Vegans, Starchy Carbohydrates and World Domination
Most vegans rely heavily on carbohydrates -- especially the starchy kinds -- for nourishment.
A lot has been written about carbohydrates and how we would be better off without them.
There are websites and forums dealing with what are thought to be the diets of early humans, which recommend eating low carbohydrate foods.
They seem to be particularly dismissive of Veganism because of the diet's reliance on starch.
Some fad diets have grown up around this idea, where animal protein and fat consumption is increased and carbohydrates are limited or even avoided as much as possible.
But most humans for all of known history have relied upon starchy carbohydrates for the bulk of their diet.
In most countries, carbohydrates are the main source of energy and have been proven over millennia to be healthy and nutritious.
The two most populous countries in the world are India and China.
Most people there have always used rice as the main part of their diet and it is obviously a healthy food.
Starchy carbohydrates, in their more unrefined state, are amongst the healthiest foods for humans.
When they are highly refined and mixed with lots of sugar and fat, as is found in most of the highly processed forms, they become less than healthy.
The main starch foods are wheat, rice, maize, oats, potatoes, millet, rye, peas and beans.
Who would want to live without them? Bread, it is said, is the very staff of life, and the other starchy foods are just as filling and nutritious.
Studies can be designed to show high carbohydrate diets are unhealthy -- if that is the desired outcome -- but studies also once showed that cigarettes weren't unhealthy, so that the dangers of tobacco were hidden for many years.
Studies can be designed to show just about anything.
I like to rely upon scientific studies for information but not when they contradict the experience and evidence of thousands of years.
In populations that rely on starchy foods, there has been a genetic adaptation to favour those who are better able to digest starch.
Modern humans are genetically suited to starchy diets The ability to digest starch led to our ancestors spreading all over the planet to exploit the available starchy plants that grow in most regions.
Once they learned about cooking they were able to cook and more easily digest the starch in roots and tubers, which will have boosted their brain power and enabled them to take over the world.
After forest fires they would have found baked tubers that were tasty and digestible, whereas before they would have been unappetising and hard to eat.
Modern humans have more copies of the amylase gene variant, AMY1, than all the species of ape.
Amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starch into sugars, making it much easier to digest.
The early humans, or pre-humans, who had the most copies of the gene will have fared much better than their less lucky cousins and will have survived more easily to spread their genes -- and to roam further afield across the vast expanses of the plains and grasslands.
It is thought that the amylase gene variant occurred sometime within the last 200,000 years, which will have been the result of our ancestors' greater reliance on starchy foods.
Humans were eating starchy foods thousands of years before the adoption of agriculture, which took place about 10,000 years ago.
Carbohydrates in the diet, probably from cooked tubers, will have been responsible for the increase in brain size and intelligence of our early ancestors.
The brain's preferred fuel is glucose, and carbohydrates are the main source.
Our early ancestors will have much more easily acquired fuel for their brains from the glucose from plant carbohydrates than from protein or the ketone bodies derived from fat.
It was once thought that the adoption of a meat based diet helped our ancestors to climb down from the trees so they could conquer the world but, although this theory is still believed by some, evidence suggests otherwise.
The meat eating and even hunting habits of chimps is put forward as proof that our ancestors would have been hunters.
But chimps derive very little energy from the meat they eat.
Meat plays more of a social role than a dietary one.
Successful hunters can share the meat with other members of the group, especially females, to seal alliances with them.
The main bulk of a chimp's diet is from plant foods.
Meat often doesn't replace the energy expended on getting it in the first place.
They also eat insects but these satisfy only a small part of their energy requirements.
Some people still claim that we are natural omnivores but if we were, we would salivate at the site of a dead rabbit at the side of the road, even if it was nicely rotting and giving off the smells of putrefaction.
Do we? No, that's a ridiculous idea.
We salivate when we see a bowl of strawberries because they are more like our natural food.
Humans have become omnivores but that doesn't mean it is the best diet for us.
Humans can smoke cigarettes for many years -- sometimes a lifetime -- without harm, but that doesn't mean our lungs developed to inhale smoke.
Many species can survive on diets that their bodies are not 'designed' for.
Polar bears live as carnivores and pandas live as folivores (leaf eaters).
But both should be omnivores -- that's what their bodies are designed for.
Yet they go against that design.
Just like humans do.
We are naturally designed to eat plant foods -- like our cousins, the apes.
Apes can eat meat but they are not designed for that.
It is much more likely that cooking starchy foods, rather than eating meat, allowed our ancestors to develop into humans.
Cooking makes most things more digestible, which allows more energy to be derived from it and less time needed to find and eat food.
Plants are all around and take little energy to collect.
They don't run away and don't defend themselves.
Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, believes that our ancestors were eating cooked food 1 million or even 2 million years ago.
