The Evolution of Diet - National Geographic. Top row: escargots, sardines, and fava beans (Crete); naan in salty yak- milk tea (Afghanistan); fried geranium leaves (Crete); boiled crab (Malaysia); raw beetroot and oranges (Crete); chapati, yak butter, and rock salt (Pakistan). Middle row: dried- apricot soup (Pakistan); boiled plantains (Bolivia); fried coral reef fish (Malaysia); bulgur, boiled eggs, and parsley (Tajikistan); stewed- seaweed salad (Malaysia); boiled ptarmigan (Greenland). Bottom row: grilled tuna (Malaysia); cooked potatoes, tomatoes, and fava beans in olive oil (Crete); rice with melted yak butter (Afghanistan); fried fish with tamarind (Malaysia); dried apricots (Pakistan); grilled impala (Tanzania; photographer’s utensils shown). Cultures around the world have centuries- old food traditions, as seen in these dishes from several different populations. By Ann Gibbons. Photographs by Matthieu Paley. Some experts say modern humans should eat from a Stone Age menu. Human nutrition refers to the. Meeting energy needs can. Simple sugars can be from an unrefined natural source. What's on it may surprise you. Fundamental Feasts For some cultures, eating off the land is—and always has been—a way of life. It’s suppertime in the Amazon of lowland Bolivia, and Ana Cuata Maito is stirring a porridge of plantains and sweet manioc over a fire smoldering on the dirt floor of her thatched hut, listening for the voice of her husband as he returns from the forest with his scrawny hunting dog. With an infant girl nursing at her breast and a seven- year- old boy tugging at her sleeve, she looks spent when she tells me that she hopes her husband, Deonicio Nate, will bring home meat tonight. Nate left before dawn on this day in January with his rifle and machete to get an early start on the two- hour trek to the old- growth forest. There he silently scanned the canopy for brown capuchin monkeys and raccoonlike coatis, while his dog sniffed the ground for the scent of piglike peccaries or reddish brown capybaras. If he was lucky, Nate would spot one of the biggest packets of meat in the forest—tapirs, with long, prehensile snouts that rummage for buds and shoots among the damp ferns. This evening, however, Nate emerges from the forest with no meat. At 3. 9, he’s an energetic guy who doesn’t seem easily defeated—when he isn’t hunting or fishing or weaving palm fronds into roof panels, he’s in the woods carving a new canoe from a log. But when he finally sits down to eat his porridge from a metal bowl, he complains that it’s hard to get enough meat for his family: two wives (not uncommon in the tribe) and 1. Loggers are scaring away the animals. He can’t fish on the river because a storm washed away his canoe. The story is similar for each of the families I visit in Anachere, a community of about 9. Tsimane Indian tribe. It’s the rainy season, when it’s hardest to hunt or fish. More than 1. 5,0. Tsimane live in about a hundred villages along two rivers in the Amazon Basin near the main market town of San Borja, 2. La Paz. But Anachere is a two- day trip from San Borja by motorized dugout canoe, so the Tsimane living there still get most of their food from the forest, the river, or their gardens. I’m traveling with Asher Rosinger, a doctoral candidate who’s part of a team, co- led by biological anthropologist William Leonard of Northwestern University, studying the Tsimane to document what a rain forest diet looks like. They’re particularly interested in how the Indians’ health changes as they move away from their traditional diet and active lifestyle and begin trading forest goods for sugar, salt, rice, oil, and increasingly, dried meat and canned sardines. This is not a purely academic inquiry. What anthropologists are learning about the diets of indigenous peoples like the Tsimane could inform what the rest of us should eat. Rosinger introduces me to a villager named Jos. Vibrant red “lobster claw” heliconia flowers and wild ginger grow like weeds among stalks of corn and sugarcane. This article reviews the health impacts of each major source of energy. Energy and Human Health. Can We Say What Diet Is Best for Health?When I ask if the food in the garden can tide them over when there’s little meat, Felipe shakes his head. My body doesn’t want to eat just these plants.” The Tsimane of Bolivia get most of their food from the river, the forest, or fields and gardens carved out of the forest. Click here to launch gallery. The foods we choose to eat in the coming decades will have dramatic ramifications for the planet. Simply put, a diet that revolves around meat and dairy, a way of eating that’s on the rise throughout the developing world, will take a greater toll on the world’s resources than one that revolves around unrefined grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Until agriculture was developed around 1. This indicates that the human 'energy budget' is. The Role of Freshwater and Marine Resources in the Evolution of the Human Diet. Energy and Human Evolution by. Patterns of Change and Development in Human Nutrition. The diet of the Neanderthals is the source of today's popular Paleolithic diet. Eating meat drove the evolution of our big. Drawing on the extra energy resources from a fatty diet. Origins and evolution of the Western diet. The incorporation of distilled alcoholic beverages into the human diet came much later. Major source of body energy. The majority of starch in the human diet