High glycemic diet causes early puberty

[kebaldwin]

This was interesting. The first article was

Puberty Comes Sooner for Overweight Girls

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20050812/hl_hsn/pubertycomessoonerforoverweightgirls;_ylt=Atr3U9MmFk5nEntWAaT0KmzVJRIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

The very next article was

Early menstruation isn't precursor to adult obesity

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050811/hl_nm/overweight_dc;_ylt=ArR_l2OMEs1KDJewdm4pp2vVJRIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Many of the low carb doctors have said that eating high glycemic diet causes early puberty. In fact, many low carb doctors feel that the increasing high carb consumption is the reason that girls keep starting puberty earlier and earlier each decade.

I have also noticed that many of the guys that are physically large (like football linemen) in high school are often very overweight around age 40.

[ItsTheWooo]

Totally, one hormone problem begets others.
I first broke out in acne at 9 years old following chicken pox. My mom thought something was wrong 'cause they weren't going away :lol:. The doctor told us it wasn't pox, but acne, and a strange coincidence that I should get them close together. I proceeded to have increasingly horrible acne from there on out. I also gradually started getting other symptoms of PCOS style hormone problems. I struggled with all of this until going on induction ~ 20 y/o. I'm not kidding, days after starting induction my skin cleared up phenomenally. All other PCOS symptoms vanished equally rapidly.

They say obesity causes these problems? Not for me. I was a very heavy 280 pounds when my reproductive issues cleared up. It was the carbs that was behind it all - the ravenous hunger, the "shakiness" I always felt, the weight, the "weird hormonal problems". It's all insulin.

[kebaldwin]

BTW, congrats on your phenominal success. And how did a 20 year old get so smart?

You are right in that type 2 diabetes, pre diabetes, syndrome X, Metabloic syndrome (whatever you want to call it) - the root problem is that insulin is way out of control. And when you knock one hormone out of control - the other hormones are knocked way out of control also. For example cortisol.

Some people with syndrome X are trying to get their cortisol under control with a popular supplement -- when they need to get their insulin under control first.

I wonder if parents that want large boys and petite girls will figure this out and abuse it? Keep girls away from high glycemic carbs to slow growth and feed high glycemic carbs to the boys to speed up growth and then withdraw when growing is done around age 18 to 20. The problem is that the boys have to keep up their exercise while eating high glycemic so that they will grow even faster but not obese.

So then how do we explain the high school runners that eat high glycemic but are wirey thin? Perhaps they are not genetically prone to type 2 diabetes.

Most low carb doctors claim that eating high glycemic diet ages you much faster -- starting puberty early is one example of aging faster.

[Samuel]

This can be explained by evolution. Meat eating species should grow at a smaller rate than vegetable eating ones do. If lions expand in number faster than the animals they eat, there would be no enough food for them . So nature must do the necessary adjustment to fix this problem.

[CindySue48]

This can be explained by evolution. Meat eating species should grow at a smaller rate than vegetable eating ones do. If lions expand in number faster than the animals they eat, there would be no enough food for them . So nature must do the necessary adjustment to fix this problem.
hmmmmm.....never thought of it that way! interesting!

[mcsblues]

Yes, but evolution doesn't work backwards. If there is no advantage to to a mutation, there is no reason why it would survive. All populations are naturally controlled by the extent of their food supply - ie if there are too many lions, or not enough prey, then some will not survive until a balance is restored. This will always be the case regardless of breeding age.

OTOH if a part of the lion population acquired a trait which allowed for earlier breeding and/or earlier independance of the offspring, then that would be an evolutionary significant advantage allowing a faster response time to periods of food scarcity and abundance. In which case the fast breeders, not the slow, who would tend to survive and dominate the gene pool.

Cheers,

Malcolm

[Samuel]

All populations are naturally controlled by the extent of their food supply - ie if there are too many lions, or not enough prey, then some will not survive until a balance is restored. This will always be the case regardless of breeding age

The prey specie would terminate first since lions would eat them all. Next to that, lions would also terminate. If nature could allow such process to happen, all life could have ended long ago. So nature had to solve the problem by making the prey specie multiply faster than the lions.

