Interesting article Gotbeer, I have always been interested in our closest cousin. I certainly wasn't comparing our strength relative to chimps, as I am well aware they are vastly superior in that departement. I was refering to brain power. The theory, as you know, is that human evolved their superior brain as a direct consequence of eating a diet rich in meat.

PS thanks for that link Lisa, that was exactly the article I was looking for

I am minoring in anthropology right now and what I am learning is that we ate less and less meat as we evolved, because we began to spend more time cultivating plants and less time hunting and gathering. This summer I am going to do an independant study on nutritional anthropology so i guess I will look into that deeper but i really don't see a correlation between eating meat and brain power from what I have learned so far.

Did your research also tell you that as we started to do more cultivation of plants and less time hunting that we also started to get diabetes and heart disease? It should, because, despite the vegan lies that are pushed, a plant based diet ISN'T healthy for anyone.

We didn't eat less meat as we evolved, we ate less meat starting with cultivation, which we just started only 10,000 years ago. Barely a tick on the evolutional clock. And as quinadal said, since then we started to get diabetes and heart disease. That's because the human body isn't made to eat a plant based diet.

We did not «evolve» much since we started cultivating plants, grains, etc. for food.

At most, we have been doing it for about 12 000 years, in the fertile crescent of the Middle East.

Homo Sapiens was fully «evolved» (i.e. identical to modern humans) 150 000 years ago, and that evolution from Neanderthal was almost entirely due to increased meat eating, with its fat, protein and calorie-rich properties, and with our shirinking gut size (compared to the apes).
Also, social behavior and tool-making skills had to evolve along with meat eating for man to become a more proficient hunter/scavenger.

Aloethe -
If you are thinking of becoming a nutritional anthropologist to demonstrate this contention, you are wasting your time. All the current research is moving in the opposite direction. If you are not prepared to find out that you are wrong, do not become a scientist. Bringing that kind of bias to scientific research always breeds bad science, of which the field of nutrition has more than its fair share.

Veganism is a quasi-religious movement whose primary concern is personal and spiritual purity and which contains an a priori definition of purity. If you want to be a vegan because you have accepted this definition of purity, then by all means do so, but purity is not a scientific concept, nor does it have anything to do with health. Attempts at a scientific justification for a particular definition of purity never work.

Combining veganism with low carbohydrate eating is an enormous challenge. I wish you luck. But I suspect that at some point you will be faced with a difficult choice. Especially, if you do pursue a scientific career and discover that there are no scientific underpinnings to veganism, either in human evolution or in biochemistry. Unfortunately, there are vegans who practice a corrupted science and, because they only talk to each other, never understand this. PCRM is a good example of this phenomenon. Don’t fall into that trap. If you do come to that choice, there are some ex-vegans who contribute to this board who may be able to help you through it.

Quinidal is correct on this point. Research has shown that as cultures moved away from hunting/gathering and towards agriculture, stature and health declined steadily and obesity and disease increased. Skeletal remains of cultures over a period of time demonstrate this clearly and much can be determined from bones and teeth about the health of the deceased.
Some of that increase in disease can be attributed to larger numbers of people living closer together, but not all. So...eating less and less meat as cultures moved away from hunting/gathering and began to rely more and more on agriculture doesn't seem to have been a good thing for their overall health.

Yes cultivation and animal husbandry along with sedentism contributed to a decline in health. We also spend much much less time working to aquire things then also.. about 4 hours compared to the hours we work today on average.

We are always evolving .. sorry i didn't mean as we evolved into Homo Sapiens but into the people we are today.

I am not going into nutritional anthropology nor am I studying it because i am trying to prove anything about veganism.
As far as purity and veganism. If i feel pure being vegan it is because of the lack of hormones, pesticides, whatever the hell is in processed foods and the like in my system and also no dairy means no casein which is the glue like substance that forms mucus and causes all kinds of health problems for people. I feel much clearer and yeah i guess more pure. But i don't feel morally superior to other or anything like that. I don't believe in good and evil or heaven and hell i just do what feels good and veganism does for me. I respect that you are doing what feels right for you from what you have experienced in life thus far.

In my opion a plant based diet is healthy but the best case scenerio would be 100% organic mostly wild plants and a good vareity, including protien rich seeds, nuts and fruits and legumes. That is why I mentioned fruitarianism. But of course higher carb fruits and veggies must be used in moderation.

