Mass production of grains and carbohydrates may be cheaper, but the big question is: Does agriculture and mass production of carbohydrate grains use up more resources on this planet or does low-carbing?

The book Neanderthin gives this answer:

"As the principle cause of animal extinction and death is the plow and not the slaughterhouse, vegetarians [carbohydrate-eaters] actually kill more animals through starvation and habitat destruction than does the meat-eater through his dietary habits. All the plants and animals that once inhabited the cultivated land must be killed to provide space for vegetable crops. Plowing accomplishes this "ecocide" very efficiently, but plowing also causes topsoil to erode by exposing it to wind and rain. Erosion can cause even the most fertile fields to become barren, sometimes in less than 100 years of cultivation. Some life-forms that inhibit good crop yields survive the onslaught of the plow. Such organisms (insects, weeds, etc.) must be fought using herbicides and insecticides. The more dependent a population is on vegetable crops, the more wild animal and plant habitats it must destroy to feed itself. Meat production is usually less damaging to plant and animal habitats--especially when the animals are range fed. In fact, it is for this reason that the person wearing a fur coat has killed fewer than 10 percent of the animals killed by the person wearing a cotton coat (cotton is one of the most ecologically damaging crops grown today, second only, perhaps, to rice). Perhaps the only species that are not endangered in our modern world are domestic animals."

In other words low-carbing is better for the planet than high carbohydrate diets. The landspace in which the cattle can graze to provide low-carb meat does not become ruined. Only mass-farming makes the land barren and ruins earth's resources.

--------------

There is also this quote from the www.westonaprice.org website:

"A nation that consumes butterfat, on the other hand, is a nation that sustains the family farm. If Americans were willing to pay a good price for high quality butter and cream, from cows raised on natural pasturage--every owner of a small- or medium-sized farm could derive financial benefits from owning a few Jersey or Guernsey cows. In order to give them green pasture, he would naturally need to rotate crops, leaving different sections of his farm for his cows to graze and at the same time giving the earth the benefit of a period of fallow--not to mention the benefit of high quality manure. Fields tended in this way produce very high quality vegetables and grains in subsequent seasons, without the addition of nitrogen fertilizers and with minimal use of pesticides. Chickens running around his barnyard, and feeding off bugs that gather under cowpaddies, would produce eggs with superb nutritional qualities--absolutely bursting with vitamin A and highly beneficial fatty acids."

And MrFrumble said, "Does this mean I can write off my steak and butter?"

Well, you know, to me it looks like government subsidies of Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers -- you have to be participating in an established, supervised program. Just one more penny in the bank for the big business diet industry that's making America fatter.

;-Deb

This article appeared in the Times newspaper here in the UK today, July 15, 2002, so hopefully the low carb message is getting some serious mainstream global attention.

More fat, please, I'm on a diet...
by Gary Taubes
Whisper it...fat may be good for you. For 25 years, nutritionists and health experts said it caused obesity and heart disease. Diet gurus who disagreed, such as Robert Atkins, were vilified. Now it seems he may have been right all along.


If the medical establishment were to have a collective nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the best-selling Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution and Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution, only to discover that he was right all along. Or maybe it’s this: they find that their own dietary recommendations — eat less fat and more carbohydrates — are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out that both of the above are true.
When Atkins published his Diet Revolution in 1972, people were coming to terms with the proposition that fat — particularly the saturated fat of meat and dairy products — was the primary nutritional evil. Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter, because it was carbohydrates — pasta, rice, bread and sugar — that caused obesity and even heart disease.

Fat, he said, was harmless.

The perversity of this alternative hypothesis is that it identifies the causes of obesity as, firstly, precisely those refined carbohydrates that we are told should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet, and, secondly, the sugar in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to in quantity because they are fat-free and so appear healthy.

Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus. It used to be that even considering the possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to quackery by association. Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, is the spokesman for the longest-running and most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which include data on nearly 300,000 individuals. Those data, says Willett, clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message “and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic”.

These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now failed the test of time. In particular, that the US is in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980s, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly during this period. They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be failures. Cholesterol levels have been declining and we have been smoking less, yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined.

“That is disconcerting,” Willett says. “It suggests that something else bad is happening.”