Of course, this has been just a short cut for the answer. If you want to know how it could happen in details, here it is:

Let us say, It has all started with few lions and a flock of prey. One prey has been unusually able to breed more than the rest. The lions have eaten most cubs of the flock to the end except his. Some of his many cubs have survived. The cubs who have survived have inherited their father's breeding ability and one of them exceeded his father in this ability. That one have had better chance to bring new cubs who can last. This cycle kept repeating itself over thousands of generations until a new specie with much higher ability to breed has been created.

I hope my explanation makes sense to you.

[mcsblues]

Its only humans who eat their prey to extinction. In nature, there is always a balance between prey and predators - if there is a population explosion in prey animals it is controlled naturally by either a lack of food for the prey animal (eg grass) or by an expanding population of predator animals (who breed more successfully when there is an abundance of food). Of course the reverse is true if the predators breed so successfully as to start to make their food scarce.

But what you were suggesting originally is that there was some sort of evolutionary advantage in meat eaters that were slower breeders - and what I am saying is this cannot occur - by definition evolution always moves forward - the fittest and those that can more successfully pass on these genes survive. As there is no evolutionary advantage in breeding more slowly (quite the reverse) then this is not a trait which would survive long term within a population which had individuals who were more likely to successfully produce offspring.

Cheers,

Malcolm

[ItsTheWooo]

Its only humans who eat their prey to extinction. In nature, there is always a balance between prey and predators - if there is a population explosion in prey animals it is controlled naturally by either a lack of food for the prey animal (eg grass) or by an expanding population of predator animals (who breed more successfully when there is an abundance of food). Of course the reverse is true if the predators breed so successfully as to start to make their food scarce.

But what you were suggesting originally is that there was some sort of evolutionary advantage in meat eaters that were slower breeders - and what I am saying is this cannot occur - by definition evolution always moves forward - the fittest and those that can more successfully pass on these genes survive. As there is no evolutionary advantage in breeding more slowly (quite the reverse) then this is not a trait which would survive long term within a population which had individuals who were more likely to successfully produce offspring.

Cheers,

Malcolm

This is not directly pertaining to Samuel's theory, but I contest that there is no evolutionary strategy to slower breeding. IF slower breeding is proportional to greater investment in offspring, this is very much beneficial. You will find that creatures higher on the food chain tend to select for reproductive strategies that favor quality (greater investment in offspring) over quantity (greater speed of reproduction). A high-investment reproductive strategy allows for creatures to be increasingly sophisticated. Greater sophistication allows creatures to be more individualist, which gives greater opportunity for the success for the species in environment. Environmental success further cements their superior status in it, by allowing them even more time to invest in offspring. This accelerates the rate at which they adapt to master their environment (evolve).

A big reason the human species is so successful is because we breed very infrequently, and invest an enormous amount of time in our offspring. A high-turnover strategy, indifferent to quality, does not benefit sophisticated species like humans. In fact, humans and other sophisticated creatures tend to spontaneously abort offspring (physically incapable of rearing) if the body detects resources are scarce. If the mother is stressed, or if physically ill in some way, fetuses will be lost, reproductive systems will shut down. Tribes of peoples without conventional mores (as well as numerous animal species) will even terminate living offspring if the resources are not sufficient to sustain their rearing. This is because more sophisticated, higher evolved species are increasingly focused on individual's actions for success of the species as a whole. It does not benefit sophisticated species to have a high number of sub-par offspring, as much as it would to have a smaller number of exceptional offspring. As creatures become more sophisticated, the more individuals in the species matter. The actions of individuals within the species increasingly dictate the success (or failure) of the species as a whole. Humans are without any remote rival, at the top of the food chain, so we exemplify this standard: evolutionary success being determined by sophistication of creatures, and greater emphasis shift on creature individuality vs collective identity. One exceptional human can lead the whole tribe to greatness. A thousand sub par humans cannot do what a single exceptional human can. Likewise, one exceptional human can lead the world to doom... but that's another topic :).

