Posted on 12/19/2022 11:24:30 AM PST by bitt
Metabolism studies reveal surprising insights into how we burn calories—and how cooperative food production helped Homo sapiens flourish
It was my daughter Clara’s seventh birthday party, a scene at once familiar and bizarre. The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal of pizza and picnic food, a few close COVID-compliant friends and family, a beaming kid blowing out candles on a heavily iced cake. With roughly 380,000 boys and girls around the world turning seven each day, it was a ritual no doubt repeated by many, the world’s most prolific primate singing “Happy Birthday” in an unbroken global chorus.
Such a wholesome setting seems an unlikely place for rampant rule breaking. But as an evolutionary anthropologist, I can’t help but notice the blatant disregard our species shows for the natural order. Nearly every aspect of our modern lives marks a cheerfully outrageous departure from the laws that govern every other species on the planet, and this birthday party was no exception. Aside from the fresh veggies left wilting in the sun, none of the food was recognizable as a product of nature. The cake was a heat-treated amalgam of pulverized grass seed, chicken eggs, cow milk and extracted beet sugar. The raw materials for the snacks and drinks would take a forensic chemist years to reconstruct. It was a calorie bonanza that animals foraging in the wild could only dream about, and we were giving it away to people who didn’t even share our genes. All this to celebrate some obscure astronomical alignment, the moment our planet swept through the same position relative to its star as on the day my daughter was born. At seven years old, most mammals are grandparents if they’re lucky enough to be alive. Clara was still a kid, dependent on us for food and shelter and years away from independence.
Humans weren’t always such scofflaws. We come from a good Family. The living apes, our closest relatives, are well-behaved primates, eating fruit and leaves straight from the tree and nibbling on the occasional meal of insects or small game. Like every other mammal, apes learn early to fend for themselves, foraging on their own as soon as they’re weaned, and they know better than to give their hard-earned food away. Fossils from deep in the human lineage, the first four million years after we broke from the other apes, indicate our early ancestors played by the same ecological rules.
...more
Canine teeth? What about those ancient sharp knives, axes, spears, traps that our early human hands could make and use?
Hard to trust ANYTHING from “Scientific American” - which is neither! But this article doesn’t do much for me. It doesn’t address why some get fat and others do not.
Yes. Chimps don’t make monkey wrenches.
Yeah.....
:has flash back to watching what chimps do to other monkeys:
Let's not go there any more.
Can you give a one or two sentence explanation of what the author said. I got about three sentences in and my mind went blank.
They did a true study of caloric usage vs age and found that kids have hyper metabolism (as expected due to their rapid growth), from age 20-60 everyones metabolism basically stays the same (men and women) and then metabolism drops off with body mass as people age beyond 60.
Was a suprise to me as I definitely felt like i went through a metabolic rate change in my mid-30s, but what they attribute those changes to are changes in activity behavior and diet and not to how you body actually processes the energy it receives.
Also indicates that the more active you keep yourself going the less mass you’ll lose and the more likely you are to keep your metabolic rate up...though that requires additional study to prove definitively.
Thanks. So much for my labeling efforts.
Yes. That was like a tiny portion of this long winded rambling pseudoscientific crap.
😄
there’s been nothing “scientific” or “american” in scientific american for several decades, so there’s no point in reading a single word they publish ...
Do you have any ancestors who were democrats?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.