Hi,
arjen hoekstra wrote:
>Before I decided to
>subscribe I went through all the archives of this
>board and hopefully read most of the posts that have
>my interest.
Excellent! Congratulations. I guess you found tons of useful
material.
>It is obvious that this board has grown
>to be a mainly raw meat supportive environment and
>that many vegans felt compelled to leave, for whatever
>reason this may be.
IMO the vegans who left had problems with theirselves. If meat is
just of no interest (like they claim) you could leave others discussing
it without yourself coming into trouble.
Anyway the list has extended the discussable foods with the years.
Extension is always good, me thinks. Narrowing is bad.
>If I remember correctly, Ward on Beyond Veg is giving
>information on rates of genetic change in certain
>traits to make us believe that genetic adaptation to
>cooked foods has occurred.
IIRC he speaks of a partial adaptation and consequentially includes
some (!) cooked foods in his nutrition.
>However, it most
>likely doesn't lead to genetic adaptation to junk
>foods, since virtually all negative health
>consequences occur after the reproductive age!
You forget one point here:
Grandparents do have a function! If they are sick and mentally weak
this is a disadvantage for the tribe as a whole.
Also you forget, that fertility i s influenced by the type of
your nutrition a n d that the quality of male sperms is also
subject to a man's living style. I would guess that the same is true
for the female ovum.
Just one example: smoking cripples sperms (other bad habits possibly
also).
>This
>seems to be the exact situation: we all can observe
>that junk food eaters breed more than health conscious
>people, whatever the reason might be. So this can lead
>to a trait becoming established in humans, while it
>actually has negative health consequences!! This is
>extremely important, because the same situation might
>apply to cooked foods!!
Ok, this sounds right. In fact wrong nutrition has established all
over the planet despite its detrimental effect on human health.
BUT this could only happen because technical means were and are used
to overcome the disadvantages of this bad nutrition. E.g. hygienic
living conditions mostly overcome the fact that the immune system
of the average SAD eater is weak. (FYI: SAD=standard american diet)
AND there are strong signs that eating SAD is a trait that will
end soon. More and more people are sick and this starts at younger
and younger ages. The percentage of chronically (=permanent) ill
people increases.
The fertility sinks.
Soon the time will come when conventionally eating people will not
longer be able to reproduce.
At this point the trait of eating cooked foods will die out with
enormous speed. Evolution has other time scales as our thinking.
What are 12.000 years for eradicating an error in the human diet?
Virtually nothing.
>I also would like to write down some thoughts about
>adaptation to meat.
...
>Evolutionary spoken this doesn't
>make any sense, since tools came into use with Homo
>habilis about two and a half million years ago, while
>our extended canines disappeared already five million
>years ago!
Are you sure? If some of the dating methods of paleologists (sp?)
are slightly changing in the light of new findings, then these
numbers are rendered completely invalid as well as your conclusions.
>Also, the use of tools does not necessarily
>mean that canines have to disappear: Chimps are known
>to use tools and still possess extended canines.
Maybe there's more to it. But consider the form of animal and
human faces. Tool usage and change to bipedal walking enabled
us to use our hands to handle things instead of walking on them.
Although chimps use their hands in a similar manner their faces
still have a protuberanting mouth. (sorry for my description if
I didn't find the right words). The face of humans has changed.
Maybe it's the frequency of tool usage that counts. Maybe its
the unique bipedal moving. Who knows.
>Being an opportunistic feeder means a lot of
>trial and error and, as I explained earlier, this
>doesn't necessarily lead to genetic adaptation to
>those foods. We have to keep in mind that prehistoric
>humans can make dietary mistakes, just like modern
>humans can. Cows are nowadays fed cows and other meat
>and they at least survive on it, but it doesn't make
>their biological make-up omnivorous.
Granted but consider that the size of the human brain went up
in times when our ancestors consumed more and more meat and organs.
This is a good sign that they thrived on this diet.
In the last ice time, according to beyond veg the percentage of
animal foods went up to 90% of the whole diet and the human brain
virtually exploded in size.
>One thing
>I don't understand of the Raw Animal Food (RAF) eaters
>is that they obviously assume that we are adapted to
>eating meat but not to cooking foods. I wonder how
>they justify this.
Meat has been there for millions of years but raw. Man could scavenge
the pray of a predator thousands of years before he began hunting him-
self.
Especially fish are present during the whole evolution of land animals.
Although fish are the oldest species on this planet the genetical
differences between them and land animals are quite small. Nature did
not invent it all again.
Therefore I would think that humans are not only able to digest raw
fish but also (to a smaller degree) the meat of land animals.
Cooking appeared at a late point of time in evolution, much later than
the appearance of land animals. So the genetical adaptation to cooked
foods must be weaker than to raw which was the standard for alle beings
on the planet until man invented the fire.
>I also would like to point out that
>eating of animal products, especially when raw, have
>nowadays serious risks involved, like Mad Cow's
>Disease, Bovine AIDS, Bovine Leukemia, E.coli and
>Salmonella, to name just a few.
Well yes but this has never been the case in paleolithic times. So if
you use meat of good sources you should have no problem with these
issues. Speaking for me (I am living in Europe) I buy only meat from
one trustable source which I have tested thouroughly.
Best raw regards,
Stefan
|