People view our tendency to become infertile (when environment is unideal and the organism afflicted with physical or emotional disease), or to spontaneously abort pregnancies, or to fail to rear children adequately in stressful, sub part conditions as a failing. It's certainly not good, but IMO it's not a failing, it's part of our design. It is crucial to our success that we not breed as rapidly when environment dictates resources are scarce. If humans are to be successful we need to focus on the individuals within our communities, not just breed like, well, rats.

Creatures that are very simple - for example insects or plants - will never do this (cease to reproduce if environment becomes unforgiving). No matter how brutal the environment, they will churn out as many as they can. It's the only way they can survive! These creatures live and die in the blink of an eye anyway so shifts in environment do not phase them, the main deterrent to their success is time. If they can't out breed the rate that they die off, then they become extinct. For this reason it's notoriously hard to cause a controlled environmental shift to, say, rid yourself of a roach infestation :). It's almost impossible to kill them off - even trying really hard - at a rate faster than they can breed. Simple, primitive species can withstand a whole range of environmental shifts for this reason, and likewise for this reason they are one of the oldest creatures and likely will be one of the last on the earth. On the flip side, a species like the roach will never dominate any single environment the way a sophisticated, highly specialized creature would (like for example, the human being). Sophisticated creatures are very environmentally specialized creatures. If something happened to make the environment different, it's way more likely the humans would go before the roaches since roaches are not as sophisticated, therefore less specialized and more adapted to withstand environmental shift.

[ItsTheWooo]

BTW, congrats on your phenominal success. And how did a 20 year old get so smart?


Thank you for the complement but I'm almost 23 now :lol:

You are right in that type 2 diabetes, pre diabetes, syndrome X, Metabloic syndrome (whatever you want to call it) - the root problem is that insulin is way out of control. And when you knock one hormone out of control - the other hormones are knocked way out of control also. For example cortisol.

Some people with syndrome X are trying to get their cortisol under control with a popular supplement -- when they need to get their insulin under control first.

I agree.
Sometimes I think focusing on the hormones themselves is going about it all wrong. You can't completely fix a problem by focusing on one hormone (ex: insulin, cortisol) or lifestyle element (ex: carbs, supplements) to exclusion of the holism of the thing. Hormone imbalances, with rare exception, are a symptom of unhealthy lifestyle. Very very infrequent is it the case that a endocrine problem is a purely organic malady that cannot be resolved by relatively simple lifestyle changes (like say an insulinoma from cancer, or hypopituitarism, or some form of autoimmune disease or something that is a little deeper). Even focusing on insulin is wrong, because insulin - again with rare exception - does exactly what it needs to do when people eat how we're adapted to eat (whole foods, meats, veggies), and live how we're adapted to live (low stress, plenty of sleep, abstaining from drugs and pills of all kinds, so on).

I wonder if parents that want large boys and petite girls will figure this out and abuse it? Keep girls away from high glycemic carbs to slow growth and feed high glycemic carbs to the boys to speed up growth and then withdraw when growing is done around age 18 to 20. The problem is that the boys have to keep up their exercise while eating high glycemic so that they will grow even faster but not obese.

I know when I was young my mom - as most moms - always forced my finicky brother to eat his foods so he would grow. She was indifferent to the fact her girls were heavier than average (my mom is not image/weight conscious), but she was worried my brother was too small because he didn't naturally have an appetite for food.

I don't think any sane, caring mother would intentionally feed their child harmful food for an aesthetically pleasing result. If the mother/father in question knew that high carb food did things to the body that made it abnormally anabolic, and it encouraged premature maturation in youths, it's also likely they would be aware of the health implications later in life from such a diet. Sort of how if you know drugs get you high, you also know that drugs can addict and kill you too. Knowledge about a substance is not selective - if you know the brighter side it is implicit with the darker side too.
I don't think parents would feed their children foods that would cause perturbations in their endocrine systems just so they can have the strapping boy they always wanted.