David Ludwig, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, runs the paediatric obesity clinic at Children’s Hospital Boston and prescribes his own version of a carbohydrate-restricted diet to his patients. He calls the science behind the alternative hypothesis Endocrinology 101, which requires an understanding of how carbohydrates affect insulin and blood sugar and, in turn, fat metabolism and appetite. This is basic endocrinology, Ludwig says, which is the study of hormones, but it is still considered radical because the low-fat dietary wisdom emerged in the 1960s from researchers almost exclusively concerned with the effect of fat on cholesterol and heart disease. At the time, Endocrinology 101 was underdeveloped, and so ignored.

If the alternative hypothesis is right, then it strongly suggests that the current epidemic of obesity is not due simply to a collective lack of willpower and a failure to exercise. Rather, it occurred (as Atkins has been saying) because the public health authorities told us — unwittingly, but with the best of intentions — to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We ate more fat-free carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier and then heavier.

Put simply, if the alternative hypothesis is right, then a low-fat diet is not by definition a healthy diet. In practice, such a diet cannot help being high in carbohydrates, and that can lead to obesity, and perhaps heart disease.

“For a large percentage of people, perhaps 30 to 40 per cent, low-fat diets are counterproductive,” says Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard’s prestigious Joslin Diabetes Centre. “They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.”

Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the body is almost inconceivably complex and the experimental tools we have to study it are still inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable and impossible to do in a rigorously-controlled scientific manner.

But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. The result is a splintered community in which researchers seem easily convinced that their preconceived notions are correct and are thoroughly uninterested in testing any hypotheses but their own.One of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic in the US is that it started around the early 1980s. By the end of that decade, nearly one in four Americans was obese. Any theory that tries to explain obesity in America has to account for that.

Meanwhile, overweight children nearly tripled in number. And, for the first time, doctors began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. Type 2 diabetes often accompanies obesity. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes but now, for the obvious reason, is not.

So how did this happen? The ubiquitous explanation is that we live in a “toxic food environment” of cheap fatty food, large portions, pervasive food advertising and sedentary lives. And because some of us are predisposed to gain weight while others are not, this explanation also has a genetic component — the thrifty gene. It suggests that storing extra calories as fat was an evolutionary development by our Paleolithic ancestors, who had to survive frequent famine. We inherited these “thrifty” genes, despite their being a liability in today’s toxic environment.

This theory makes perfect sense and plays to our puritanical prejudice that fat, fast food and television are innately damaging to our humanity.

But there are two catches. First, to buy this logic is to accept that the copious negative effects of obesity — both social and physical — are easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal. Second, little data exist to support any of this.Fast-food consumption, for example, continued to grow steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, but it did not take a sudden leap, as obesity did. As far as exercise and physical activity go, the 1990s data show obesity rates in the US continuing to climb, while exercise activity remained unchanged. This suggests the two have little in common.

As for the thrifty gene, it provides the kind of evolutionary rationale for human behaviour that scientists find comforting but that cannot be tested.

It is also undeniable, students of Endocrinology 101 argue, that mankind never evolved to eat a diet high in starches or sugars. “Grain products and concentrated sugars were essentially absent from human nutrition until the invention of agriculture,” Ludwig says, “which was only 10,000 years ago.”

This is discussed frequently in the anthropology texts but is mostly absent from the obesity literature, with the prominent exception of the low-carbohydrate-diet books.

What’s forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself is only about 25 years old. Until the late 1970s, the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you feel full, and that carbohydrates made you fat. In The Physiology of Taste, for instance, an 1826 discourse that is among the most famous books ever written about food, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says he could easily identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one “stout party” after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a “particularly stout party”) potatoes. But by the 1980s all that had been forgotten, and the typical breakfast of bacon and eggs was being supplanted by a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and dry toast.

Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, such as olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. What this means is that even saturated fats are not nearly as harmful as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. As Willett explained to me, you will obtain little or no health benefit by giving up milk, butter and cheese and eating bagels instead.

But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it’s true that the remainder will raise your LDL, the bad stuff, but it will also boost your HDL. The same is true for lard.

If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the pack and reduce your risk of heart disease.

The crucial example of how the low-fat recommendations were oversimplified is shown by the potentially lethal impact of low-fat diets on triglycerides, the component molecules of fat. By the late 1960s researchers had shown that high triglyceride levels were at least as common in heart-disease patients as high LDL cholesterol, and that eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would, for many people, raise their triglyceride levels, lower their HDL levels and accentuate what the American endocrinologist Gerry Reaven calls Syndrome X — a cluster of conditions that can lead to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. It took Reaven a decade to convince his peers that Syndrome X was a legitimate health concern, in part because to accept its reality is to accept that low-fat diets will increase the risk of heart disease in a third of the population.

