Porridge is bad for you

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

Ok, now I'm gonna break my own damn rule, but only cos you write such long dense posts.:p

Like how I passed my leaving cert Irish exam the clue and answer is often to be found in the opening statement/question. Emboldened for your convenience

And they never will, been on this merrygoround a few times. Ice is a raw vegan, so you know, a diet that has never supported any human population in history. I don't think the anthropological angle is a match for a dietary religion.

True enough. They had me at mineral destruction in cooking.

That's Wrangham's hypothesis, but it's built on sparse evidence. The rapid expansion in our brain's along with commensurate gut shrinkage occured 1.8m years ago, but the earliest hearths are from all from less than 250,000 years ago (there's one site in Keyna from 1.6m but that's still very speculative as regards any cooking occurring there). Not saying it's not possible, but the evidence leans more towards the move from plant to calorie dense animal foods, ie the expensive tissue hypothesis. You need a massive boost in DHA to support a big brain, you don't get that from starch.

Oh I concur it was the move to animal protein that more and more drove the changes. We went from an apple shaped beer bellied ape to a V shaped hominid very rapidly. A sure sign of a novel diet. And that's just in the bones. The tools utilised add to that with their external adaptation/exaptation(sp). Humans are bloody brilliant for that stuff. I'll bet within 5 years cooking will be pushed further back. I'll further bet at around 1 MYA. I don't look at the tools so much, nor the hearth evidence, I look at the isotope results from the bones. That and how that reflects on the other existing evidence. Plus I look at some apparent outliers among moderns. I regard the andaman islanders(a thread in itself across a myriad forums hereabouts) and some of their more quirky tells. Pretty much alone among fully modern humans they didn't know how to make fire. They understood it's importance, but stored it after lightning strikes and the like. With Incredible ingenuity while they were at it. Either somewhere along the line from Africa they lost the ability(probable), or the ability itself is a lot later than we may think today(changes the books). They tend not to have hearths and cook their food lightly, so evidence of them cooking is very sparse in the record. And we know they do.

But even then we've done a lot of evolving in the past 250,000 years. We're more adapted to cooked foods than raw. And although I think raw food is a worth-while contribution to a diet, the bulk of calories should be cooked unless you like to chew all day long like our more herbivorous cousins.:)

That said as a treatment for modern ills I'd have some support for Ice's position. More than one experiment has been done which had modern not healthy but not sick, the chronically well people try a raw food diet for a short while and it made a significant diff to their health. All good. But like you say, short term and long term the jury's out. As a palative for a fcuked up diet it's may be bang on, as a long term strategy, I'm not so sure.

Maybe it's because I'm a woman but the image of man the hunter and woman the leaf and berry gatherer always irks me.:D Women actually gathered a large amount of protein in the form of shellfish, lizards, insects and grubs

Very true. It wasn't just veggie material. Native Australian women a great example. Indeed I watched a telly programme on just that subject and the women were bringing home a significant, if not the majority amount of daily nutrition. The men may have been bringing home the bacon, but the women were bringing home the veg and tea and biccies and everything else. A ratio the ladies in question joked about.

According to the latest research, megafaunal extinctions are actually more likely to have been climate related.

It's an interesting one alright. Very debatable. For another thread methinks.

Humans are efficient scavengers and opportunists, we were never top of the food chain, you can't be when things still eat you! It's a romantic notion that has persisted despite evidence to the contrary.

Ohh I dunno. Wolves are predated on by other predators, often their own kind, as are lions etc. Apex predators will eat other apex predators. Even T- rex shows signs of this. Sound familiar? One of the first pathologies noted in our ancestors is a case of hypocalcemia(sp ) in a homo erectus female. Caused by ingesting the liver of a predator. To this day many tribal types have a taboo and stories around ingesting predator livers. Neandertal were very much the apex predator of their day and when we showed up we continued and took that mantle from them.

Although yes, animal protein is of significantly higher bioavailiability, the allergy argument doesn't really prove anything, prevalance of allergies to a protein is no indication of it's suitability in the diet. I used to think so, but the pathology of allergies is more down to an auto-immune response occurring during the presence of an otherwise innocent protein, than anything intrinsically wrong with the food.

I agree, but still for me it's striking that of all the protein specific responses in modern humans worldwide, red meat reactions are waaaay down the list. That for me may show an archaic adaptation. Indians may be lactose intolerant because of Hindu religious practice, but I'll put good money they don't react badly to the meat of a ruminant animal in near the same way

It only seems to increase longevity if the mice are calorie restricted from birth, if you calorie restrict them half way through their life the benefits drop dramatically. Also, human studies have been short term, lots of things that cause markers to improve short term can turn pear shaped in a few years.

Initial improvement in health = what you take out of your diet
Long term maintennance of health = what you put in to your diet

Plus have you seen any long term CRONies? They look like hell:

http://www.calorierestriction.org/cr4_dvds

[/QUOTE]Oh agreed ED, it's "out there" on a few levels. Not unlike the raw food diet aforementioned. One interesting study looked at intermittent
fasting in humans and found an overall positive response regardless of the age of the individal. Which would make sense given our history. Being hungry the odd time is likely good for you kinda thing.


I swear I'll not multi quote again :o

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

Do you have a link to anything about isotope ratios showing significant starch consumption from c.1.8m years ago?

Oh sorry no it was animal food ratios that went up. Now erectus shows signs of parasites(tapeworms in particular) so not deep frying their meat, but the change to meat is clear and cooking makes meat more bioavailable to a gut more omnivorous in makeup. IMHO that's why erectus was likely the first human to leave Africa. That would be a lot harder for a veggie, unless it was a grass eater. The plant foods they would have encountered in the new environments would be different to what they left behind. A whole new safe/poisonous database would have to be written up. For carnivores it's a lot easier. If it moves you can eat it. If it moves slowly and is large, Happy Christmas! Plus with the change from forest to grassland fruit and veg pickings were very slim. May be why we started to look under the grasslands.

I don't doubt raw veganism in the short-term causes people to improve their health. But then again so does any variety of extreme diet, including zero carb, which is almost the exactly the opposite in terms of content.

I'd attribute this to the elimination of the most potentially problematic foods. So the success of a LFRV diet is no more attributable to the lack of animal foods as the zero carb is to the lack of plants.

Another factor is intermittent protein restriction causes favourable improvements on health, long term protein restriction comes with it's own set of issues in my own experience, notably a drastic drop in mood and loss of muscle.

Longer term, 5 years later maybe less, problems happen. Teeth fall out, weight starts to be regained, depression and other issues creep in. Either way the inevitable deficiencies of either approach become apparent. At this point the belief that this is The Best Way To Eat (TM) is so ingrained that the person has an almost Stockholm-syndrome like dedication to continuing the diet and that the reason it's not working is that it's not strict enough.

+1

Overall the most depressing thing is that we have yet to discover the diet that allows for consistent and permanent weight loss. Until we're stuck with evangelists (like myself lol!) trying to convert people round to our way of thinking.

I reckon we have, just it requires consistent and permanent application. I would also personally believe that any "perfect diet" can't be applied worldwide to all populations. I ain't talking about blood group diets (completely daft IMHO). I'm talking about deep and shallow genetic heritage that might come into it. What may be tip top as a dietary component for one population may play havoc with another. EG Soya for Asians OK, may not be so good for Europeans and Africans and others though. Gluten and lactose would be other obvious ones with local adaptations. Applying a one size fits all probably won't work worldwide.