Although while on the subject, I've often heard how foreigners marvel at how huge (in size, not just fat mass) americans are. They often say it's because of the synthetic anabolic (and therefore insulin-like) hormones they put in animal products. Perhaps this is part of it, but perhaps part of it is also the fact that americans eat very big portions, therefore we have a very high glycemic load diet, and therefore our bodies are abnormally anabolic (resulting in our greater size... and greater waistbands).

So then how do we explain the high school runners that eat high glycemic but are wirey thin? Perhaps they are not genetically prone to type 2 diabetes.

I think all people are prone to T2 diabetes, just some much more than others to the point where it may appear to be a genetic disease. If we all lived forever, eating standard diets, we would probably all likely become glucose intolerant with time.
I think T2 isn't a disease more a state of exhaustion... eventually the body is just like "forget it, I quit" and a long-failing sugar metabolism completely poops out. First it starts with just jitters after eating, some dizziness, minor symptoms of hypoglycemia. THen you might get more severe hypos, fainting even. It slowly progresses more and more until hypos become less frequent & severe as insulin resistance grows and grows while pancreatic exhaustion sets in. Then you become a T2. Many people who are T2 were actually quite healthy carb eaters as teens, until IR accumulates over time to the point where it can hardly use energy.

Also, let's not forget that the greater the energy demands (activity level), the more tolerant the body is of a high glycemic diet. Greater demand for energy keeps fat-burning machinery always kindling, which kind of grains against the insulin surge of eating carbs. I think when eating carbs, a laborious physically intensive lifestyle is crucial to staying reasonably thin and healthy. I think this is another reason so many people get glucose intolerance in middle age. Teens are not only very anabolic (from growth) but they also are very active, both mean huge demands for energy and therefore active metabolism. Higher metabolism means a higher tolerance for carbs before you can expect problems with fat burning, and then eventually sugar burning too :).

Most low carb doctors claim that eating high glycemic diet ages you much faster -- starting puberty early is one example of aging faster.
Yep. Anabolic hormones like insulin are double bladed. Rapid growth can be beneficial (for obvious reasons like greater size, more impressive muscle (and fat) gains, faster maturation can be beneficial as well). That's why anabolic type steroids are abused by people like athletes, and animal-food industries.

Then again, it also ages you faster, you'll die younger, and might even predispose you to cancers & other diseases as a consequence. That's why their use (abuse) is discouraged by the public as a whole.

If only we knew that our diet & lifestyle also affected our bodies as much as a syringe full of growth hormone...

[mcsblues]

This is not directly pertaining to Samuel's theory, but I contest that there is no evolutionary strategy to slower breeding. IF slower breeding is proportional to greater investment in offspring, this is very much beneficial. You will find that creatures higher on the food chain tend to select for reproductive strategies that favor quality (greater investment in offspring) over quantity (greater speed of reproduction). A high-investment reproductive strategy allows for creatures to be increasingly sophisticated. Greater sophistication allows creatures to be more individualist, which gives greater opportunity for the success for the species in environment. Environmental success further cements their superior status in it, by allowing them even more time to invest in offspring. This accelerates the rate at which they adapt to master their environment (evolve).

A big reason the human species is so successful is because we breed very infrequently, and invest an enormous amount of time in our offspring. A high-turnover strategy, indifferent to quality, does not benefit sophisticated species like humans. In fact, humans and other sophisticated creatures tend to spontaneously abort offspring (physically incapable of rearing) if the body detects resources are scarce. If the mother is stressed, or if physically ill in some way, fetuses will be lost, reproductive systems will shut down. Tribes of peoples without conventional mores (as well as numerous animal species) will even terminate living offspring if the resources are not sufficient to sustain their rearing. This is because more sophisticated, higher evolved species are increasingly focused on individual's actions for success of the species as a whole. It does not benefit sophisticated species to have a high number of sub-par offspring, as much as it would to have a smaller number of exceptional offspring. As creatures become more sophisticated, the more individuals in the species matter. The actions of individuals within the species increasingly dictate the success (or failure) of the species as a whole. Humans are without any remote rival, at the top of the food chain, so we exemplify this standard: evolutionary success being determined by sophistication of creatures, and greater emphasis shift on creature individuality vs collective identity. One exceptional human can lead the whole tribe to greatness. A thousand sub par humans cannot do what a single exceptional human can. Likewise, one exceptional human can lead the world to doom... but that's another topic :).

