Food Facts

Meat-Eating: Evolution of Our Brain and Gut

Throughout the human lineage, both the gut and the brain have been composed of metabolically expensive tissue—that is, they require a disproportionate amount of energy to function properly. According to one theory, as the human brain evolved to be bigger the gut had to shrink, to leave more energy available for the brain.

Throughout the human lineage, both the gut and the brain have been composed of metabolically expensive tissue—that is, they require a disproportionate amount of energy to function properly. According to one theory, as the human brain evolved to be bigger the gut had to shrink, to leave more energy available for the brain.

Source: www.americanscientist.org Read the full article by clicking on the link. There are some wonderful pictures there depicting the evolution of the size of our brain and gut compared to primates.

Evidence of meat-eating among our distant human ancestors is hard to find and even harder to interpret, but researchers are beginning to piece together a coherent picture.
by Briana Pobiner

Over the course of six million years of human evolution, brain size increased 300 percent. Our huge, complex brains can store and process decades worth of information in split seconds, solve multifactorial problems, and create abstract ideas and images. This would have been a big advantage to early humans as they were spreading out across Africa and into Asia just under two million years ago, encountering unfamiliar habitats, novel carnivore competitors, and different prey animals. Yet our large brains come at a cost, making childbirth more difficult and painful for human mothers than for our nearest evolutionary kin. Modern human brains take up only about 2 percent of our body weight as adults, but use about 20 percent of our energy. Such a disproportionate use of resources calls for investigation. For years, my colleagues and I have explored the idea that meat-eating may have played a role in this unusual aspect of human biology.

In 1995, Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler developed the expensive tissue hypothesis to explain how our huge brains evolved without bringing about a tremendous increase in our rate of metabolism. Aiello, then of University College London, and Wheeler, then of Liverpool John Moores University, proposed that the energetic requirements of a large brain may have been offset by a reduction in the size of the liver and gastrointestinal tract; these organs, like the brain, have metabolically expensive tissues. Because gut size is correlated with diet, and small guts necessitate a diet focused on high-quality food that is easy to digest, Aiello and Wheeler reasoned that the nutritionally dense muscle mass of other animals was the key food that allowed the evolution of our large brains. Without the abundance of calories afforded by meat-eating, they maintain, the human brain simply could not have evolved to its current form.

Green Smoothies Are a Danger to your Health

Green Smoothies Are a Danger to your Health

I just want to recommend the Townsend Letter to anyone who is interested in cutting edge health information. This article published in Jan 2015 is very timely. I have a lot of friends who have succumbed to this health fad, so it is really good to have a clear picture laid out for us as to exactly ho ...

A Child’s Food Preferences Begin in the Womb

A Child’s Food Preferences Begin in the Womb

Source: The Guardian How a child's food preferences begin in the womb Tests have shown that what a woman eats during her pregnancy is easily detectable in her amniotic fluid, and the foetus develops a taste for familiar flavours It may be a survival mechanism that's come back to bite us o ...

Beeturia: Low Stomach Acid

Beeturia: Low Stomach Acid

Do The Beet Test: How to Tell if You Have Low Stomach Acid & Weak Digestion reposted from www.tarawarner.com by Heather Gardner www.consciousearthcompany.com I’m sure you’ve been there. The moment when, in fright and fear, sure that you have some ghastly ailment; you reach for the phone ...

The War on Health: The FDA’s Cult of Tyranny

The War on Health: The FDA’s Cult of Tyranny

Watch the full film here www.garynullfilms.com just pay with a tweet or post to facebook. ...

Beautiful Guernseys at Hurdlebrook Dairy

Beautiful Guernseys at Hurdlebrook Dairy

Hurdlebrook Dairy - Raw Milk from Somerset from Mark Whatmore, Yoho Media on Vimeo. Hurdlebrook Dairy in Somerset is home to a beautiful herd of Guernsey cows who produce some of the most delicious milk imaginable. The milk is sold raw - cooled, but otherwise untreated. It has a unique texture a ...

Apple Pectin for Radioprotection

Apple Pectin for Radioprotection

Source: Institute of Science in Society A group of doctors and scientists risked their lives and careers to help children living in the most contaminated areas of the Chernobyl fallout and discovered a simple treatment that clears the radionuclides from their bodies, offering hope for future gene ...

Superfoods to Protect Against EMFs

Superfoods to Protect Against EMFs

With the levels of low-level electromagnetic pollution on the rise I thought I should share some of my favorite superfoods that help to protect against toxic wireless radiation. They include a list of foods high in antioxidants including melatonin, vitamin C, vitamin E, glutathione and superoxid ...

Tulsi (Indian Basil) Works as Anti-Radiation Medicine

Tulsi (Indian Basil) Works as Anti-Radiation Medicine

Source: newstopnight.in Tulsi can be used as Anti-Radiation Medicine: DRDO As per the study by scientists of the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), the herbal plant holi ‘Tulsi’ (Indian Basil), used as a home remedy for cough, cold and other ailments, has a higher healin ...

Edible Oil Wars: Palm Oil Plantations ‘Biological Deserts’

Edible Oil Wars: Palm Oil Plantations ‘Biological Deserts’

Are You Eating Dirty Oil? The Environmental Impacts of the Palm Oil Industry Source: www.onegreenplanet.org Borneo is the third largest island in the world, and forty years ago it was covered with dense rainforest. As you read this, loggers in the Borneo rainforest are chopping down the tr ...