Of course, everyone involved in drafting dietary guidelines wants people simply to eat less junk food. But instead we eat more starches and refined carbohydrates, because, calorie for calorie, these are the cheapest nutrients for the food industry to produce and can be sold at the highest profit. It’s also what we like to eat. Rare is the person under 50 who doesn’t prefer a biscuit or sweetened yogurt to a head of broccoli.

Nutrition researchers also played a role by trying to feed science into the idea that carbohydrates are the ideal nutrient. It had been known for almost a century, but considered mostly irrelevant to the aetiology of obesity, that fat has nine calories per gram compared with four for carbohydrates and protein. Now it became the fail-safe position of the low-fat recommendations: reduce the densest source of calories in the diet and you will lose weight.

Then, in 1982, the American biochemist JP Flatt published his research demonstrating that it is rare for the human body to convert carbohydrates into body fat. This was misinterpreted by the media and quite a few scientists to mean that eating carbohydrates, even to excess, could not make you fat — which is not the case, Flatt says.

As a result, the major trends in American diets since the late 1970s have been a decrease in fat calories and a greatly increased consumption of carbo hydrates. At the same time, they suddenly began consuming more calories: now up to 400 more each day since the US Government started recommending low-fat diets.

If these trends are correct, the obesity epidemic there can be explained by the consumption of more calories than ever and, specifically, more carbohydrates. The question is why? The answer provided by Endocrinology 101 is that people are hungrier than they were in the 1970s, and the reason is physiological more than psychological. In this case, the salient factor is how carbohydrates affect blood sugar and insulin. In fact, these were obvious culprits all along, which is why Atkins and the low-carb-diet doctors pounced on them.

The primary role of insulin is to regulate blood-sugar levels. After you eat carbohydrates they are broken down into their component sugar molecules and transported into the bloodstream. Your pancreas then secretes insulin, which shunts the blood sugar into muscles and the liver as fuel for the next few hours. This is why carbohydrates have a significant impact on insulin and fat does not. And because juvenile diabetes is caused by a lack of insulin, doctors had believed since the 1920s that the only evil with insulin was not having enough.

But insulin also regulates fat metabolism. We cannot store body fat without it. Think of it as a switch. When it’s on, in the few hours after eating you burn carbohydrates for energy and store excess calories as fat. When it’s off, after the insulin has been depleted you burn fat as fuel. So when insulin levels are low, you burn your own fat.

The fatter you are, the more insulin your pancreas will pump out per meal and the more likely you are to develop what’s called “insulin resistance,” which is the underlying cause of Syndrome X. In effect, your cells become insensitive to the action of insulin and you need ever greater amounts to keep your blood sugar in check. So, as you gain weight, insulin makes it easier to store fat and harder to lose it. But the insulin resistance in turn may make it harder to store fat — your weight is being kept in check, as it should be. But now the insulin resistance might prompt your pancreas to produce even more insulin, potentially starting a vicious cycle.

Which comes first — the obesity, the elevated insulin, known as hyperinsulinemia, or the insulin resistance — is a chicken-and-egg problem that hasn’t been resolved. Insulin also profoundly affects hunger, although to what end is another point of controversy. On the one hand, insulin can indirectly cause hunger by lowering your blood sugar, but how low does blood sugar have to drop before hunger kicks in? That’s unresolved. Meanwhile, insulin works in the brain to suppress hunger. The theory, as explained to me by Michael Schwartz, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington, is that insulin’s ability to inhibit appetite would normally counteract its propensity to generate body fat. In other words, as you gained weight, your body would generate more insulin after every meal, and that in turn would suppress your appetite; you’d eat less and lose weight.

Schwartz, however, can imagine a simple mechanism that would throw this “homeostatic” system off balance: if your brain were to lose its sensitivity to insulin, just as your fat and muscles do when they are flooded with it. Now the higher insulin production that comes with getting fatter would no longer compensate by suppressing your appetite, because your brain would no longer register the rise in insulin. The result would be a physiological state in which obesity is almost pre-ordained, and in which the carbohydrate-insulin connection could play a major role. Schwartz says he believes this could indeed be happening, but research hasn’t progressed far enough to prove it.

David Ludwig says that it’s the direct effect of insulin on blood sugar that does the trick. He says that when diabetics get too much insulin, their blood sugar drops and they become ravenously hungry. They gain weight because they eat more, and the insulin promotes fat deposition. The same happens with lab animals. This, he says, is effectively what happens when we eat carbohydrates — in particular, sugar and starches such as potatoes and rice, or anything made from flour, such as bread.

