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Eating Meat Helped Early Humans Reproduce
PolygamousRanchKid writes "If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child's brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. 'Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened,' said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. 'This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.' She notes, however, that the results say nothing about what humans today should or should not eat."
Gee, I know a child of a vegan mother who's not that bright; obviously, you're wrong.
Indeed it doesn't seem to indicate much at all as regards what mothers should eat today. I know two vegan mums and their (vegan) kids weaned off early and are very bright, healthy little 5 and 9 year old kids.
And as we all know, anecdotal evidence always trumps scientific research.
I like how the researcher feels the need to close off with a "don't antagonise vegetarian groups" political-correctness statement, lest she risks being eaten alive (pun intended).
Even today, children of vegans still die occasionally due to malnutrition. While careful vegetarians (such as many Hindus whose cuisine has adapted to this) can get everything they need from normal food, vegans need supplements to stay healthy. This is especially the case for children, who haven't built up a store of, for example, B12 yet. Childhood malnutrition quickly leads to retarded development and hence eventually poor intelligence.
Man was never made to be vegan and, judging from our closest relatives the Chimps, probably not vegetarian either.
Gee, I know a child of a vegan mother who's not that bright; obviously, you're wrong.
Why was this post marked "redundant" ... especially when it was one of the first? It's a nice, short, sarcastic jab at substituting anecdotal evidence for scientific study.
<p>And as we all know, anecdotal evidence always trumps scientific research.</p></quote>
The scientific research says that vegetarian and vegan diets adequately meet nutritional needs and are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including infancy and early childhood (American Dietetic Association)
And before someone suggests that the American Dietetic Association is not qualified to make that determination.
The association has 72,000 members and ~72% are registered dietitians and ~50% of those hold advanced degrees.
Some feminist psychos will nuts of those results, and not over the mens' nuts. Here is an example of meat and sex, gone wrong... Seriously and dangerously wrong:
"The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Sexual-Politics-Meat-Feminist-Vegetarian/dp/0826411843)
"First published in 1990, The Sexual Politics of Meat is a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate. The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. We live in a world in which men still have considerable power over women, both in public and in private. Carol Adams argues that gender politics is inextricably related to how we view animals, especially animals who are consumed. Further, she argues that vegetarianism and fighting for animal rights fit perfectly alongside working to improve the lives of disenfranchised and suffering people, under the wide umbrella of compassionate activism."
That book can be seen as part of the ongoing degradation of general observations and science into something very dangerous - views and opinions based on random whims, often with a feminist, religious, sexual or otherwise subjective world-view.
One can hope these new results will help raising the arguments to a decent intellectual level.
I'm sure if he knows the mothers then they would let him know if they have any health related problems. Plus it doesn't take a doctor to tell if a kid is malnourished. It's always interesting when there's an article posted about veganism and all the haters come out trying to say it's an unhealthy diet. I've been vegan for 12 years and I'm a very healthy person and I don't take any supplements. My wife is pregnant with our first child and her doctor says she's totally fine to be vegan and have the baby. Not sure why people get so offended by vegans.
Can I bum a sig?
my cousin smokes a pack a day, and he's perfectly healthy. hell, he's much stronger than me. i don't understand all this "smoking is bad" advertising.
my sig pwns your sig
'Breathing air enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened from infinity to a few years', said slashdot reader Capta1n Obvi10us. 'This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution'.
An Anonymous Coward noted in a reply, however, that the results say nothing about what humans today should or should not breathe.
Because people are happier using anecdote to support their opinions than they are changing their opinions when confronted by facts.
It's all about feelings.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
You don't need historical analysis. I've seen first-hand that buying a woman steak or lobster helps me reproduce.
They'll also push a high-carb, low-fat diet which won't do anything for you but leave you hungry and make you fat.
The medical industry bought into Ancel Keys early and misleading research on dietary cholesterol and heart disease, none of which has been scientifically validated over time, despite a ton of money (6 NIH studies, $100 million dollars).