Based on his knowledge of chimpanzees, he estimates that members of Homo erectus (possibly an ancestor of humans) would have needed to chew raw meat for about 6 hours or eat about 12 pounds of raw plant food a day to obtain enough energy.
Another anthropologist, Ralph Rowlett from the University of Missouri-Columbia, has found a Homo erectus site at Koobi Fora in Kenya from 1.
6 million years ago which contains a mixture of different types of burnt woods.
Early pre-humans could have been controlling and using fire to cook starchy foods.
They could have easily kept burning embers from forest fires to start new fires before they learned how to make fire.
Or they could have made fire by striking flints together.
They were familiar with making tools from flints and would have seen how sparks can be created when certain rocks are bashed together.
A chance spark igniting some dry grass would have given them an idea.
They weren't as stupid as was once thought.
There have been suggestions that the burnt wood at Koobi Fora was from forest fires but, by examining the soil and the way crystalline structures were melted, it was found that the fires had burned at a much higher temperature than is found in forest fires.
And the site had been used frequently over a period of years.
This was discovered by using archaeomagnetism techniques: when soil is burnt, iron particles align with the prevailing magnetic field direction.
This changes over time.
The iron particles in the soil were in different orientations which must mean fires were lit at different times over a long period.
It's likely the area was a regular campsite.
Brian Ludwig, from Rutgers University, has found further evidence which points to early fire use.
Whilst examining the evolution of flint knapping, he found pieces that had characteristic fractures and colour changes in them.
These only occur when the stone is heated.
None of these marks were found in very early examples but they began to show up on stones from 1.
6 million years ago.
After that date, they consistently turn up in many places.
Some more evidence comes from Israel.
Examination of wood and flint samples from a Homo erectus site shows that wood and flint were subjected to fire there 790,000 years ago.
Nira Alperson, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, contends that the flint and the wood were burnt in hearths.
Only small amounts show burning, which suggests controlled fires.
Forest fires would have burnt all the samples, all 86,000 of them.
At about this time - 2 million years ago - there occurred a mutation in the myosin of jaw muscles in our early ancestors.
This mutation didn't occur in other muscles.
It resulted in a reduced bite force potential.
Cooked food doesn't need as much bite force potential as tough, raw leaves, shoots and tubers do.
About 500,000 years later there was a reduction in the size of the chewing teeth.
Again, a sign that not so much chewing force was needed.
If our ancestors were cooking food they wouldn't need to have much chewing power, and individuals with smaller teeth will have been able to survive and pass on their genes.
Why those with the ancient large teeth didn't also pass on their genes is unknown.
But Peter Lucas, Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University, says that a reduction in the toughness of food consumed will lead to a rapid reduction in tooth size.
If our ancestors hadn't taken to a high carbohydrate diet the human race would now number only a few tribes of hunter gatherers or even apemen.
But their adoption of starchy foods and the subsequent explosion in the population proves how healthy starchy carbohydrates are.
Most modern hunter gatherer societies have a mainly plant based diet.
Meat plays a smaller part in their diets -- it is an occasional addition which often requires long hunting trips.
These societies are usually found in the drier grasslands and semi-desert areas.
In 1968 Richard B.
Lee and Irven DeVore from Harvard University edited the book 'Man the Hunter', based on an earlier symposium at the University of Chicago.
In it they estimate that the !Kung people of the Kalahari -- thought by many to be the typical model of hunter gatherers -- get 33% of their food from animal sources and 67% from plant sources.
And mongongo nuts constitute half (by weight) of their plant based food.
Hunter gatherers who live in jungles consume meat -- but not exclusively so.
Eskimos and others of the arctic regions traditionally lived mainly on meat and fish.
But now, at least for those in Alaska, coffee, white bread, white rice, milk and other non-traditional foods have been added.
In some areas, according, I believe, to Weston Price, -- a darling of the more-meat-and-saturated-fat lobby -- Eskimos also ate berries, seaweed, nuts, flowers and sorrel grass.
The more a society traditionally relies on starchy foods, the more of the amylase variant they will carry due to natural selection.
It has been found that, in particular groups of humans who have been tested, those who have diets with high proportions of starches -- the Hadza hunter gatherers, European-Americans and Japanese -- have higher numbers of the AMY1 variant than do groups with lower starch diets -- the Biaka, Mbuti, Datog and Yakut.
Whether or not you believe that eating meat rather than the adoption of starchy foods enabled our ancestors to spread around the world, don't be tricked into thinking that starchy foods are bad for us.
They plainly are not.
In fact, they are good for us.
Whatever diet you choose, it is important to lead an active life.
A mixture of vigorous exercise and regular bouts of walking can go a long way to protecting you from the dangers of overindulgence, which has become a bane of life in industrialised countries.
