----- Original Message -----
From: alexs <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 19, 1999 2:51 AM
Subject: Re: [P-F] Sex and food


> >Todd Moody opined:
> >
> >>..Additionally, the gorilla's vegetarian food
> >> produces tremendous amounts of intestinal gas....
> >
> >This is idiotic.  Man-like?  Gorillas were here first; they
> >should be well adapted to their food supply.
>
> This statement is uninformed and unprovable. The most
> current thought is that modern-era primates descended
> from a common ancestor, not from each other. As for
> "well adapted", the huge guts of gorillas and orang-utans
> likely indicates the need for processing large amounts
> of low-nutrient food, i.e. vegetation mostly. The huge
> guts of some humans points toward an unsuitable or incom-
> patible diet, at least according to Paleofood theory.
>

No human has a huge gut in comparison to his or her brain size. (The term
"gut" is properly applied to the intestinal tract--not to a large deposit of
adipose tissue around the abdominal cavity.) Actually, the human gut is very
small in comparison to the size of the human brain. The gorilla's gut is
very large in comparison to it's brain size. As indicated by the Expensive
Tissue Hypothesis, this dissimilarity would seem to explain the difference
between natural human and gorilla diets, the former being composed of a lot
of animal protein and fat, the latter being primarily vegetarian.

The Expensive Tissue theory postulates that, based on the relatively small
size of the human gut (upper and lower intestines) in comparison to the
human brain, it is reasonable to assume that a natural human diet would be
composed of nutrient-dense foods, because the human gut is able to derive
limited amounts of nutrients from nutrient-sparse foods.

See the following:

Aiello, Leslie C. and Peter Wheeler, "The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis: The
Brain and the Digestive System in Human and Primate Evolution. " CURRENT
ANTHROPOLOGY, vol. 36, #2 (April 1995), 199-221.

Troy G.