comes from wheat, rice and corn as grain crops, potato. Evolution of crop plants. As farming emerged, nomadic hunter- gatherers gradually were pushed off prime farmland, and eventually they became limited to the forests of the Amazon, the arid grasslands of Africa, the remote islands of Southeast Asia, and the tundra of the Arctic. Today only a few scattered tribes of hunter- gatherers remain on the planet. That’s why scientists are intensifying efforts to learn what they can about an ancient diet and way of life before they disappear. We are running out of time. If we want to glean any information on what a nomadic, foraging lifestyle looks like, we need to capture their diet now.” So far studies of foragers like the Tsimane, Arctic Inuit, and Hadza have found that these peoples traditionally didn’t develop high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease. The notion that we’re trapped in Stone Age bodies in a fast- food world is driving the current craze for Paleolithic diets. The popularity of these so- called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat the way hunter- gatherers did during the Paleolithic—the period from about 2. A Stone Age diet “is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup,” writes Loren Cordain, an evolutionary nutritionist at Colorado State University, in his book The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat. After studying the diets of living hunter- gatherers and concluding that 7. Cordain came up with his own Paleo prescription: Eat plenty of lean meat and fish but not dairy products, beans, or cereal grains—foods introduced into our diet after the invention of cooking and agriculture. Paleo- diet advocates like Cordain say that if we stick to the foods our hunter- gatherer ancestors once ate, we can avoid the diseases of civilization, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, even acne. That sounds appealing. But is it true that we all evolved to eat a meat- centric diet? Both paleontologists studying the fossils of our ancestors and anthropologists documenting the diets of indigenous people today say the picture is a bit more complicated. The popular embrace of a Paleo diet, Ungar and others point out, is based on a stew of misconceptions. The Hadza of Tanzania are the world’s last full- time hunter- gatherers. They live on what they find: game, honey, and plants, including tubers, berries, and baobab fruit. Click here to launch gallery. Raymond Dart, who in 1. Africa, popularized the image of our early ancestors hunting meat to survive on the African savanna. Writing in the 1. By starting to eat calorie- dense meat and marrow instead of the low- quality plant diet of apes, our direct ancestor, Homo erectus, took in enough extra energy at each meal to help fuel a bigger brain. Digesting a higher quality diet and less bulky plant fiber would have allowed these humans to have much smaller guts. The energy freed up as a result of smaller guts could be used by the greedy brain, according to Leslie Aiello, who first proposed the idea with paleoanthropologist Peter Wheeler. The brain requires 2. This means that from the time of H. Fast- forward a couple of million years to when the human diet took another major turn with the invention of agriculture. The domestication of grains such as sorghum, barley, wheat, corn, and rice created a plentiful and predictable food supply, allowing farmers’ wives to bear babies in rapid succession—one every 2. A population explosion followed; before long, farmers outnumbered foragers. Over the past decade anthropologists have struggled to answer key questions about this transition. Was agriculture a clear step forward for human health? Or in leaving behind our hunter- gatherer ways to grow crops and raise livestock, did we give up a healthier diet and stronger bodies in exchange for food security? When biological anthropologist Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University describes the dawn of agriculture, it’s a grim picture. As the earliest farmers became dependent on crops, their diets became far less nutritionally diverse than hunter- gatherers’ diets. Eating the same domesticated grain every day gave early farmers cavities and periodontal disease rarely found in hunter- gatherers, says Larsen. When farmers began domesticating animals, those cattle, sheep, and goats became sources of milk and meat but also of parasites and new infectious diseases. Farmers suffered from iron deficiency and developmental delays, and they shrank in stature. Despite boosting population numbers, the lifestyle and diet of farmers were clearly not as healthy as the lifestyle and diet of hunter- gatherers. That farmers produced more babies, Larsen says, is simply evidence that “you don’t have to be disease free to have children.” The Inuit of Greenland survived for generations eating almost nothing but meat in a landscape too harsh for most plants. Today markets offer more variety, but a taste for meat persists. Click here to launch gallery. It’s true that hunter- gatherers around the world crave meat more than any other food and usually get around 3. But most also endure lean times when they eat less than a handful of meat each week. New studies suggest that more than a reliance on meat in ancient human diets fueled the brain’s expansion. Year- round observations confirm that hunter- gatherers often have dismal success as hunters.
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