These are known as high-glycaemic-index carbohydrates, which means that they are absorbed quickly into the blood. As a result, they cause a spike of blood sugar and a surge of insulin within minutes. The resulting rush of insulin stores the blood sugar away and, a few hours later, your blood sugar is lower than it was before you ate. Your body effectively thinks it has run out of fuel, but the insulin is still high enough to prevent you from burning your own fat. The result is hunger and a craving for more carbohydrates. It’s another vicious circle, and another situation ripe for obesity.

The gist of the glycaemic-index idea is that the longer it takes the carbohydrates to be digested, the less the impact on blood sugar and insulin and the healthier the food. Green vegetables, beans and whole grains cause a much slower rise in blood sugar because they have fibre, a non-digestible carbohydrate, which slows digestion and lowers the glycaemic index.

Protein and fat serve the same purpose, which implies that eating fat can be beneficial. And the glycaemic-index concept implies that a primary cause of Syndrome X, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity is the long-term damage caused by the repeated surges of insulin that come from eating starches and refined carbohydrates. At Ludwig’s paediatric obesity clinic, he has been prescribing low-glycaemic-index diets to children and adolescents for five years. His clinic has a nine-month waiting list and in April he received $1.2 million from the National Institutes of Health to test his low-glycaemic-index diet against a traditional low-fat-low-calorie regime. That might help resolve some of the controversy over the role of insulin in obesity, although the redoubtable Robert Atkins might get there first.

The 71-year-old Atkins says he first tried a very low carbohydrate diet in 1963 after reading about one in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He lost weight effortlessly, and turned a fledgling Manhattan cardiology practice into a thriving obesity clinic. He then alienated the entire medical community by telling his readers to eat as much fat and protein as they wanted, as long as they ate little to no carbohydrates. They would lose weight, he said, because they would keep their insulin down; they wouldn’t be hungry; and they would have less resistance to burning their own fat. Atkins also argued that starches and sugar were harmful because they raised triglyceride levels and that this was a greater risk factor for heart disease than cholesterol. When the American Medical Association released its scathing critique of Atkins’s diet in March 1973, it acknowledged that the diet probably worked, but expressed little interest in why. During the 1960s this had been the subject of considerable research, with the conclusion that Atkins-like diets were low-calorie diets in disguise; that when you cut out pasta, bread and potatoes, you have a hard time eating enough meat, vegetables and cheese to replace the calories.

That, however, raised the question of why such a low-calorie regimen would also suppress hunger, which Atkins insisted was the signature characteristic of the diet. One possibility was Endocrinology 101: that fat and protein make you sated and, lacking carbohydrates and the ensuing swings of blood sugar and insulin, you stay sated.

The other possibility arose from the fact that Atkins’s diet is “ketogenic”. This means that insulin falls so low that you enter a state of ketosis, which is what happens during fasting and starvation. Your muscles and tissues burn fat for energy, as does your brain in the form of fat molecules produced by the liver called ketones. Atkins saw ketosis as the obvious way to kickstart weight loss. He also liked to say that ketosis was so energising that it was better than sex, which set him up for some ridicule. An inevitable criticism of Atkins’s diet has been that ketosis is dangerous.

When I interviewed ketosis experts, however, they sided with Atkins, and suggested that maybe the medical community and the media confuse ketosis with ketoacidosis, a variant that occurs in untreated diabetics and can be fatal. “Doctors are scared of ketosis,” says Richard Veech, an NIH researcher. “They’re always worried about diabetic ketoacidosis, but I would argue that ketosis is the normal state of man. It’s not normal to have McDonald’s on every corner. It’s normal to starve.”

Simply put, ketosis is evolution’s answer to the thrifty gene. We may have evolved to store fat efficiently for times of famine, Veech says, but we also evolved ketosis to live efficiently off that fat when necessary.

Rather than being poison, ketones make the body run more efficiently and provide a backup fuel source for the brain. Veech has shown that both the heart and brain run 25 per cent more efficiently on ketones than on blood sugar.

The bottom line is that for the better part of 30 years Atkins insisted his diet worked and was safe, people tried it by the tens of millions while nutritionists, doctors, public health authorities and anyone concerned with heart disease insisted it could kill them, and expressed little or no desire to find out who was right. Now researchers have finally decided that Atkins’s diet and other low-carb diets have to be tested, and are doing so against traditional low-calorie-low-fat diets.