People view our tendency to become infertile (when environment is unideal and the organism afflicted with physical or emotional disease), or to spontaneously abort pregnancies, or to fail to rear children adequately in stressful, sub part conditions as a failing. It's certainly not good, but IMO it's not a failing, it's part of our design. It is crucial to our success that we not breed as rapidly when environment dictates resources are scarce. If humans are to be successful we need to focus on the individuals within our communities, not just breed like, well, rats.

Creatures that are very simple - for example insects or plants - will never do this (cease to reproduce if environment becomes unforgiving). No matter how brutal the environment, they will churn out as many as they can. It's the only way they can survive! These creatures live and die in the blink of an eye anyway so shifts in environment do not phase them, the main deterrent to their success is time. If they can't out breed the rate that they die off, then they become extinct. For this reason it's notoriously hard to cause a controlled environmental shift to, say, rid yourself of a roach infestation :). It's almost impossible to kill them off - even trying really hard - at a rate faster than they can breed. Simple, primitive species can withstand a whole range of environmental shifts for this reason, and likewise for this reason they are one of the oldest creatures and likely will be one of the last on the earth. On the flip side, a species like the roach will never dominate any single environment the way a sophisticated, highly specialized creature would (like for example, the human being). Sophisticated creatures are very environmentally specialized creatures. If something happened to make the environment different, it's way more likely the humans would go before the roaches since roaches are not as sophisticated, therefore less specialized and more adapted to withstand environmental shift.

Wow! :lol:, I agree with a great deal of what you say, but it has very little to do with evolution.

Lets get a few things straight – evolution does not have a “strategy”. If it did this might give some credence to the so called “intelligent design” nonsense which is put about by creation ‘scientists’:rolleyes:. If you are interested, read Richard Dawkin’s book “The Blind Watchmaker” – he explains this much better than I can, but essentially natural selection favours mutations or variations that work – ie what works … works! … and what works better may become the norm if the change is significant enough to affect the survival rates of the affected individuals and/or their ability to pass on their genes. There is no strategy, no design, just a very simple, but amazingly powerful process.

Now you are right in saying that some animals have evolved a capacity to either not conceive or to naturally abort offspring if times are bad. There is an advantage in not wasting scarce energy or resources if the return doesn’t justify it – but this is only an advantage if there is a corresponding capability to breed fast when conditions are good.

I also agree that advantages can be obtained by investing time in offspring – but again this in itself, has nothing to do with evolution. There may well be evolutionary changes which mean that this time is available (ie having a bigger brain means not having to devote so much time to simple survival) – but different societies, even different individuals will use this time in different ways – but whatever they do will not change the genetic makeup of the current or future generations (Darwin and Wallace long ago supplanted the Lamarckian theory) So choosing to have fewer children, regardless of method, will have no impact on their “quality”.

Now you go on to tell us that humans need to change their behaviour to survive, and that cockroaches are perhaps more likely to adapt to environmental change. Well this idea has some merit for two reasons – (a) humans have long since abandoned natural evolutionary processes – and even if we reverted to the basic principle of the survival of the fittest (allowing the weak to die or at least be out competed for breeding partners) then - (b) cockroaches have a much faster breeding cycle so evolutionary change could be much more rapid …in which case our slower breeding time could be seen for the Achilles heel that it is. (its only an ‘advantage’ or perhaps more accurately a luxury, whilst we are (largely) at the top of the food chain, and climatic or environmental change is not too fast)

OTOH we have the ability by virtue of our evolved brainpower to not require further evolutionary change – we can, during our lifetime change the environment to suit us better (rather than the other way around) – at least in theory! We can also now look to manipulating our own genes – to manufacture change, but I’m sure my distant relative (Darwin) would be rotating in his grave if you were to call either of those things evolution.