I advise anyone to become vegan and to take enough exercise to stay fit, strong and healthy.
A lot has been written about carbohydrates and how we would be better off without them.
There are websites and forums dealing with what are thought to be the diets of early humans, which recommend eating low carbohydrate foods.
They seem to be particularly dismissive of Veganism because of the diet's reliance on starch.
Some fad diets have grown up around this idea, where animal protein and fat consumption is increased and carbohydrates are limited or even avoided as much as possible.
But most humans for all of known history have relied upon starchy carbohydrates for the bulk of their diet.
In most countries, carbohydrates are the main source of energy and have been proven over millennia to be healthy and nutritious.
The two most populous countries in the world are India and China.
Most people there have always used rice as the main part of their diet and it is obviously a healthy food.
Starchy carbohydrates, in their more unrefined state, are amongst the healthiest foods for humans.
When they are highly refined and mixed with lots of sugar and fat, as is found in most of the highly processed forms, they become less than healthy.
The main starch foods are wheat, rice, maize, oats, potatoes, millet, rye, peas and beans.
Who would want to live without them? Bread, it is said, is the very staff of life, and the other starchy foods are just as filling and nutritious.
Studies can be designed to show high carbohydrate diets are unhealthy -- if that is the desired outcome -- but studies also once showed that cigarettes weren't unhealthy, so that the dangers of tobacco were hidden for many years.
Studies can be designed to show just about anything.
I like to rely upon scientific studies for information but not when they contradict the experience and evidence of thousands of years.
In populations that rely on starchy foods, there has been a genetic adaptation to favour those who are better able to digest starch.
Modern humans are genetically suited to starchy diets The ability to digest starch led to our ancestors spreading all over the planet to exploit the available starchy plants that grow in most regions.
Once they learned about cooking they were able to cook and more easily digest the starch in roots and tubers, which will have boosted their brain power and enabled them to take over the world.
After forest fires they would have found baked tubers that were tasty and digestible, whereas before they would have been unappetising and hard to eat.
Modern humans have more copies of the amylase gene variant, AMY1, than all the species of ape.
Amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starch into sugars, making it much easier to digest.
The early humans, or pre-humans, who had the most copies of the gene will have fared much better than their less lucky cousins and will have survived more easily to spread their genes -- and to roam further afield across the vast expanses of the plains and grasslands.
It is thought that the amylase gene variant occurred sometime within the last 200,000 years, which will have been the result of our ancestors' greater reliance on starchy foods.
Humans were eating starchy foods thousands of years before the adoption of agriculture, which took place about 10,000 years ago.
Carbohydrates in the diet, probably from cooked tubers, will have been responsible for the increase in brain size and intelligence of our early ancestors.
The brain's preferred fuel is glucose, and carbohydrates are the main source.
Our early ancestors will have much more easily acquired fuel for their brains from the glucose from plant carbohydrates than from protein or the ketone bodies derived from fat.
It was once thought that the adoption of a meat based diet helped our ancestors to climb down from the trees so they could conquer the world but, although this theory is still believed by some, evidence suggests otherwise.
The meat eating and even hunting habits of chimps is put forward as proof that our ancestors would have been hunters.
But chimps derive very little energy from the meat they eat.
Meat plays more of a social role than a dietary one.
Successful hunters can share the meat with other members of the group, especially females, to seal alliances with them.
The main bulk of a chimp's diet is from plant foods.
Meat often doesn't replace the energy expended on getting it in the first place.
They also eat insects but these satisfy only a small part of their energy requirements.
Some people still claim that we are natural omnivores but if we were, we would salivate at the site of a dead rabbit at the side of the road, even if it was nicely rotting and giving off the smells of putrefaction.
Do we? No, that's a ridiculous idea.
We salivate when we see a bowl of strawberries because they are more like our natural food.
Humans have become omnivores but that doesn't mean it is the best diet for us.
Humans can smoke cigarettes for many years -- sometimes a lifetime -- without harm, but that doesn't mean our lungs developed to inhale smoke.
Many species can survive on diets that their bodies are not 'designed' for.
Polar bears live as carnivores and pandas live as folivores (leaf eaters).
But both should be omnivores -- that's what their bodies are designed for.
Yet they go against that design.
Just like humans do.
We are naturally designed to eat plant foods -- like our cousins, the apes.
Apes can eat meat but they are not designed for that.
It is much more likely that cooking starchy foods, rather than eating meat, allowed our ancestors to develop into humans.
Cooking makes most things more digestible, which allows more energy to be derived from it and less time needed to find and eat food.
Plants are all around and take little energy to collect.
They don't run away and don't defend themselves.
Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, believes that our ancestors were eating cooked food 1 million or even 2 million years ago.