None of these studies has yet been published. But the results have been reported at conferences and they are consistent. Subjects on some form of the Atkins diet — whether overweight adolescents on the diet for 12 weeks or obese adults averaging more than 21st on the diet for six months — lost twice the weight as the subjects on the low-fat, low-calorie diets.

In all five studies, cholesterol levels improved similarly with both diets, but triglyceride levels were considerably lower with the Atkins diet. Though researchers are hesitant, it does suggest that heart-disease risk could actually be reduced when fat is restored to the diet and starches and refined carbohydrates are removed.

All of this could be settled sooner rather than later, and with it, perhaps, we might have some long-awaited answers as to why we grow fat and whether it is pre-ordained by societal forces or caused simply by our choice of food.


Contribute to Debate via comment~thetimes.co.uk

I like Voyager's answer, thanks.

Of course, the way I was looking at the issue was that if the lack of environmental resources, and the need to try to make the most of the available space, poses a threat to organic food, then I can deal with that. But if it were to pose a threat to low carbing, that's something else entirely. To me, saying that resource preservation means we have to eat high carb is a bit like using the same reasoning to justify the use of appetite suppressants and amphetamines as an alternative to eating. That's definitely not the way to go. So this isn't me knocking low carb food at all, quite the contrary, it's me wanting reassurance that it can be sustained for the entire global population.

I appreciate that I'd be on dodgy ground if I started saying things like "one million healthy people is better than ten million drug addicts" - it smacks of right wing extremism. However, dismissing any attempt to solve the problem as political extremism won't make the underlying problem itself go away, and I believe that it's better to have one million people with hope than to have ten million people with no hope at all. Perhaps the fact that we're even having this discussion is a sign that the globe is overpopulated anyway. If that means we have to go to war, and reduce the world's population, so that the remaining population can sustainably eat low-carb, then so be it, there's no point in pretending that it won't happen, but let's hope that none of us nice people are any of the ones that lose out by it. However, it would be a good idea to make sure that there's a way of managing resources without having to fight wars and kill people for it. Whatever happens, the threat to environmental resources is definitely not an excuse for racism or bigotism, because we're one family, and we're all in the same boat.

So, yeah, I like the reasoning in Neanderthin. However, the thought that bothers me is that it's easy to compare the use of resources by a thousand meat eaters with the use of resources by a million grain eaters, and conclude that the meat eaters pose less threat to the environment - in fact, I suspect that much the same slightly flawed reasoning is often used to show how organic food is supposedly better for the environment. But it's not comparing like with like. I won't be totally reassured until I see comparisons done on a like-for-like basis. I might have a look round the library and see if I can come up with anything later.

Oh and thanks to o2bslim - I'm going to get a copy of the Times today.

Forgive me for using this thread to make abstract musings but ....

After reading voyajer's post, and a bit more of Protein Power, I'm gradually coming round to the opinion that agriculture in any shape or form is not such a good thing, because the grain-based diet that it has led onto has always caused health problems, and ideally we need to be hunter-gatherers.

So, ummm, has agriculture actually done anything for us at all? Maybe we're not as healthy, but are there actually any more of us?

There seems to be a widespread assumption that because the global population seems to have risen in the last 50 years or so, it has always risen consistently ever since prehistoric times. And agriculture is the thing that has given us the capability to do this.

Now I'm no historian, but I'm led to believe that it isn't quite as straightforward as that. Have there not been wars, plagues, floods and bushfires that have wiped out vast swathes of the population in large areas in one go since the dawn of agriculture? Did the Roman empire not collapse? I dare say that someone who is more clued up about history than me can probably think of lots of better examples. It all sounds just a bit Revelations! Point is, I'm led to believe that there may well have been times a thousand or more years ago when the population was more or less what it is now - at least in some regions.

So I'm now wondering - what was global population before agriculture started, and in its early days? If it was anywhere near what it is now, then that's something to go with, and perhaps our bacon can be saved - no pun intended. Anyone who knows more about this than me care to comment?

I like to think that everyone can live long and happily, so I don't like to jump to the conclusion that the world is overpopulated if it can be avoided.

Nuff for now.

Squidge,

Actually, a lot of your musings are addressed in the Discover magazine article by Jared Diamond posted here entitled: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

I love how this article attacks our elitist superior modern man agricultural mentality:

This is a great example from the article:

"Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

"Coming up on 20/20:
<snip>
• Plus, is the conventional wisdom that a low-fat diet reduces heart risk really proven? Dr. Tim Johnson reports."

