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Subject:
From:
Micky Snir <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Evolutionary Fitness Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 24 Apr 2001 16:39:09 +0300
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It seems to me pretty obvious that as humans age, their hormonal
imbalance would make them fatter: their basic metabolic rate declines,
accentuated by loss of muscle.
For women, the change is abrupt(menopause), and for men it is
gradual(adropause).
Men can do better to stall the (androgenic) hormonal decline with
intensive workouts such as wind-sprints and resistance training, and
with hormonally correct nutrition (more protein, more fat, less carbs,
definitely less high GI carbs).
Physical labor that is not intense, for long durations (agriculture
style) make things worse, as it will cause more muscle loss via elevated
Cortisol secretion.

Micky.

 -----Original Message-----
From:   D. Tweed [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent:   Tuesday, April 24, 2001 12:41 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:             Re: [EVOLUTIONARY-FITNESS] Evolutionary Education

> How on earth can you say it's "easy" never to become fat?  Go visit
Turkey.
> Large country.  Bigger than Texas.  Everywhere in the Western part (I
> haven't been to the East) you see women, girls and old women tilling
the
> field--excruciating hand labor, from sunup to sundown.
>
> All the old ladies are fat.  It's a pattern that one cannot fail to
> note--thin little elfin girls, who grow to slender young women, who
turn
> into stocky, heavy old ladies.

[Pointedly ignoring issues of who's been impolite]

Regarding this point, does anyone have any evidence (preferably
epidemiological but theoretical if necessary) about what the causes of
becoming obese under a lifestyle which involves hard manual labour might
be? What's interesting is that this seems to be common to many groups,
e.g., twenty years ago when manual labour in the UK meant much more work
than it does now (and still less than it would 50 years ago) male manual
labourers seemed to become more obese with age.

Is it possible that, as the immediate thought off the top of my head,
that
being obese isn't an immediate problem with a lifestyle that involves
heavy muscular work such as tilling the soil or carrying heavy weights,
and that evolutionarily the `stored food' benefit outweighs the others.
Could it be that when the lifestyle enforces dexterity and fleetness
that
the metabolism gets tuned to different keep bodyweight low, so that
there
are (at least) two reasonably stable `modes' in the system. Does anyone
on
this list who knows about palaeontology/ethnographics know of any
statistically valid records of an itinerant people who had plentiful
food
available, and what the obesity stats were for the males and females of
the various age groups? (The tentative hypothesis is that the need to
keep
fleet for moving would conteract the hormonal weight-gain effects of
pregnancy.)

> What about all those paleolithic venuses?  Maybe those sculptors were
> describing what they saw around them.

Could you clarify precisely which time & place sculptures you are are
referring to here please? Its quite possible that these are the way they
are because they're accurate renderings of reality, but from __what
little
I know of the area__, physical sculpting by chipping away at marble and
other rocks doesn't make it particularly easy to have `thin' sections
because they break very easily. Likewise, the few times I tried it at
school I discovered that rough clay is almost impossible to make into a
stable human figure (Dungeons and Dragons character type of figure :-) )
of realistic proportions because there's too much stress on sections
corresponding to thin limbs. AFAIK most of the modern `statuesque'
figures
are made by casting/moulding either in metal or soft plaster.

___cheers,_dave________________________________________________________
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm|tweed's law:  however many computers
email: [log in to unmask]     |    you have, half your time is spent
work tel: (0117) 954-5250      |    waiting for compilations to finish.

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