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apparently the docs think in time we can adapt quite well to hostess cake. What good observers they are of concrete material evidence right in front of their faces (insert modern disease or weight issue here). Lot of good those big brains we got fair-trade. Sorry for the sarcasm, my mother sent me this crap, hopefully she wasn't impressed by it.

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[www.nytimes.com]
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Could people one day evolve to eat rich food while remaining perfectly slim and svelte?

This may not be so wild a fantasy. It is becoming clear that the human genome does respond to changes in diet, even though it takes many generations to do so.

Researchers studying the enzyme that converts starch to simple sugars like glucose have found that people living in countries with a high-starch diet produce considerably more of the enzyme than people who eat a low-starch diet.

The reason is an evolutionary one. People in high-starch countries have many extra copies of the amylase gene which makes the starch-converting enzyme, a group led by George H. Perry of Arizona State University and Nathaniel J. Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported yesterday in the journal Nature Genetics.

The production of the extra copies seems to have been favored by natural selection, according to a genetic test, the authors say. If so, the selective pressure could have occurred when people first started to grow cereals like wheat and barley at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, or even much earlier.

Paleoanthropologists have long wondered what change in the usual primate diet of fruit and nuts enabled the emerging human lineage to support a brain that eventually swelled to three times the size of chimpanzees’.

Neural tissue requires large amounts of energy, and the usual assumption is that humans began to eat meat some 2.5 million years ago when brain volume started to expand. But another possibility is that the extra nutrients came from starch.

As soon as the human lineage split from the chimp’s about five million years ago and started to live in open woodland, its diet may have expanded to include tubers, corms and the other underground structures in which plants store starch. In support of this idea, Dr. Dominy, a paleoanthropologist, said that the teeth of early humans “are not well suited for eating meat.”

Chimpanzees, whose fruit-based diet does not include much starch, have a single amylase gene. Dr. Dominy, Dr. Perry and their colleagues believe that the number of amylase genes in the human genome had started to expand by at least 200,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier, but the exact date cannot yet be determined.

Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard and an advocate of the tuber-eating thesis, said the amylase finding was a convincing insight into the different digestive physiology of people and chimps, but that the date of 200,000 years ago, derived from limited genetic information, was not old enough to give direct support to his ideas.

The amylase enzyme studied by Dr. Perry’s team exists in the saliva, where it predigests starch and lets glucose get absorbed from the mouth into bloodstream. The evolutionary advantage of this strange arrangement is not clear, but it could provide the body with energy during episodes of diarrhea, or might protect against diarrhea. Or it could just make the digestion of starch more efficient.

Whatever the exact mechanism, the extra copies of the amylase gene seem to have arisen through positive selection, the researchers said. Their conclusion is based on comparing the genomes of the Japanese and the Yakut, a Siberian people who eat mostly reindeer. Dr. Perry, a geneticist, said he could not tell whether the Japanese, who have a high-starch diet, including rice, had gained the extra copies of the gene or whether the Yakut had lost theirs.

Geneticists realized only in 2004 that having extra copies of genes was a widespread form of variation in the human genome. Many of the extra copies seem to have arisen through mistakes in the duplication process that doubles the number of chromosomes in dividing cells. The effect of these extra copies is largely unknown and the story of the amylase gene is one of the first to be understood, at least to some degree.

Dr. Perry and his team started their research by having undergraduates at Arizona State University give samples of saliva, which were analyzed for amylase. The researchers found the amount of amylase a person produced was correlated with the number of copies they possessed of the amyloid gene, which ranged from 2 to 15. The copies are arranged in the genome like a string of beads, with each gene being about 120,000 units of DNA in length.

Wondering whether the copy number varied with diet, the researchers then collected saliva and blood samples from the Yakut and other low-starch eating populations, showing that this was indeed the case.

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it could be your thoughts...

[www.writerwriterwriter.com]
[www.lulu.com]


short and sweet....and DEEP

_____________________________________________________ ...and FREE

It's hilarious how much money is wasted on 'proving' what the yogis have known all along.


I mean that it took many thousands of studies to determine that, yup, fresh raw fruit IS good for you, whodathunkit! and they labour on and on with minutae because they're afraid nature couldn't possibly be good enough.


I'm feeling cynical, (sorry).

hmm..my interpretation is that science (little S) equates adaptation to crap...as a positive.

And that we push our evolution by essentially straying from an existing path.

Its certainly a great theory and has relevance, but one that unfortunately does not apply to nutrition/health, as mutation - in this case - is a more suitable name for the body requireing to absorb, or ameliorate the effects of harmful substances.

Luckily, having gone through whatever 'evolving' we needed to do, and eating the things that were available, for whatever reason/path, we now have a system/consciousness in which reversing certain 'evolutions' is quite possible, and arguing over why/when/how becomes quite the hole to the center of the earth.

_____________________



it could be your thoughts...

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short and sweet....and DEEP

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Anaken, have you read the book Sugar Blues? It's the history of disease and medicine from the standpoint of the rise of sugar consumption.

nah, i hate reading about health

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Yeah I wasn't responding directly to that study, just lumping together all the imo-useless studies on food and health.

I don't believe that diet is what "enabled the emerging human lineage to support a brain that eventually swelled to three times the size of chimpanzees’ ", but I'm probably in the minority in that I don't believe in Darwin's T.o. Evolution.

i think that many people don't believe in darwins theory, especially in the u.s.

of course, it's likely that virtually all of those people don't have the slightest understanding of it.

have you studied the theory, aqua ?
what alternative theory do you believe?

regarding the article, the funny part to me is that they think that
skinny/svelte = healthy

therein lies just one problem with their conclusions, in addition to the other problem of genes being analyzed alone, when they act in concert for the most part.