This will be aired on Friday, July 19, 2002, at 10:00 pm Eastern time on ABC. I don't know if they'll be addressing the issues raised in the NYT article or not, but I sure hope so!

Gem

I've read that the population of the America's was roughly 100,000 people, before the Europeans barged in. That's not just the US, but all of Canada and South American too. Think about it!

They had natural ways of limiting their birth rates, and would do so knowing they could not feed 8 kids per couple. Many tribes would farm, but they would also move around. In the spring they would choose an area in the north where they could find all the plants and game they needed. Before they left for the winter, they would replant the seeds from their spring's crop intake. They would move to warmer climes, and do it all over again.

Indians would take only what was needed, and would give back just as much.

That's what life was like before agriculture, it's on the opposite end of the spectrum.

In answer to Squidgy's request for information about changes in the world population over time, I did a bit of research on the web.

Prehistoric populations were extremely small:

"The findings support estimates made by geneticists, whose analysis of DNA from living peoples around the world indicates that prehistoric populations were small. Genetics-based data suggest that fewer than 10,000 people --not 100,000, as generally cited--inhabited sub-Saharan Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago , and that as few as 500 people, by one estimate, departed their homeland to colonize Eurasia. " ~ Jonathan Shaw (I added the bold for emphasis)
http://www.harvard-magazine.com/issues/mj99/right.paleothic.html


Today, our world population is about 6,234,277,496. And it's rising fast:

Total Midyear World Population 1950-2050:
Year Population
1950 2,555,982,611
1970 3,706,601,448
1990 5,277,725,410
2010 6,840,423,256
2030 8,224,502,122
2050 9,309,051,539
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Projections.
http://www.npg.org/facts/world_pop_year.htm
(They have this listed year by year; I only gave every 20 years for brevity.)


You can see a clock that does a real-time estimate of the world population at:
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
US & World population clocks

We're adding about 3 people a second. One site said that all of the EU countries added about 343,000 people in the whole year of 2000, while India added 343,000 people in the FIRST WEEK of 2001. Whoa.

Over 9 billion people by 2050.... I'd say this is going to be a strain on food production, no matter what we eat.

I'm not usually a population growth person. I was just sort of shocked by this.

Anyway, hope this helps,
Gem

I don't necessarily think population is the issue. (Although Diamond pointed out that Pre-Agricultural hunter-gatherers necessarily had babies 4 years apart since babies took so much care-taking and would need to be carried and could be a hinderance to life.) You see earth's population necessarily (whether you believe in human evolution or special creation) started from a small population of species that evolved and grew (or from one couple--depending on your point of view), but in either case, it would necessarily take time for population growth. I think it is better to look at pre-agricultural lifespan compared to agricultural lifespan (of course, there would have to be qualifications to the study to make it reflect merely change in diet, not change in medical skills, or change in safety of the environment i.e. living protected from hazardous wild life).

I don't think it is a matter of whether the Egyptians ate more natural types of carbohydrates and more meats and fats and still had the diseases of civilization. The point is they were civilized. They had cities and agriculture, meaning close contact between people for easier transmission of disease. Until recent history, cities meant less sanitation than hunter-gatherer societies who constantly moved their dwelling. Until pretty recent history not much was known about bacteria causing disease. It was figured out that outbreaks of diseases like cholera were due to unclean city water when one doctor, John Snow, saw that one of the two water companies in London in 1845 that was using water downstream from where the sewage was dumped into the river had most cases of the disease. Before that everyone thought is was fine to drink water downstream from sewage. In other words, city life was killing people. Agriculture made civilization and cities possible.

I think this article is very telling about the effects for humans of changing from hunter-gatherer to farmer.

Recent brain-size decreases in humans as further evidence of the brain/diet connection

Why has brain size decreased 11% in the last 35,000 years and 8% in the last 10,000?

Far-reaching dietary changes over the last 10,000 years. This leaves us with the indication that there has likely been some kind of recent historical shortfall in some aspect of overall human nutrition--one that presents a limiting factor preventing the body/brain from reaching their complete genetic potential in terms of absolute physical development. The most obvious and far-reaching dietary change during the last 10,000 years has, of course, been the precipitous drop in animal food consumption (from perhaps 50% of diet to 10% in some cases) with the advent of agriculture, accompanied by a large rise in grain consumption--a pattern that persists today. This provides suggestive evidence that the considerable changes in human diet from the previous hunter-gatherer way of life have likely had--and continue to have--substantial consequences.

http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t...p-anat-4b.shtml

Einstein had a smaller than average brain...it's all in how you use it!

