Good morning paleodiet digest participants,

Working on Plant-Food-Consumer interactions, I am very happy to have come across this listserver, and
thoroughly enjoyed reading the first paleodiet digests on my screen.  A big thank to the organizers for this
well done job.

Commenting (very briefly, and with a few short-cuts) on information relevant to starch and carbohydrates from
Jennie Brand Miller <[log in to unmask]> and from  Loren Cordain <[log in to unmask]> that
were in the last two or three digests :

If leaves and some fruits, most notably banana, do contain some starch, the main starch source in humans' diet
comes from tubers and seeds, all of them belonging to the Group of the Angiosperms.  Tubers and seeds are
progenies of mother plants.  They cannot run away when comes a predator, a plant-eater.  Hence, the mother
plant protects them, on the one hand with odour-silence to pass unoticed, and on the other hand, with powerful
anti-nutritional factors.  Following  T. Swain (1977, Annual review of Plant Physiology, 28 : 479-501;
according to ISI, one of the ten most cited papers of the plant science literature), plant anti-nutritional
factors may have evolved in response to overfeeding by dinosaurs, hence contributing to their demise over some
35 long million years.

A few moulds, insects and grain-eating birds (successful dinosaurs) have adapted to the challenge of plant
anti-nutritional factors, and mutated some stomach genes to overcome plant chemical defences.  For instance,
their trypsin is insentive to plant-anti-trypsin.  Other animals, humans included cannot eat raw grains and
beans and tubers : anti-trypsins, anti-amylases, lectins, cyanogens, alkaloids, etc, would kill them.

So, when Jennie wrote

> Thanks for your well-documented facts about amylase inhibitors.  My
> understanding is that these are all very heat labile and denatured by cooking.

It's correct : they are heat labile, but not always "very" heat labile.  (If we go back to pre-historical
baking technology, we would need up to half a day to bake a bread.)  There are now some papers going into the
depth of the physical-chemistry of this denaturation, even measuring the kinetics of the detoxification
phenomenon, which is of tremendous importance both to the food and feed industries as well as to the food
safety for the Consumers.

> If we eat raw starch we get a bad pain in the belly because raw starch per se is
> resistant to digestion.

Here, I believe that Jennie meant "raw flour".  Indeed, raw wheat flours can kill.  Not because of starch, but
because of wheat toxic proteins, e.g. anti-amylases, dispersed in the endosperm between starch granules.  And
indigestible-insufficiently-baked gluten balls in our stomachs do cause pains.  Concerning uncooked or more
precisely ungelatinized starch itself, a good source of kilocalories, if it cannot be attacked by amylases  and
hydrolysed down to dextrins, it can be hydrolysed (slowly) by glucoamylases (releasing glucose units).

Now, moving from the comments to a question :

All animals that I know, whether domestic or wild, whether fishes, rabbits or gorillas, once they tasted a
piece of bread or of chocolate, they just love to eat more when given an opportunity.  The major difference
between them and humans, is that only humans can apply Fire Technology and the Maillard Reaction "invented" by
our Mother(s) Eve, for detoxifying plant anti-nutritional factors.

Could the abscence of fears from the fire be related to some human-specific genetic defect(s)???

Who knows?

Any comment ?


Have a good day, and regards,

Luc

                                         __
A paleo-thought :                       /  \
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      __/\/\/\/\_                      /      ^^^^
     /°          \                    /       ****
    /             \_                  /      /
   <-_____----_____ _\>>>>>           /      \>>
      / \      / \

A Stegosaurus evolved from about 144 million years ago to 135 million years ago.
A Tyrannosaurus rex from 83 million years ago to about 65 million years ago.
Thus, although often displayed together, a T. rex never ate a steak of Stegosaurus.
And as Angiosperms started to evolve some 120 million years ago, no Stegosaurus could taste one of them and
smell flower perfumes.

--
Luc De Bry, Ph.D.; Head of Research Department; DANONE BISCUITS NORTH
De Beukelaer-Pareinlaan 1; B-2200  Herentals  -  Belgium
Tel. 32 (0)14 241432; Fax 32 (0)14 241025; Email : [log in to unmask]
URL Site  http://www.danonegroup.com