Re: Diet and Evolution


Catherine Woodgold wrote:
"camelopard" (camelopard@xxxxxxx) writes:
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.

No, no, it doesn't work that way.

Optimal health is not necessarily obtained by duplicating
the circumstances under which the species evolved.

I would think that most of the time it would be so, with obvious
inconveniences like smilodon bites not considered.

We should remember "Foods [the human body] is able to digest" is not
the same as what we were eating when we evolving from an earlier
primate to us.

Some considerations:
We did not eat milk products as adults until recently (and not all
ethnic groups handle it well now).
We did not typically eat grains until recently (neolithic times).
The fruits and vegetables we ate were not bred for size, and many of
them had fewer calories (ever see a wild carrot?).
The meat we ate was *lean.
And so were we - out paleolithic ancestors were not couch potatos.
Regular, vigorous, exercise made a difference. For one thing, it meant
we had to eat more calories, which exposed us to more vitamins and
minerals on a daily basis.
At least some of our vices - ethanol, f'rinstance - interfer with
absorbtion and metabolizing certain nutrients.

I'm not sure it's possible to follow the advice of supplement skeptics
- "just eat right" - if by eating right they mean eating the way we
were meant to (i.e. conditions to which we adapted over time). Surely
not easy. Exercise hard, maybe two or three hours daily, six days a
week. Fruit, veggies, and nuts, mostly raw. Cooked very lean meat.
Water. No coffee, no soda pop, no sports drinks, no booze, and
definitely no cigarettes. No bread, no milk. No candy, ever.

Anyone here eat like that? Yes, many of the supplement enthusiasts are
kind of goofy. But we're not eating a natural diet.


If you take your assumptions further, you could argue
that species should evolve to be healthy when they're
taking in no food at all. That way they could live
through famines, and go further and save time and
energy by not bothering to eat even when there's
food present.

That's obviously impossible.

Often, providing larger amounts of food and other
resources leads to better health.

During evolution maybe most individuals were in poor
health, but when a better environment is found
(with less famine, etc.) they immediately do better.

From what I hear, most modern or near-modern human fossils are of tall,
thick-boned people with strong muscles attachments and good teeth.

They don't usually have much trouble adapting to
a situation of more food being available.

Prolem is, most of us do not have a natural desire to move often, and
vigorously. Our ancestors moved (climbed, carried, hunted) or they
starved. They didn't think about it. We can sit around, and we also
have lots of calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods readily available.


The same is true for each nutrient. It would be
nice if we evolved to be perfectly healthy without
taking in any vitamin C or iron. But it's not
realistic to expect us to evolve that way in only
a few millions (or billions) of years. We need
those nutrients.

We need calcium to hold our
bones up. In a calcium-poor environment we might
evolve to be smaller or have narrower bones or
something, but we would still use calcium.
If we suddenly obtained food with more calcium,
our bones would immediately become stronger and
less likely to break.

Yes. We also need pounding and weight-bearing, or those bones will not
be able to use the calcium and vitamin D efficiently.


The optimal amount of each nutrient may be larger
or smaller than the typical amount in the diet.
It depends on realistic things like having to
contend with the force of gravity, as well as
on adaptation to the diet available.

There are many studies showing lower rates of
various diseases among people taking vitamin supplements.
Some studies show lower rates of "death from all causes".
This suggests that the optimal amounts are larger
than in a typical diet.

It does not follow logically from this that the
diet earlier in our evolution must have had those larger
amounts -- just as showing that preventing famine
reduces the death rate does not prove that our evolving
ancestors did not often experience famines.

Kermit


.

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