Meat- Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPROm Nom Nom: As we began to shy away from eating primarily fruit, leaves and nuts and began eating meat, our brains grew. From left, a cast of teeth from a chimpanzee, Australopithecus afarensis and a modern human. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.
It wasn't a very high- calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks. Digestion, she says, was the energy- hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers. Until, that is, we discovered meat. That's one sign of our carnivorous conversion. But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it's a tapeworm. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 2. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello. Tools even made vegetable matter easier to deal with. As anthropologist Shara Bailey at New York University says, they were like . Wrangham invited me to his apartment at Harvard University to explain what he believes is the real secret to being human. All I had to do was bring the groceries, which meant a steak — which I thought could fill in for wildebeest or antelope — and a turnip, a mango, some peanuts and potatoes. As we slice up the turnip and put the potatoes in a pot, Wrangham explains that even after we started eating meat, raw food just didn't pack the energy to build the big- brained, small- toothed modern human. He cites research that showed that people on a raw food diet, including meat and oil, lost a lot of weight. Many said they felt better, but also experienced chronic energy deficiency. And half the women in the experiment stopped menstruating. It's not as if raw food isn't nutritious; it's just harder for the body to get at the nutrition. Wrangham urges me to try some raw turnip. Not too bad, but hardly enough to get the juices flowing. Chimps, for example, sometimes chew for six hours a day. That actually consumes a lot of energy. And cooking is what he thinks really changed our modern body. Someone discovered fire — no one knows exactly when — and then someone got around to putting steak and veggies on the barbeque. And people said, . Fresh, unprocessed, live, raw food benefits every creature on the planet, so why are humans so confused about what to eat? Eating raw food benefits health and human. I learned that. Earlier this year (in 2012), U.S. News & World Report reported its second annual list of the Best Diets, as ranked by a panel of “22 nationally recognized experts. Make sure your horse or pony has a healthy diet. Things you should do. Horses must have continuous access to fresh clean water. Horses should be provided with as much. It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. And that collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food. Yes, cooking can damage some good things in raw food, like vitamins. But Wrangham argues that what's gained by cooking far outweighs the losses. As I cut into my steak (Wrangham is a vegetarian; he settles for the mango and potatoes), Wrangham explains that cooking also led to some of the finer elements of human behavior: it encourages people to share labor; it brings families and communities together at the end of the day and encourages conversation and story- telling — all very human activities..
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