Interesting, how can there be both a high engagement in fishing jobs and low amounts of fish in the diet. Are they very unsuccessful fishers? All the fish is sold to some other, by definition unhealthy, population?
Prior to the 20th century (depending on where you live, but this is for the areas hit with obesity epidemics):
1. You had to walk most places (often miles a day).
2. You had to physically labor. Most people didn't have desk jobs or the period's equivalent.
3. Food was relatively scarce, and harder to transport.
4. Social activities (we are social creatures) required physical effort (walking to, dancing, walking around). We can now be social while being remarkably physically passive.
5. Entertainment options were more scarce, so boredom meant you did something. Now, you can entertain yourself by sitting on a couch or at the desk playing a video game or watching a movie. You could make a case for books being similarly physically passive, but that requires widespread literacy and access to books which wasn't true of the general population.
The expansion of ranching and farming in the great plains of the Americas was sufficiently bountiful to lead to the first 'health food' crazes of the early 20th century--more people had enough to eat, and increasing automation was already reducing labor. So the roots of our current problem were already being planted, as it were. But in the last 30-40 years, there's been a noticeable uptick in average caloric consumption, even more reduced activity, and more of those calories (at least in the US) coming from processed foods with ever-larger quantities of sugar.
One of the likely contributors is the unhealthy long-chain long-shelf-life fats of most prepared foods, which didn't arrive until the 30's and 40's.
Given that most people don't make the time to make fresh meals from scratch, they're getting fairly unhealthy food even if they cook at home. (And many folks short-cut with fast-food options, which are usually worse.)
For having lived in several Asian and European countries, I can claim on the basis of anecdotal life experience that it has a lot to do with the local culture. When I first came to America I was (and still am) shocked by the way people related to food and the ease with which you could fall in a sedentary lifestyle.
Thanks for this. The article has grown since I last checked dome years ago. The quote about non-combatant deaths struck me as particularly interesting. I look forward to reading further on the subject.
There may exist such a pathway, but we need to check its capacity, efficiency and by-product production. Maybe it is a pathway for critical situations only and we should not relay on it for prolonged periods of time.
Maybe the carbohydrate to glucose pathway is for critical situations only and we should not relay on it for prolonged periods of time.
These are evolutionary adaptions that let us extract energy efficiently from our environment, maybe yesterday's sensationalist news about our alcohol dehydrogenase efficiency is proof that we should use alcohol for all energy needs.
For any parents starting to get worried: toe-walking is completely normal for many children below 5 years old and even older[1]. Usually they grow out of it as they get older. So I would definitely not consider that a sign pointing to the possibility of autism.
But it can be one flag (of many) pointing to a sensory processing disorder and should be noted if other behaviors are seen.
My son toe-walked. We did some mild sensory-processing screening and therapy which helped. It also turned out that his tendons were too short and he needed serial casting to get them stretched out far enough.
The study you linked appears to have one possible flaw. It reports on whether a child walked on their toes 'at some time'. In the many kids I've been around with autism, it's impossible not to notice the toe walking because it is so frequent. For our child, we would actually be more inclined to notice when she didn't toe walk.
If you combine this one with another couple symptoms, it's best to get it checked out.
Just to throw a anecdote on: I picked up toe-walking when I was a kid in response to regularly having to walk around barefoot on gross locker-room floors. In my case, I only do it when barefoot, and these days my heels are typically only about about an inch above the ground.
This means fire was used before homo sapiens existed, fascinating. We might have evolved to eat cooked/roasted food.
I thought a lot of the links to Richard Wrangham's research on the origins of cooking had already been widely shared on Hacker News. Here is a chronological list of a few stories on his research to show how this line of research has developed over the last decade.
I was very surprised when I saw the early dates (before the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species) for the earliest evidence of cooking. The current view is cooking actually enabled hominin evolution in the direction of smaller gut sizes and larger brain sizes, as is characteristic of Homo sapiens.
I do believe that if a human nowadays were to try to eat purely raw vegetables, their digestive system wouldn't be able to extract enough calories per day to make up for the energy used to digest and stay alive. Cooking food reduces the amount of energy required to digest, effectively increasing the caloric value of foods.
Staying warm seems so unimportant compared to doubling or tripling your effective food supply.
The raw food movement would disagree but it's a valid point. Cooking does two things, both softens food and enables chemical reactions which create useful sugars.
I'll admit I don't stay current on the latest trends in human diet, but I know some coworkers who are proponents of raw foods specifically because they are harder to digest. They say there's more fiber, more bulk, and fewer useful sugars (simple carbs being bad for you). When they eat foods raw that normally would be cooked, they're taking in fewer calories and filling up faster. As the food is broken down slowly, they are given nutrition throughout the day without eating more. This is their claim.
As I admit though, I don't know if this is the same as the dietary movement we're talking about. I don't know any amount of science in either direction.
That is the same bunch, they would refute the statement
"... if a human nowadays were to try to eat purely raw vegetables, their digestive system wouldn't be able to extract enough calories per day to make up for the energy used to digest and stay alive."
I guess what I missed in my post (deliberately) was tying this diet to weight loss. To lose weight, simply put, you take in fewer calories than you burn to stay alive. That's the gist of why my coworkers do it. If they get 1400 calories usefully extracted from their diet but they need 2000, they lose 600 calories every day, 600 calories which the body then makes up by burning fat. Even if they could extract 2500 just from cooking the food.
The human body is incredibly designed to not die if you don't eat anything. Basically, you have to not eat anything PLUS not have any useful fat left to burn PLUS not have any extra muscle to burn. Almost everyone in the Western world could go a month without eating and only suffer from lethargy and possibly a lack of non-fat-soluble vitamins. Eat nothing but take a multivitamin and you're theoretically good to go for months. There was the study published on one man who fasted for a full year and suffered no health detriment.
I tried to dodge that direct statement in my original post because I am not a health professional, I know nothing of the science behind the diet, and I'm not trying to make the argument that the diet would be a "good" way to lose weight.
If that's the case, then why did consuming nothing but freshly-juiced fruits and vegetables (6 kale leaves, 1 cucumber, 4 celery stalks, 2 green apples, 1/2 lemon, 1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, with some variation of amounts and ingredients, taken as many times per day as required to feel full) literally save the lives of these two guys (Joe Cross and Phil Staples)? I understand that it's an infomercial for the lifestyle brand "Reboot Your Life", disguised as a documentary, but if it's for real, then the results are truly impressive. I ask because I'm seriously considering doing an all-out, 3-month fast like they supposedly did in the film. Thanks in advance for any useful info which anyone can give me about the efficacy and safety of this regimen.
But staying warm means you would require less food to supply the energy you need, being cold really drains you at least here in the winter I know I get really hungry when I am cold.
If you are warm and require less food that's less trips out to hunt and fewer chances of being injured or killed.
Maybe add onto that the cooking of food being digested better too.