Cheers,



Malcolm

[Nancy LC]

Thread hijacking!
but I’m sure my distant relative (Darwin)
Cool! How're you related to Darwin? I think you'd like this web site that opens with a letter to the Kansas school board with another Intelligent Design theory. Quite amusing.

http://www.venganza.org/


You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

[mcsblues]

Thread hijacking!

Cool! How're you related to Darwin? A fair way back on my mother's side - you might think this is shameless name dropping (and you would be right!) but I would also have to admit that my family is a living, breathing exhibit of what happens when natural selection is abandoned.

think you'd like this web site that opens with a letter to the Kansas school board with another Intelligent Design theory. Quite amusing.

http://www.venganza.org/Nice site, you may be impressed by my connections, but as far as i know I have yet to be touched by His Noodly Appendage ... so you are one up on me there!;)

Cheers,

Malcolm

[Nancy LC]

Of course, I can't practice FSMism because of being a low-carber, but I do respect their beliefs. :D So I too have not been touched by his Noodly Appendage. *sigh* However, I could worship his spicy meatballs!

[Samuel]

But what you were suggesting originally is that there was some sort of evolutionary advantage in meat eaters that were slower breeders


No. I meant only that there was no advantage in being faster breeder for a lion. Let us see if the same theory applies to lions:

[One lion has been unusually able to breed more than the rest. His cubs have been more but this has changed nothing. Nobody eats lions so all new lions have equally survived and got mixed together, so the breeding abilities for lions have not changed.]

However, according to the same theory, lions' strength grows with time since the stronger lion can hunt better hence have better chance for survival.

[mcsblues]

I've just been reading an article which provides an interesting perspective on the meat eating / breeding question when it comes to human evolution.

Whilst there is a lot of debate as to when man first controlled fire for cooking (estimates range from about 200,000 years to nearly 2 million years) - but whatever the actual time this change in the environment (to one which included cooked food as a result of the use of early man's larger brain), has been around an significant time - time enough for evolutionary adaptations to have occurred as a result, and even without adaptation, the consequences of the use of fire may well have had implications for the survival of our species.

Amongst these advantages is one that is pertinent here - because as Wrangham says the weaning of human babies occurs 30 - 40% earlier than might be predicted for a primate of our body mass, and this allows much shorter inter birth intervals - which allows 'us' the capacity to breed faster when conditions allow. And fire is the key as it allows nutrient rich food to be prepared in a easily digestible form - both for adults and as a baby food.

http://anthropology.tamu.edu/faculty/alvard/anth630/reading/Week%208%20Diet%20tubers/Wrangham%20and%20Conklin-Brittain%202003.pdf

Cheers,


Malcolm

[TheCaveman]

http://anthropology.tamu.edu/faculty/alvard/anth630/reading/Week%208%20Diet%20tubers/Wrangham%20and%20Conklin-Brittain%202003.pdf



Wrangham?! Oh my, Malcolm. I can assure you that Richard Wrangham has NO evidence that Homo used fire any more than 80kya, and for cooking: 45kya. His mental obstacle seems to be that if fire was used, it HAD to be used for cooking. Chemically, there is no reason for animals to cook food.

I haven't read this new piece of his, but doesn't he go on and on about vegetarians, totally ignoring meat in his analysis? He wants to prove raw foodists wrong, so he makes up some stories about cooking. Use of fire does not equal cooking. He seems to have no excuse or evidence for his thinking.

Dang Malcolm, I thought you were a Dawkins man.

[mcsblues]

Wrangham?! Oh my, Malcolm. I can assure you that Richard Wrangham has NO evidence that Homo used fire any more than 80kya, and for cooking: 45kya. His mental obstacle seems to be that if fire was used, it HAD to be used for cooking. Chemically, there is no reason for animals to cook food.

I haven't read this new piece of his, but doesn't he go on and on about vegetarians, totally ignoring meat in his analysis? He wants to prove raw foodists wrong, so he makes up some stories about cooking. Use of fire does not equal cooking. He seems to have no excuse or evidence for his thinking.