As far as cruelty goes they have proved that a chemical is released into an animals system when it is stressed and it does have an effect on us when we ingest it. So yeah if you gonna kill and eat cow don't feed it pesticides or inject it with hormones,give it a beautiful life, adaquate nutriton and social interaction (did you nkow cows babysit for each other?) then yeah if you feel like research shows your gonna be fat unless you eat a cow.. then yeah shoot it in the head while it's not looking and ingest the meat of a cow who isn't full of chemicals and stress hormones.

I guess for me realizing that carbs made me gain weight has led me to think about what is in my food and where it comes from and how it effects me when i eat it. I feel so level ( i guess it's my blood sugar?) and clear and stable having cut out all those carbs. I still do feel like i am getting adequate amounts of nutrients even being vegan. I enter everyting I eat into a site that calculates everything and charts it. I am not deficient in anything and like i said i feel better than I ever have. and oh yeah I lost a few more lbs. I weigh 145 now down from 155.

one more thing..

This simply is not true... animals we farm must be fed plants. Far more than we would consume if we ate them directly and it is entirely possible to grow food with out pestides, machinery, or harmful fertilizers. And as far as making a profit. I think the organic food market is doing just fine. But really small community gardens and personal plots could feed many people. Do we really have to be fed by corporations and have everything wrapped in plastic etc...

in the case of grass-fed animals, they are eating plants that are already there, usually on land that is not suitiable for crops. the grass fed meat I order is raised without pesticides and fertilizers, the animals are killed in a stress free manner.

good luck with your veganism, even tho I personally think you're kinda like that cartoon shark, trying to eat a diet that isn't well-suited for your species...

Yes, but as Mr. Freddy pointed out, they don't necessarily have to eat plants that are edible by humans. In fact, cattle can thrive grazing on grass that we don't have the ability to even digest fully and are far more efficient at turning that grass into quality protein and fat than we humans are. Furthermore, they can eat grass that is growing in areas that are otherwise unsuitable for growing other crops. Often cattle are fed grain products that are unsuitable for human consumption.
This link says it all far better than I could (and with a lot less space ).

http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstr...etarianism.html

Hey Aloethe-

I am getting a Ph.D in paleoanthropology and just wanted to address this last sentence of yours. I am also a vegetarian (of the lacto-ovo variety), so I am not going to give you any grief about your personal choices. I agree that we should just get along here. I just wanted to address the brain/meat connection. There is some evidence to suggest that in order to allow for the brain to expand in the course of our evolution, higher quality foods, (e.g. meat) became more important in our diet. The digestive system and the brain are both expensive organs/organ systems to run. Our brains make up only abou 2% of our total body weight, but use nearly 25-30% of nutrients we take in. For plant eating organisms, the gut takes an enormous amounts of foods and calories just to make it function. Cellulose is a pain to digest and to extract the needed nutrition. Horses and cows, for example, have highly developed digestive systems designed for this purpose. Our closest relatives and our ancestors had expanded cecum's also for that purpose. So, there are not enough calories to run both a large brain such as ours and a digestive system-as long as the digestive system is adapted to grasses/grains/fruits. Meats are calorie/nutrient dense and easier to digest with a smaller digestive system. As our guts reduced in size because we switched from being primarily vegetarian to a more omniverous diet, those calories that were used to run our digestive systems were freed up and allowed to operate a more expansive brain.


Here are a couple of articles, one has a link to the article:

Aiello LC, Wheeler P. 1995. The expensive-tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. Curr Anthropol 36:199-221.

REVIEW ARTICLE
Brains and guts in human evolution: The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis*
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?scr...&lng=es&nrm=iso

This hypothesis was tested in a really innovative way:

Jason Kaufman, WashingtonUniversity "Using fish to test the expensive tissue hypothesis" -- poster presentation AAPA 2003.

Great article Paleo, thanks for the link. The following from the article caught my eye:


Forget building muscle mass to increase your BMR.... it's your brain you need to build!

Wyv

unfortunately thinking really hard doesn't help you lose weight. Believe me, I have tried.

The "meetyourmeat" thing lost all credibility instantly when I clicked on the link and up popped Alec Baldwin.