GenInv – Health and Wellness

One of my hobbies includes reviewing material on evolution and its relationship to the human diet.

I know, I’m too cool for school.

Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution is one particular book that I have been reading lately. It’s a collection of essays written by numerous anthropologists, biologists, etc. regarding – you guessed it – evolution and the human diet.

In “Evolution, Diet, and Health” by S. Boyd Eaton, Stanley B. Eaton III, and Loran Cordain, the authors examine d

ietary evolution from the last common ancestor of apes and humans all the way up to modern men of today.

They conclude the essay with four ways in which intensive agriculture (i.e. farming) and industrialization have changed human health for the worse:

#1: Sodium Intake Has Dramatically Increased

About 90% of current sodium intake results from food processing, preparation, and flavoring: Only 10% is intrinsic to the foods themselves.

Many groups of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and ru

dimentary horticulturalists that lack commercially available salt have been studied in this century. These ancestral human surrogates experience neither rising blood pressure with age nor clinical hypertension.

It is also important to note that most of these “ancestral human surrogates” do not consume any rock salt at all (i.e. table salt, sea salt, volcanic rock salt, etc.). They receive all of their sodium from the foods they eat.

#2: Grains Have Replaced Fruits and Vegetables

No pr

imates other than humans ordinarily consume cereal grains, but from the introduction of agriculture onward, grains have been the single most important contributor to human food energy, providing from 40% to 90% of human caloric requirements.

In doing so they have displaced fruits and vegetables that, until the Neolithic [period], had been the dominant energy source for Stone Agers, earlier hominds, and our antecedent primate ancestors for fifty million years.

You may be thinking that this focus on grains has allowed us time to anatomically and physiologically adapt to digesting them. However, the authors make it clear that this isn’t so:

The phytochemicals of grains have interacted with the human genome for only ten thousand years. Hence, substitution of grains for vegetables and fruits in human diets might readily diminish our resistance to development of neoplastic [cancerous] disease.

Some sources do say 30,000 as opposed to 10,000 years. Nonetheless, supporters of evolutionary theory agree that this simply is not enough time for digestive adaption to occur.

#3: Fatter Bodies From Lack of Exercise

For primates and other mammals in natural settings, food procurement is inextricably linked to energy expenditure…The ratio of fat to muscle generally varies with season, but typically lies within fairly narrow limits; hyperadiposity [excess of fat tissue], as it exists for many contemporary humans, is rare or not existent for other primates.

In the present, however, obtaining food energy is no longer dependent on muscular exertion: From childhood on, calories are available at the lowest cost in human experience without reciprocal energy expenditure. The result is relative sarcopenia – deficiency of skeletal muscle.

And here is a dire result of hyperadiposity and sarcopenia (too much fat and not enough muscle):

…a given insulin secretory pulse, in response to a carbohydrate-containing meal, now produces less reduction in blood glucose levels than would have been achieved for prior humans with evolutionarily “appropriate” body composition. Additional, “extra” pancreatic insulin is required to produce glucose homeostasis…the process can proceed to glucose intolerance and overt diabetes.

Essentially, the fatter you are, the harder time your body has of properly assimilating glucose that has been absorbed into your bloodstream.

Sound familiar? That’s because I often talk about FAT as the true cause of sugar metabolic disorders like Diabetes and candida overgrowth, not sugar. As long as you are consuming a low-fat diet, you will have absolutely no trouble digesting the simple sugars in fruit.

For more on the dangers of a high fat diet, check out my article here.

Speaking of too much fat…

#4: Too Much Fat in the Diet

For ancestral humans, the cholesterol-raising saturated fatty acids constituted about 5% of total energy intake, and trans fatty acids intake was negligible. For Americans, cholesterol-rai