to end up with scurvy. If you eat a balanced diet, you will eat a random selection of everything. All things contain different nutrients that are important for us and since we don't know exactly which ones, we say balanced diet when we mean everything.
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#77Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#78I thought this was known. When my first born was a toddler, she would go into the fridge and eat butter. I expressed concern to my grandmother, a life long nurse who was born in 1920 said to me; “the brain knows that it needs fats to grow, just let her eat butter. It is what her body is saying she needs” She is super smart and it wasnt an issue otherwise.
I would tend to attribute this to the fact that butter is delicious before I'd say it was an instinctual craving for fats.
And it's delicious to us because we need it. What comes first?
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#79Ghee is considered "Brain food" in Indian culture. It is included in many food items and also in Ayurvedic Meds. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/amp39Gheeamp39-and-its-m...
There is no one "Indian" culture. In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, goat bone marrow is relished a lot, and fatty fish brain is relished and considered brain food.
Re: Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains
#80One 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…
"in the middle of the dessert"
This was probably a mistake but I love the way it sort of works both ways.