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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.
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.
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.
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'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.
As far as we know, Man wasn't made to be anything. It just adapted to the conditions, but that doesn't mean we're bound to those adaptions, or we wouldn't be using /. either.
Not that I am a vegan (I don't even know any vegans), but this pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo about the purposes we were "made for" is ridiculous and annoyingly common even among non-theists.
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Milk is vegan, if the animal you obtain it from, consents to give it to you - in other words, human breast milk can be vegan (though don't try to steal any from the next pregnant woman you see on the subway - that won't go well).
But since non-human animals can't give us consent to take the milk they produced for their own offspring, that stolen cows' or goats' milk is not vegan.
There, now you can say you've learned something today.
You don't need historical analysis. I've seen first-hand that buying a woman steak or lobster helps me reproduce.
I find if I don't label people 'cunts' they're usually quite friendly.
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No, in fact, it has been actually validated.
http://nutrition.stanford.edu/projects/az.html
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."
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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.
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.
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