Diet and Evolution

I am puzzled by the statements of some dietary supplement advocates,
which I take to be true statements, that certain vitamins, minerals, amino
acids, etc. are not present sufficinetly in foods to meet the daily needs of
the human body, even if we eat an enormous amount of the providing foods,
and thus we have to take supplements.

This doesn't seem to make evolutionary sense. It seems that the human
body should receive ample nutrients from the foods it is able to digest.

How would one answer this? Is the same true for other species, or just
for humans?

Are some foods adapted not just for humans, but for the diet of other
animals? So does the human body just get more or less of what it needs?

Perhaps the human body is adapted to a diet followed by early humans and
monkey-like ancestors, and perhaps for most of its evolutionary history the
human or pre-human body was much smaller, and perhaps more metabolically
adjusted to its food, and did not require supplements.

Or maybe the human diet has always been deficient. Does that mean the
human body is unnatural? Or maybe the original foods have been destroyed,
and we have only nutritionally imperfect substitutes, that fall short of
what is required.

Oh, well. This is getting complicated. I wonder what the question was?



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Relevant Pages

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