Of course, once careers and status is on the line, nothing is let go, and we're still stick in a paradigm that insists that eating carbs and eschewing animal fat is somehow good for us when it's been scientifically well established for 75 years that insulin is the primary driver of fat accumulation.
If the ADA is so fucking smart about diet, why do so many people go on high carb, low-fat, reduced calorie diets and end up as fat as they were when they started? It's a false paradigm.
I find if I don't label people 'cunts' they're usually quite friendly.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Well, dogs are kind of naturally predisposed to eat meat. That's why they have forward-facing eyes (better depth perception for hunting), big sharp pointy teeth (good for biting big holes in prey) and strong jaw muscles. It just so happens that they can prtty much survive on vegetables alone, but it's pretty miserable for them.
It's worth pointing out that you *cannot* feed cats a vegan diet at all; all felidae are unable to synthesize taurine and can only get it from meat. Without taurine, cats gradually go blind. Many spiders have quite a lot of taurine, which is presumably why cats eat them so readily.
Feeding any animal a diet that is unsuitable for it is nothing short of abuse. It is hypocrisy in the extreme to criticise feedlot livestock production for feeding cows an un-natural diet and at the same time force domestic pets to eat a diet they simply cannot make use of.
No, in fact, it has been actually validated.
http://nutrition.stanford.edu/projects/az.html
As long as they don't yack into my meat lover's pizza, I don't mind them.
It's always the same. You go to a restaurant, order something and you may rest assured some militant Vegan is in the audience, coming over and asking whether you know where that meat comes from and what the animal had to endure... my standard answer is something akin to this:
Yes, the cow never saw a green leaf, it was raised on silo food, wedged in between its peers, with its horns and hooves cut and mutilated so they can't harm each other despite the constant stress of being so close to each other with no way to turn around and nowhere to lay down but in their own filth, being shot up with antibiotics every other day 'cause else they'd be swarming with disease. Then they get pushed towards the transport, with cattle prods because they don't know how to move, they never set one foot in front of the other so they have no idea what is expected to them, then they're wedged into a transport, without any food or water, often for days, the stress even killing already some, before they're again pushed with electric shocks towards the killing floor where they get wedged into a small box where they get a bolt to the brain stem. If they're lucky, sometimes they just use a large hammer to bash in their head, and even the bolt doesn't really kill them, there's still brain waves when the next step comes where they get cut open and cut in half, technically while still alive.
Can I fuckin' eat now or do I have to go on with the less savory parts?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For a long time, humans were pretty dumb doing little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, "so strange compared to other animals."
Ponca City, We Love You
I find if I don't label people 'cunts' they're usually quite friendly.
How odd, I find that if people are quite friendly, I don't usually label them as a "cunt". Indeed, they often have to go out of their way to get into mine before I will do that. And I've lost track of how many times I've had to hear from a complete stranger about how eating meat is bad, because I grew up in Santa Cruz which was at the time full of dippy hippies (and which is now too gentrified for me to afford, so I probably preferred it the old way -- Vegans > Valleys.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not sure why people get so offended by vegans.
Because you get to be a vegan. But we have to be around a vegan.
I've been around vegans, mostly through work, but a few in social settings, and while it isn't universal, it's more like 90 percent:
We get to hear how they are a vegan within 5 minutes of meeting them.
We get to hear how they are healthier than us corpse eaters.
We usually get "looks" if they see that we are wearing anything leather.
In general, a lot of sanctimony.
There was one who I worked with who pretty much wrecked our department's social life. We used to go to lunch several times a week. When this priceless person came to work with us, she came along. Every restaurant waiter would get grilled about every thing. This woman was determined nothing that touched anything that touched meat would get past her lips. Then we'd get a lecture and more the condescension if we had the audacity to order anything with meat. Quickly whittled the lunches down to no one going. She was the extreme example, but most others had that thing going on to a lesser or greater degree.
When she left, we had a party the day after she left town. Cheeseburgers all around!
