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Sun, 10 Oct 1999 17:22:57 -0400 |
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Paleolithic Diet Symposium List |
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I found Steve Matesz's post about the fallacious reasoning behind the
cooked vegetables article to be quite interesting. Nevertheless, I'm having
a hard time digesting (pardon the pun) Marsh and Crawford's
"...general rule, to which there are no known exceptions: All animals
having large brains, sophisticated nervous and vascular systems, and a
capacity for complex intelligent behavior are carnivores or omnivores, and
must be in order to obtain sufficient EFAs for building their large brains,
sophisticated nervous and vascular systems."
Although "man" is indeed an omnivore, it is also clear that human
individuals (and large classes of humans: e.g. Hindus) are quite capagle of
living and reproducing on a vegetarian diet. Biochemical differences might
exist between the brains/nervous systems of vegetarians and
non-vegetarians, but unless compelling arguments can be advanced showing a
functional detriment at the level of evolutionary fitness for vegetarians,
lower level arguments (e.g. DPA predominates in the brains of vegetarians
and is far inferior to DHA with regard to neural activity) would seem to be
either irrelevant or to indicate that the current biochrmical knowledge
base is inadequate.
Gary Ditta
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