Okay, true. You got me there.

But if braincase sizes (the portion of the skull that holds the brain itself) have indeed gotten smaller since the Agricultural era 10,000 years ago (which I don't see this guy quoting any studies), but if it's true, then it would be the first time there was ever a decrease in man's brainsize since he first emerged from ape-like ancestors. In other words, today's primates have a braincase size of 430cc to 550cc for the gorilla (although gorillas have much bigger bodies than we do). But in the hominid evolutionary tree starting from earliest man (Ardipithecus ramidus and the Australophithecines) to Homo Sapiens (modern man), the braincase (shown from over 50 skulls) has increased in size from 410cc to modern man whose average brain size is 1200-1400cc.

Brain size in general has nothing to do with intelligence (I've heard that it is the brain folds that increase with intelligence), but it appears that in human evolution, the braincase did indeed enlarge progressively as we worked toward becoming modern man. Therefore, within the range of possible modern human brain size, size doesn't matter as far as intelligence between modern man, but in evolutionary terms brain size matters because the change in size from ape-like creatures to modern man is progressively larger.

So back to the point, if agriculture has succeeded in making the average braincase in the skull of man smaller, then this would be a backwards evolutionary step.

I just realized I didn't back myself up either with any studies, so here is what Scientific American 10/21/1999: [Ask the Experts] :[Biology] has to say:

"Human evolution appears to be associated with a trend toward greater intelligence. Is there a discernible trend toward greater intelligence in other species as well? And if cognitive ability confers an evolutionary advantage, why are humans (apparently) so unique in this trait?

"Paul Grobstein in the department of biology at Bryn Mawr College offers the following thoughts:
"It is, however, possible to talk about both evolutionary trends and evolutionary advantages in relation to a better-defined variable: brain size. For exactly the reasons mentioned above, it is not possible to equate brain size with either intelligence or cognitive abilities. But studying brain size yields insights that may be relevant nonetheless. Useful observations were documented and discussed in an article by Harry J. Jerison in Scientific American ('Paleoneurology and the Evolution of Mind", January 1976). Brain size--or, more accurately, brain size in relation to body size--has clearly increased over evolutionary time, not only in human lineages but in those of many other groups of organisms as well.

"These two issues are brought together in an interesting way by Christopher Wills in his book The Runaway Brain (BasicBooks, 1993). Wills suggests that larger brain size is associated with increased capacity to handle sensory information and hence with increased flexibility as well as decreased predictability in behavior. The latter innovation would then, in turn, exert selection pressure for increased brain size on other animals, whose survival relates to, among other things, their ability to predict behavior. These resulting increases in brain size would, of course, generate pressure for further increases in brain size. It is because of this positive feedback loop that Wills refers to the 'runaway brain.'

"So are larger brains actually 'better'? If Wills is right, the answer depends to a significant extent on whether or not there are other, larger brains around; in this case, increasing brain size is part of an evolutionary experiment whose future outcome is uncertain, as true of all evolutionary processes. On the other hand, if Wills is right, we (and some other animals) can all count on not becoming bored--and, perhaps, on becoming steadily wiser or, at least, steadily less wrong).

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Okay, so I was in the middle of this post and came across some research on our decreased brain size (so I shouldn't knock the guy who originally wrote that from beyondveg.com--in fact I think Dr. Eades recommends the site in PPLP):

Rambling Road
to Humanity

Anthropologists debunk another
myth of evolutionary progress

Science has, over the centuries, humbled humans, gradually forcing us to abandon the illusion that our species represents the ultimate end of creation. Copernicus and Galileo displaced Earth from the center of the universe; Darwin dashed the conceit that humans originated in a special way, distinct from all other species. Now a group of researchers--Christopher B. Ruff of Johns Hopkins University, Erik Trinkaus of the University of New Mexico and Trenton W. Holliday at the College of William and Mary--throw cold water even on the notion of steady "improvement" within the human line.

In their recent study, Ruff and his colleagues thoroughly analyzed the fossil record to determine the evolving body mass and brain size of the Homo species leading up to us. The results, published in the May 8 issue of Nature, show just how far from the truth is the stereotypical image of a straight progression from small, pea-brained ancestors to the technologically adept egghead Homo sapiens who inhabit the world today. The truth is quite a bit more complicated.