Why does this happen? I think that it is a sort of neurosis, where people believe that they have to eliminate evil from their life, and begin to gauge everything they do as "good" or "not good". Obviously there are some unpleasant aspects to killing animals to eat them, so they can quickly home in on that as in the "not good" category.
But a person who eats meat is no more or less good or bad as a person who eats plants only. Like it or not, almost all animals and a fair number of plants take their sustenance by depriving other animals or plants of their life. The Rhododendron in my yard that poisons the soil to kill other plants that take root there, and uses their composted remains, or the Venus flytrap plant or pitcher plant that traps and consumes bugs are not evil or bad - they are just what they are. And of course those composted remains mean that plants are practicing a form of cannibalism, taking nutrition from their dead ancestors.
So there is one answer to your question. The short version is that many Vegans are unpleasant to be around.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I've heard thats not true. a friend of mine told me that they had heard a story of someone who was ok with facts changing his opinions, and who didnt rely on anecdotal evidence for his beliefs.
In my situation it's always the other way around. The only time I tell people I'm vegan is when they want to go somewhere to eat. Which in the USA is a lot of the time. All of the aggression comes from the other side though, not mine. But I have noticed that over the years the aggression has turned more into a curiosity and more people like to ask me about the diet. Some of the time they want me to bring them some vegan food to try. But online its a totally different story. Aggression and name calling always starts with the non-vegans. Everyone's got some story about how a vegetarian made them feel bad about themselves. So you met one asshat, I meet a lot of non-vegans that are turds on a regular basis, but I don't assume it's because they eat meat and I don't lump all non-vegans with that person. I bet that person you worked with isn't even vegetarian any more if they are that aggressive with their believes.
Can I bum a sig?
A week? Might want to check your facts. The transit time for all matter is on average 24 hours, regardless of source.
Difference is, we actually digest the meat. Meanwhile, much plant food must make it to the large intestine for bacterial fermentation. Once there, the body absorbs the fatty acids created by fermentation. Highly inefficient. In fact, we don't even need to eat plant food to survive, it's just an omnivorous adaptation -- starch is easy energy (though nutritionally void).
You're right about the canines. Chances are, like many primates, is that early homonids scavanged rotting meat. To this day, humans prefer partially putrified meat - also fire came about to help.
Oh, and I have a PhD in metabolic biochemistry, thank you very much -- I know a lot more than some quack "nutritionist".
You are wrong. It does not take meat a week to be digested. All foods take 24 to 72 hours to complete their journey through the digestive system. You will get more or less nutrients from foods depending on how easy it is to extract the nutrients, but the trip takes the same time. Some foods have to be cooked to get any nutrition from them. Some foods are better eaten raw as the heat of cooking will destroy the nutrients. Know your foods. Most meat should be cooked. Many beans and grains should be cooked. Most fruit and many vegetables are best eaten raw.
Colon cleanses are not needed for your health and are more likely to harm you than do any good. Your natural processes do a fine of job of keeping your digestive track clean and healthy.
Anarchists never rule
Atkins specifically, yes. But he wasn't promoting a healthy diet, he was promoting a weight-loss program. And although he had some correct ideas, his diet as outlined was neither healthy nor successful as a weight loss program in the long run.
But some of the things he got right are that it's perfectly fine to be low carb (it's also perfectly fine to be relatively high carb, but one needs to be careful about certain metabolic issues that can ensue). The idea that low carb is somehow better for weight loss is flawed. Some people will eat less on low carb, and some people will eat more, and ultimately, calories decide weight, so Atkins works for some and not others. A good portion of initial weight loss is not fat, but water and glycogen, which gives a false initial impression, especially compared with other diets. Even if you overeat on Atkins, at first you will lose non-fat weight, while you are actually gaining fat! Though I doubt that's too common, and that most people are under eating, and thus losing fat as well.
