On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Elizabeth Miller wrote:

> From what I can gather about stone age man is that he would eat basically
> anything that moved or grew -- but because of conditions and availability he
> was most likely to eat meat, fish, nuts, leaves, flowers, twigs, etc. except
> for a few months in the summer when he'd have access to more sugary carbs
> (good for laying down a fat pad to help him survive the winter and/or
> non-fruiting season -- I actually think we are hard wired to eat sugar -- the
> conditions under which we evolved gave us natural limits,  and later the
> agrarian life was so hard we could hardly eat enough to keep up -- but now --
> the sky's the limit!!).

I think this is exactly right.  The brain and red blood cells
have an absolute glucose requirement.  We can produce glucose
from protein but metabolically we "prefer" not to do that.  Hence
the sweetness detectors on our tongues.  I have wondered about
the amylase in our saliva, which initiates starch digestion.  Why
initiate starch digestion in the mouth.  My hypothesis is that
this allows for immediate absorption of a small amount of
glucose, which serves to reinforce the starch-eating behavior.
But as you say, under most conditions glucose consumption would
be limited by the environment itself.

> Stone age probably nibbled on wild grains all along
> in small quantities.

This is feasible when the grains are not quite mature.  In fact,
they would be much easier to harvest at this stage, since mature
grains quickly fall off the stalk.  As Annette Stahl points out
in "Hominid Dietary Selection Before Fire," other primates also
exploit the brief immature growth stage of various plants, so
this way of utilizing grains wouldn't be an innovation.

> However, as things warmed up and the area native to our
> ancestral grains got wetter at the end of the last ice age, these grains were
> probably more plentiful. Started to settle around these grass crops and soon
> discovered he could stay put and grow this stuff himself. Soon discovered
> ways to process the stuff and make it go further.

Exactly.  It makes perfect sense when you consider that they had
been eating them in small amounts all along.

> Wild wheat was not a first choice food at first. In
> fact, it's called a third choice food because it was relatively difficult to
> gather and process. We probably first ate it in any quantity because we were
> hungry; we had to.

I would imagine that other grains were exploited earlier.

> But it had certain advantages: one, it was storable, rela
> tively plentiful, easy to grow -- and probably made us feel good. Only later
> did we know the cost -- by then we didn't know how to go back.  The authors
> of the Origins of Agriculture are not suggesting that the opioids were the
> only reason for a turn to grains -- admittedly grains also provide nutrition,
> not just a high.

These are, in fact, major advantages.  But in addition to any
costs due to eating the grains themselves we must add the costs
of the entire new way of life that resulted.  This makes it
difficult to know which costs were simply the result of ingesting
grains and which were "collateral damage."  For example, the
storage of grains under damp conditions could breed aspergillus
flavus, which creates aflatoxin, which causes liver cancer.  This
would create a correlation between large-scale grain eating and
liver cancer, but it wouldn't be quite accurate to pin it on the
grains, because eating fresh wild grains as hunter-gatherers
probably had been doing for a long time probably wouldn't have
this consequence.  The same point applies to other lifestyle
changes that go along with the switch to agriculture.

> Of course, over time we individually and as a species - adapt -- habituate --
> down regulate -- and our need for the stuff grows greater to get the same fix
> -- and thus, "bread becomes the staff of life".

I still think that if it were this potent I'd be able to detect
the effect.

> Obviously as we grew dependent on agriculture we domesticated more
> and more species and ways to store it and eat it all year round.

And yet in Asia the dominant crop, rice, was one without opioids.
If the proliferation of agriculture was driven by opioid
intoxication, it doesn't make much sense that they would switch.

> For the
> first time in history an animal was in control of his own carbohydrate supply
> without regard to season -- this was indeed revolutionary.

But this makes lots of sense: fields and fields of glucose which,
as you pointed out, we are wired to consume.  And many of us
consume it addictively even when it contains no opioids.

> But now that we know the consequences .......?

...We reduce our glucose intake to something like what the
environment imposed on us prior to agriculture.

Todd Moody
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