Hominid brains appear to have remained fairly constant in size for a very long stretch from 1.8 million years ago until about 600,000 years ago--a "period of stasis" whose reality has long been debated by scientists. An abrupt break occurred during the Middle Pleistocene epoch (from 600,000 to 150,000 years before the present), when fossils show that the cranial capacity of our ancestors skyrocketed. This trend peaked roughly 75,000 years ago, when archaic Homo sapiens fossils (a category that includes the well-known Neanderthals) indicate a brain mass of about 1,440 grams. Since then, brain mass has actually drifted downward to the 1,300 grams that is typical today.

Brain size alone does not tell the whole story, of course. Intelligence seems to have less to do with brain size per se than with the brain's proportion to the body it must care for and control (and even that link is rather tenuous). Here, too, the results of the Nature paper are telling. Over the nearly two-million-year span that Ruff and his co-authors examined, ancient hominids were on average about 10 percent more massive than modern humans. Body size peaked about 50,000 years ago: Neanderthals were muscular brutes who weighed upwards of a quarter more than modern humans. Since that time, humans have been marching steadily downhill in both stature and cranial capacity (with the exception of some recent gains due to improved nutrition and reduced disease). The good news is that the steeper decline in body mass over the past 50,000 years has raised our ratio of brain to body above Neanderthal levels, even though total brain mass has dipped.

Calculating the size of our progenitors' brains and bodies from a few scattered bones is a tricky process. Many of the bones vary too much from one individual to another to use for such estimation. Teeth wear differently depending on diet, for example. Eye sockets have changed in proportion over the years, and skulls have grown thinner. Past estimates of the body masses of human ancestors have sometimes disagreed by as much as 50 percent. These disparities made it difficult to assess the changing nature of the human line. But in their methodical survey, Ruff, Trinkaus and Holliday found two variables that appear closely tied to body size in even the most ancient humans: the width of the ball joint on the top of the thighbone (which bears much of our weight when we stand) and the breadth of the pelvis. Measuring these dimensions for 163 fossilized hominids, the scientists were able to plot our genus's changes in brain and brawn.

These improved data are already prompting anthropologists to re-evaluate their assessment of the environmental and cultural transformations that shaped human evolution. In an accompanying commentary in Nature, John Kappelman of the University of Texas at Austin offers some intriguing speculations along these lines. The long, dry spell of constant brain size suggests to him that among our ancestors, as in modern apes, competition among males for access to females may have created an evolutionary pressure favoring continued large bodies. Behavior that was "more dependent on brawn than brains," Kappleman writes, evidently was successful enough that there was little evolutionary pressure toward a bigger cranium.

In considering the new reconstructions of Homo over the past 90,000 years, Kappelman is struck less by the roughly constant brain size than by the rapid decrease in body size, which runs quite counter to the earlier steady or upward trends. He suggests that this decrease in overall bulk was favored "by a social structure that relied on more cooperative foraging and better communication skills." At the same time, a better and more reliable food supply could support the metabolic demands of a large brain. "The increase in relative brain size of modern humans may then be, in part, an effect of selection for smaller body mass," Kappelman rather ignominiously concludes.

So this is what it has come to. The favored son of the Garden of Eden has been demoted to the incredible shrinking human.


--Corey S. Powell and W. Wayt Gibbs, staff writers

It's been my belief for sometime, that natural selection has been abandoned in the human species for a long time.

Think about it! If wisdom teeth were lethal, the only people around would have been born without them. I've got them because my ancestors didn't feel wisdom teeth were a considerable threat to their survival. A strong back and life skills were assets however, and I'm happy to say, they survived just fine.

As societies changed with agriculture/mechanical ages, the need to breed offspring that would have an evolutionary advantage diminished greatly. Having many children was preferable, as they could work the farmland, and the likelyhood of a whole family being wiped out by disease was slim, and meant that the family tree would continue. Strength in numbers and all that.

As I see it, the evolutionary needs changed as well, and the difference between surviving and excelling narrowed. In our own country, there came welfare programs that kept stupid, lazy, and otherwise people not worthy of survival, from starving to death. That might sound harsh, but in terms of evolution, it's simple truth. Evolution is truly about survival of the fitest, not the most handsome.

So, in our modern world, evolution is on the ropes. It's stalled, in the sense that we will never become the hugely brained, 9 foot tall, 3 fingered aliens that we see on X files. We will always choose the mate that steals our hearts, not the person with the longest life span, or the most resistance to disease.

Crazy, ain't it?!