On Fri, 4 Sep 1998, Ray Audette wrote:

> Maybe it's genetic (see brother Michael's posts) or maybe it's because
> I'm a Texan (yes, it really is bigger).  But just as the principle health
> threat to the pastoral Tutsi are agrarian Hutus, I have had to struggle
> against the forces of Kellogg for many years (as did Stefansson-also
> known for his arrogance).

Ironically, the struggle was made longer by the fact that Kellogg
lived a long and healthy life.  Personally, I don't think much of
Kellogg's nutritional ideas, nor do I care to become a vegan like
Shaw, but I am hardly in a position to deny that these diets
worked well for these men.

> My point was that an all meat diet is not as abnormal historically as the
> year round proliferation of fresh fruits and vegetables in the modern
> supermarket is.

Except in tropical "refugia."  The "bottleneck" theory says that
only *some* populations had to adapt to the absence of
vegetation, so that the last glaciation did not create universal
selection pressure for an all-meat diet.  If this theory is
correct, it has important implications for nutrition since it
undermines the claim that all humans ought to thrive on a certain
kind of diet because of uniform adaptation to it.

> The Europeans
> who settled Iceland were not genetically predesposed to eat only meat,
> yet according to their remains they thrived on it.  If someone wants to
> go on an all meat and fat diet there are very few health risks involved.

When you have an isolated breeding population, pressure to adapt
to local conditions is extreme, for the simple reason that
members of the population are not readily replaced by immigrants.
Adaptation to particular environmental conditions is called
microevolution, and it does *not* required long geological time
periods to happen.  While the settlers of Iceland were adapting
to all-meat, the settlers of the South American rain forests were
adapting to something quite different.  Why would you expect them
to turn out the same?

(continued)