Ultimately, however, because Atkins tends to be difficult for most people to follow for more than a year (too restrictive relative to the culinary milieu in America), people fall off the diet, and without some solid guiding principles, go back to their old ways of eating, and regain all their weight (as well as making up for lost time, go beyond it). It's essentially a magic trick (water/glycogen), a bio-hack (low carb, *high protein*, medium fat, which helps people naturally eat less (really, low carb, high fat, medium protein, is superior for long-term health)), in the short term, and unsustainable in the long term (for most people).
Two things that I don't think he ever touched upon, but would definitely help to make his diet more balanced and reasonable, is that saturated fat does not cause heart disease, and in fact is extremely healthy (your body absolutely *loves* using it as a fuel. So much so that it turns carbs into it and stores it for use later, and burns it every night while you sleep, and every day between meals!), and cholesterol does not cause heart disease. Cholesterol is an important molecule for life (why would your body make it if it wasn't?), but abnormally small, damaged cholesterol (which is uncommon except for people eating a junk-food type diet, which in America now means almost everyone), gets trapped in damaged arteries. Cholesterol is normally too large to do so (HDL, what is commonly called the good cholesterol). So is LDL, but VLDL is not, and that's where the correlation comes from.
Anyway, Atkins took a few correct notions, and over applied them resulting in a reasonably OK, but ultimately inaccurate weight loss theory.
well, perhaps that's the moral. or perhaps it should be that a vegan that won't eat carrots doesn't represent the vegan community at all.
Or perhaps the moral is that we generally eat food that was previously alive. Where we draw lines about exploiting that "life" is usually based on arbitrary divisions projecting human feelings and morals onto things that have a very different experience of the world.
For most of the vegans I know who have a problem eating honey, I think the carrot really represents a conundrum. It is really a greater problem to exploit the work of bees than it is to rip a living organism out of the ground and kill it completely to consume it? Some people say that the bees still have a nervous system that can feel pain or something and harming or exploiting them is a problem... but have you never had a garden and stepped on a plant, or tore a leaf, or made some sort of other damage or barrier or whatever to the plant's growth? The plant will respond (albeit more slowly). It is a living thing, and it has systems designed to react to the environment, as all animals do.
The line is always arbitrary. For most people in my experience, it's primarily about "cute and cuddly" things more than anything else... and I'm not sure that's a good thing to build a moral philosophy on.
And what about our teeth says we evolved to eat meat?
They're not all flat grinders. In fact, they're mostly shaped for cutting and tearing. Only 3 out of 8 are grinders.
Please don't say canines because if you look at real canines and then look at a humans canines they are totally different. Same name, but functionally not the same. Real canines tear through flesh a lot easier than the human canines can.
That's because we don't chase down our still living (and running) food and try to bite them to death. We have omniovore canines.
Look no one can predict what we are supposed to eat...
We don't need to _predict_ it, we _know_ what we're supposed to eat. Our teeth, digestive systems and metabolism tell us what we should eat. Our history tells us what we eat. Our pre-history has left us evidence of what we eat and how we evolved to eat it.
...but to assume that being vegan is a stupid diet isn't logic speaking, that's culture speaking.
Veganism is also a cultural artifact, driven by emotion, not logic, and by your logic, stupid. "Aw poor cute animal, I have to kill it to eat it. I'll eat plants instead." Guess what? You have to kill most plant foods to eat them, too.
Not sure why you get offended by veganism, but you should look into it more before you criticize it.
I have looked into it. It's a denial of human nature, an attempt to feel morally superior and an arrogant deceit of one's self. It's like self-flagellation, which is almost as offensive as veganism. The truth is simple: all things that live, eat. And for all living things to eat, something must die. This is the cycle of life.
You should ask a nutritionist about the vegan diet and how healthy it is. Get a professionals point.
So you consulted a professional vegan nutritionist for this objective, balanced point of view?
Like I said, I've been a strict vegan for 12 years (no honey or processed sugars).
Ah yes, avoid the evil animal-based processed sugars to be a strict vegan.
I don't know if it's contributed to my health, but it definitely hasn't hurt it.
Based on your post, I rather doubt both those statements.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Dead animals taste good!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........