Dang Malcolm, I thought you were a Dawkins man.

Hi there Caveman!

I am very much a 'Dawkins man', and strangely a friend and I where only discussing yesterday some of the shortcomings in Wrangham's paper (yes there are a few) - but the evidence of early use of fire is not one of them. He simply quotes from a range of sources giving a fair assessment of the range of opinion here. I think his basic suggestion is that it doesn't really matter all that much - fire has been used for cooking for an evolutionary significant time - and I agree with him there.

If you want to debate the evidence, or lack thereof, I am happy to hear your views. From what I can gather some are happy enough to see evidence of 'cooked' bones, bones 'burnt' unevenly (suggesting the 'burning occurred with flesh still attached) and/or bones burnt at a higher temperature than would have been the case in a natural wild fire in (say) a grassland/savannah area.

Others insist that we require irrefutable evidence of cooking tools, hearths or ovens - in fact you get the feeling that some are still looking for a fossilized microwave!;) - just kidding.

I think there are two big problems with the second camp. First, if you were to adopt that standard of proof, then you would be led to the erroneous belief that some modern day hunter gatherers have never controlled fire or cooked - eg some of 'our' aboriginal population never used cooking vessels or dedicated hearths - and don't to this day - but they do cook food, and they still use fire to flush out game and to prevent more devastating wild/bush fires - and there is a lot of evidence that this behaviour has had a pronounced impact on our environment since they arrived (approx 60 kya).

The other point is that if you accept that early man controlled fire (forget Wrangham) - I think there is plenty of evidence that this goes back well before 80 kya - then to me at least it defies belief than man spent tens of thousands of years sitting around the fire, and used it for warmth and perhaps protection against predators ... without discovering by experiment or accident it could be used to make food more palatable and/or more easily digestible.

Now I agree with Wrangham that changes in teeth and jaw structures from flesh tearing 'canine like' to the modern skull which has all but lost these attributes, provide some evidence of the evolutionary adaptation to more easily consumable food (by whatever means). I disagree with his (and Cordain's) reliance on examples of eating the leanest, toughest parts of the beast - instead of also looking at the fat, brain and bone marrow. I also disagree with his suggestion that adaptation to cooked food necessitates us 'losing' the ability to process large amounts of raw food (this is a bit like saying if you learn to run, you will end up losing the ability to walk) - and this relies on possible digestive changes, for which there is no compelling evidence.

But what I don't have any problem with (as some, not all paleo adherents do) is that fire, and its use have been with us for a very, very long time - and its logical to look at the changes in physiology and opportunity this has presented.

Cheers,


Malcolm

[TheCaveman]

Yikes! We're off topic, aren't we.

[mcsblues]

Yikes! We're off topic, aren't we.

Well yes, and we have been for some time!

I am still intrigued as to your cutoff for the use of fire at 80 kya - is there some reason to dismiss all earlier evidence?

Nancy - I have given FSMism some further thought and I am tempted to write to the Kansas School Board and offer my view that this theory is seriously flawed - after all creation obviously occurred at a time long before the invention of spagetti - hence the natural low carb diet of early hunter gatherer man. What Henderson fails to grasp is probably just an error of translation of FSSM texts .... yes the second S (Squash) has somehow been dropped over time. And I understand His meatballs, are even spicier! (Hear ye the way of the gourd!)

As devout low carbers, I think we can both look forward to being touched by His Noodly (yet LC) Appendage. ;)

Cheers,

Malcolm

[Nancy LC]

A friend of mine was definitely touched by his noodly appendage and he has proof!

http://www.crashdeadhorse.com/Pictures/Misc/touched.jpg

So you're saying it should be the Flying Spagetti Squash Monster? Hmmm... I think a scism is about to happen!

[kismycandi]

I wonder how much of this diet is a symptom of all the other problems I have now started to have. Since being on low carb since May 2004 I have had so many monthly and yeast problems. Can any one give me a clue if this might be the culprit ? I asked this question before but could not find the thread lol.