Based on his knowledge of chimpanzees, he estimates that members of Homo erectus (possibly an ancestor of humans) would have needed to chew raw meat for about 6 hours or eat about 12 pounds of raw plant food a day to obtain enough energy.
Another anthropologist, Ralph Rowlett from the University of Missouri-Columbia, has found a Homo erectus site at Koobi Fora in Kenya from 1.
6 million years ago which contains a mixture of different types of burnt woods.
Early pre-humans could have been controlling and using fire to cook starchy foods.
They could have easily kept burning embers from forest fires to start new fires before they learned how to make fire.
Or they could have made fire by striking flints together.
They were familiar with making tools from flints and would have seen how sparks can be created when certain rocks are bashed together.
A chance spark igniting some dry grass would have given them an idea.
They weren't as stupid as was once thought.
There have been suggestions that the burnt wood at Koobi Fora was from forest fires but, by examining the soil and the way crystalline structures were melted, it was found that the fires had burned at a much higher temperature than is found in forest fires.
And the site had been used frequently over a period of years.
This was discovered by using archaeomagnetism techniques: when soil is burnt, iron particles align with the prevailing magnetic field direction.
This changes over time.
The iron particles in the soil were in different orientations which must mean fires were lit at different times over a long period.
It's likely the area was a regular campsite.
Brian Ludwig, from Rutgers University, has found further evidence which points to early fire use.
Whilst examining the evolution of flint knapping, he found pieces that had characteristic fractures and colour changes in them.
These only occur when the stone is heated.
None of these marks were found in very early examples but they began to show up on stones from 1.
6 million years ago.
After that date, they consistently turn up in many places.
Some more evidence comes from Israel.
Examination of wood and flint samples from a Homo erectus site shows that wood and flint were subjected to fire there 790,000 years ago.
Nira Alperson, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, contends that the flint and the wood were burnt in hearths.
Only small amounts show burning, which suggests controlled fires.
Forest fires would have burnt all the samples, all 86,000 of them.
At about this time - 2 million years ago - there occurred a mutation in the myosin of jaw muscles in our early ancestors.
This mutation didn't occur in other muscles.
It resulted in a reduced bite force potential.
Cooked food doesn't need as much bite force potential as tough, raw leaves, shoots and tubers do.
About 500,000 years later there was a reduction in the size of the chewing teeth.
Again, a sign that not so much chewing force was needed.
If our ancestors were cooking food they wouldn't need to have much chewing power, and individuals with smaller teeth will have been able to survive and pass on their genes.
Why those with the ancient large teeth didn't also pass on their genes is unknown.
But Peter Lucas, Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University, says that a reduction in the toughness of food consumed will lead to a rapid reduction in tooth size.
If our ancestors hadn't taken to a high carbohydrate diet the human race would now number only a few tribes of hunter gatherers or even apemen.
But their adoption of starchy foods and the subsequent explosion in the population proves how healthy starchy carbohydrates are.
Most modern hunter gatherer societies have a mainly plant based diet.
Meat plays a smaller part in their diets -- it is an occasional addition which often requires long hunting trips.
These societies are usually found in the drier grasslands and semi-desert areas.
In 1968 Richard B.
Lee and Irven DeVore from Harvard University edited the book 'Man the Hunter', based on an earlier symposium at the University of Chicago.
In it they estimate that the !Kung people of the Kalahari -- thought by many to be the typical model of hunter gatherers -- get 33% of their food from animal sources and 67% from plant sources.
And mongongo nuts constitute half (by weight) of their plant based food.
Hunter gatherers who live in jungles consume meat -- but not exclusively so.
Eskimos and others of the arctic regions traditionally lived mainly on meat and fish.
But now, at least for those in Alaska, coffee, white bread, white rice, milk and other non-traditional foods have been added.
In some areas, according, I believe, to Weston Price, -- a darling of the more-meat-and-saturated-fat lobby -- Eskimos also ate berries, seaweed, nuts, flowers and sorrel grass.
The more a society traditionally relies on starchy foods, the more of the amylase variant they will carry due to natural selection.
It has been found that, in particular groups of humans who have been tested, those who have diets with high proportions of starches -- the Hadza hunter gatherers, European-Americans and Japanese -- have higher numbers of the AMY1 variant than do groups with lower starch diets -- the Biaka, Mbuti, Datog and Yakut.
Whether or not you believe that eating meat rather than the adoption of starchy foods enabled our ancestors to spread around the world, don't be tricked into thinking that starchy foods are bad for us.
They plainly are not.
In fact, they are good for us.
Whatever diet you choose, it is important to lead an active life.
A mixture of vigorous exercise and regular bouts of walking can go a long way to protecting you from the dangers of overindulgence, which has become a bane of life in industrialised countries.
I advise anyone to become vegan and to take enough exercise to stay fit, strong and healthy.
