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Old Mon, Sep-09-02, 18:26
BlueToo BlueToo is offline
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Posts: 10
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 198/178/175
BF:9%
Progress: 87%
Location: Washington
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What else do you have on point 25? I have some issues with your wrapup.

1) At what point does what our ancestors eat become relelvant or irrelevant regarding what is best for us? In other words man 2M years ago primarily ate meat but chimps primarily ate fruit? Why looks at man 2M years ago versus chimps 4-7M years ago? Can evolution change (or better, did evolution change) the basic metabolic system between chimps and man such that one diet better reflects how our bodies should be fed? 2M years is nothing and I doubt it could seriously change much (in general is changed size only - brain, bone, muscle). In addition if you look over the broad range of primates the diets radically change per other work done by your reference 58. Chimps eat 5-10% meat at most. Which is the right comparable? Tough one to answer.

2) I don't have a good reference on this but I know more recent work has gone against the traditional concept of man as efficient meat hunter and relegated it to more of a vulture status - namely gathering meat that was left. And in most cases the remaining meat was brain or marrow - we were able to better extract brain meat from a skull/bones than other animals. In most cases brain meat is incredibly dense with protein and fats. Does that mean our best diet would be brain? Muscle meat has very different composition and therefore your're making a stretch. A second point is that there is only one study to my knowledge (Crawford, Michael) showing the absolute need for meat as a precursor to larger brain development.

3) If meat was 50% of our diet what was the other 50%? If that is all fruit then this is a problem with the evolutionary diet theory. Homo habilis ate more plant matter than meat but I can't find any studies on dietary breakdown.

4) "When the body is perfectly balanced it is disease-free" Huh? First of all what does 'perfectly balanced' mean? Are you saying that viral and bacterial infections don't affect the human body if we meet that definition of 'perfectly balanced'? Come on you're stretching here.

5) Man hasn't eaten grain for a most of his existence. Fine but if you are going to invoke this argument don't you have to invoke it for all the other stuff we haven't eaten for most of our existence? What meats aren't on that list? What vegetables aren't on that list? I don't know the answer but I know it wasn't that long ago that the homo lines of humans branched out of Africa and the potential for evolutionary forces to modify the metabolic/dietary process was too short to do anything radical. Therefore you could argue we should be eating meat and plants from the African region.
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