In the newsgroups someone started a thread by posting The Guardian web page
that we discussed here a few days ago. Being crossposted to a bunch of
groups with diverse opinions has made it long and controversial. I pulled
this one out, as the argument presented in 1. below was new to me, and
presumably to others here. Don.

Newsgroups:
alt.support.diet.paleolithic,alt.support.diet.low-carb,alt.support.diet,sci.med.nutrition,misc.health.diabetes
Subject: Re: Would eating a Stone Age diet make us healthier?
From: Patrick Sonnek <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2003 08:21:22 -0600

And quite specifically, one of the biggest differences in our diet vs
the Chimpanzee, is that earliy homonids consumed a larger quantity of
meat in their diets, this can be seen in two very obvious ways.

1.  Our lower abdonmen.  The chimps rib cage splays out as it nears the
waist and most chimps look like they have a pot-belly.  This is not due
to lack of excersise, or being over weight.  It's due to needing a large
digestive tract to draw all of the nutrients out of plant material.  Our
rib cage narrows as it nears the waist and a human in good phyiscal
shape has a realtivly flat stomach as meat needs much less digestive
tract to pull out the nutrients.

2.  Large brains require large quantities of protean.   In archaic
Africa the only reliable source of concentrated protean was meat.


Now I'm not knocking the vegitarian diet.  In modern times we have
several choices for a high protean meat substitue, with the predominate
one being the soy bean.   I'm just saying that when humans and chimps
parted ways on the evolutionary tree, we had to eat a lot more meat to
grow our huge brains.