Hey! I resemble that remark!
Posted on 11/25/2012 12:20:00 AM PST by nickcarraway
High caloric intake enabled brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically
Vegetarian, vegan and raw diets can be healthy — likely far healthier than the typical American diet. But to continue to call these diets "natural" for humans, in terms of evolution, is a bit of a stretch, according to two recent, independent studies.
Eating meat and cooking food made us human, the studies suggest, enabling the brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically over a period of a few million years. Although this isn't the first such assertion from archaeologists and evolutionary biologists, the new studies demonstrate, respectively, that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least 1 million years before the dawn of humankind.
Shhh, don't tell the gorillas
At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human brain consumes 20 percent of the body's energy at rest, twice that of other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.
One study, published last month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the brain sizes of several primates. For the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times more massive than humans — have smaller brains and three times fewer neurons. Why?
The answer, it seems, is the gorillas' raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating only plants to provide enough calories to support their mass.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Like I keep telling vegetarians and vegans, we didn’t kill our way to the top of the food chain only to eat a few leaves.
If we weren’t able to digest it, we would’ve found that out a long time ago.
If we couldn’t chew it, we’d either eat it as a paste, or not at all.
They’ll never understand it.
even red meat in moderation is good.
We shouldn't be sitting down to a fatty meat every day, but once in a while, ok
I’m not saying we should eat half a cow daily, but the simple fact is, humans function best when meat is in the diet.
“The answer, it seems, is the gorillas’ raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating only plants to provide enough calories to support their mass.”
Naw. gorillas don’t need big brains since all they think about is how lousy those plants and leaves taste and where they can get a double bacon cheese burger.
Oh well. Thought I would be seeing an actual full-hearted tell-off to the vegans out of MSDNC. Instead, I see evolutionary nonsense mixed in about gorillas and whatnot. (Chimps hunt animals for food, but it doesn’t put their intelligence at human level.) If I were in the article author’s place, I’d have the flame-retardant suit on before the libs remind him that gorillas are eight times stronger than Olympic weightlifters, on average . . . (ain’t got a thing to do with diet)
For as long as mankind has lived outside of the tropics, he has eaten something other than vegetables for a good portion of the year.
Bears eat what they can when they can. They’ll pound down the salmon for a month, and then pound down berries for a month. They might eat some honey or a rotten moose.
Vegans are the oddest people with the most unnatural ideas.
“Bears eat what they can when they can.”
You forgot tourists, they are particularly fond of that delicacy!
Nice green salads have a place. Before the main course of a 24 oz. steak grilled to perfection.
Unless you’re Yogi, and then you raid picanic baskets.
The author manages to contradict himself with the final statemenst about there being many good reasons to go vegetarian or vegan when he just wrote a great expose detailing why going vegan or vegetarian would have made us all puny idiots. If going v and v would have made us inferior now, it will then make us inferior in the future. Moral of the story: to stay strong and smart, eat meat.
I never saw a lion that got fat on daisies.....
high grade animal protein increased our brain power and gave us time away from dumb grazing animals, to increase our intellect and ponder our next moves...which developed into science and art.
I think that's the problem in the schools, too. These kids need REAL protein....eggs, meat and dairy. Stop the rabbit diet.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Rabbits eat bugs (not as in bunny) too don’t they?
We had a bunny. It totally ate my HUGE house plant. Bunnies are not trustworthy.
I have a nice rabbit coat.
You trusted the rabbit for that coat
vegan is ancient pri-mordal word for ...”bad hunter”
The author of the article is a science writer, not a scientist, expressing pure opinion with that statement.
People try pure vegan diets, but I have yet to hear of someone sticking with one permanently. There also isn't any research establishing that such diets are actually healthy. Nor is there any scientific reason to believe that vegetarianism is somehow better for the environment. I know that there is a lot of hype claiming scientific support for these assertions, but reading the original science articles reveals that the scientific basis isn't there.
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