Yeah, I noticed that too (svelte) - that's the journalist's view I guess.

I had to study it a long time ago, but something about it doesn't resonate for me.

Here's what makes me a true weirdo: I don't believe any of the theories I've heard - not Darwin, not that Earth was populated by aliens, not creationism.

I'm comfortable not clinging to a theory - I just don't know so I'll have to not know until I do.

None makes real sense to me - maybe because I don't have the capacity to understand them, but also because I don't believe ANY of us knows. And all the theories have their merits.

But I have experienced a few things that make me certain of a truly beautiful energy in life, which is 'timeless'. That stuff is important to me, so I guess by contrast, how we got here fades into the background.



How about you fresh ? Do you favour any theories ?

aquadecoco Wrote:
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> Here's what makes me a true weirdo: I don't
> believe any of the theories I've heard - not
> Darwin, not that Earth was populated by aliens,
> not creationism.

Not at all! I don't believe any of the theories either and agree with most of what you said in this message.

Rob

--
Rob Hull - Funky Raw
My blog: [www.rawrob.com]

aquadecoco Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Here's what makes me a true weirdo: I don't
> believe any of the theories I've heard - not
> Darwin, not that Earth was populated by aliens,
> not creationism.


a weirdo is a great thing to be

creationism is not a theory - it is unfalsifiable, for one thing.

> How about you fresh ? Do you favour any theories
> ?

as to evolutionary theory, yes i think darwinism does the best job.

Anaken,
I love your sense of humor! With a subject line like that, I just had to look.

Sharrhan:


[www.facebook.com]

These scientists and the reporters reporting on their findings are guilty of a very common and enormaous mistake that is rampant in such articles these days: the failure to distinguish sufficiently between COMPLEX carbohydrates found in most vegetable foods, and SIMPLE carbohydrates (sugars and simple starches) found abundantly in modern "fast foods" but not much in natural "veggie" foods. No twinkie trees existed for our distant ancestors to pluck Hostess Twinkies from!

To somehow say it is okay to let humans "evolve" to this type of un-natural diet is to condemn many generations to lives of sub-par health, suffering and early death, while burdening societies and economies with all that implies. Worse -- that adaptation may never come, or may come with many unwanted side-effects.

The big problem here is the timelines involved: most of the degenerative diseases caused by eating excessive simple starches do not kill people before they are old enough to have children. It normally takes several decades before people die of "adult onset" diabetes, heart attacks, etc... and by the time they do die, they have already had children. So the process of weeding out, the "survival of the fittest" mechanism, is very slow and takes place only over many generations. That means generations of ailing people dying prematurely, but still able to remain around long enough to breed.

Yes, such adaptations eventually and gradually takes place. In countries in the Middle East, where gluten-grain consumption first began, gluten intolerance is not so common, as gradually over 14,000 years and more, SOME of those people who can't eat grains have died out, gradually diminishing the presence of their genes in the gene pool. In countries in the North (Ireland, Northern Europe/Scandinavia) gluten-intolerance is much more common, because only relatively recently have people in those countries had access to grains that won't grow will in their colder climates. YET there is still gluten-intolerance in the Middle East; in Italy, with its long history of pasta consumption going back to pre-Roman days, the government requires ALL children to be tested for it in the schools, as it is still widespread enough.

The adaptation to simple starches and sugars in the diet would be MUCH SLOWER than any adaptation to gluten, not only because of the reproductive issues mentioned above, but also because blood sugar and its regulation plays such a central and critical role in so many aspects of our bodies' functions.

While there may be some truth in what that article said, I think it is irresponsible and stupid of them to present such a naive and over-simplified narrow aspect of this subject like that, as if suggesting the process they descibe is almost okay, because it is somehow "natural" and "inevitable". That is like saying if we kill all people over six feet in height, people will genetically grow shorter over time. True enough, but immoral and irresponsible. Far better to recognize that, while the body's adaptability within a single lifetime, and the species' adaptablity over many generations, is prodigious, that is no excuse to abuse it until it eventually "adapts"!

Funky Rob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Not at all! I don't believe any of the theories
> either


Ha! TWO weirdos!

>These scientists and the reporters reporting on their findings are guilty of a very common and enormaous mistake that is rampant in such articles these days: the failure to distinguish sufficiently between COMPLEX carbohydrates found in most vegetable foods, and SIMPLE carbohydrates (sugars and simple starches) found abundantly in modern "fast foods" but not much in natural "veggie" foods. No twinkie trees existed for our distant ancestors to pluck Hostess Twinkies from!<

Amen! I've been irked about that for years. A lot of people don't seem to know a carb from a cab, let alone distinguish between good and bad carbs. But scientists ought to be able to.

Sharrhan:


[www.facebook.com]

fresh Wrote:
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creationism is not a theory - it is unfalsifiable,
> for one thing.




As you must know, the word 'theory' has usages outside the science classroom ...

aquadecoco Wrote:
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>
> As you must know, the word 'theory' has usages
> outside the science classroom ...


good point. but within the context of this discussion it seems valid to me to use the strict sense of the word. i understand you may think differently....

[www.talkorigins.org]

theory and fact

<apparently the docs think in time we can adapt quite well to hostess cake. >

Not necessarily hostess cake, but cooked roots, tubers, brown rice, etc. are ok.

Some of us do alright with them.

That doesn't mean we need them.

Most of us have adaptations for starch-based diets. Most of us have also adapted to eat more meat than our 500 MYA ancestors, and more fat as well. For example, green monkeys develop atherosclerotic lesions on olive oil; they are much more sensitive to high fat (even the "good" fat) than we are.

I suspect that we do better without all those things. The evolutionary pressures that allow for adaptation are geared towards reproductive success and not necessarily longevity.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/13/2007 12:14AM by arugula.