Not a Doctor just commenting on what is common sense, if sugar is a problem and diabetes is a dietary problem, at the end of the day, it does not seem good common sense to eat carbs, and if one has to eat some depending on their diet, simply ensure you don't eat potatoes, rice, pasta or bread...substitute these for much more fascinating, foods and menus that are even better, and healthier.It's a question I've often wondered about.
I'm no expert but from an evolutionary point of view, it's only been very recently that we've had carbs in our diets. I don't think our bodies actually need them - could it just be that some people's bodies can deal with them and some can't ?
Could do with some clarity on this from someone who has studied it in some detail.......just to put it out of my head
Except birds and rodents.We are also the only animals stupid enough to eat them
Except birds and rodents.
Your question: "How did the ancient Americans (indigenous if you want) get to the Americas?"
It is thought that human migrated out of Africa, gradually spread across Russia then walked across a land-bridge to Alaska which existed temporarily when sea levels fell. This is thought to have happened about 14,000 years ago (although estimates vary and some people believe it is a lot longer ago than that).
Humans in our present form, i.e. Homo Sapiens, have existed for circa 270,000 years. We started eating wild grains roughly 22,000 years ago, and started farming roughly 10,000 years ago. In Homo Sapiens period of existence that's hardly just a day. More like a month. Genus Homo beings have existed for millions of years, however I'm not sure what you can and can't state about their diets, etc....
Native American populations have a greater percentage of Neanderthal DNA than East Asian populations which, in turn, have more than Europeans. Africans mostly have none.Thanks for that, as a history A level student, many years ago, in fact I am a part of history according to my grandkids and my much younger work colleagues.
I was aware of that theory and I do believe that it is many years before history tells us that it happened.
One question that crops up is, do indigenous Americans have similar DNA as us Europeans which does have Neanderthal genome?
Interesting!
Very interesting. I found another article on this:Native American populations have a greater percentage of Neanderthal DNA than East Asian populations which, in turn, have more than Europeans. Africans mostly have none.
This article talks about the hypothesis that a gene which increases the risk of type 2 diabetes may have come from Neanderthals originally:- https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/140204_diabetes
Yes, interesting.Very interesting. I found another article on this:
https://dna-explained.com/2013/12/26/native-americans-neanderthal-and-denisova-admixture/
Specifically it says that although both Europeans and native Americans have Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, the Americans got gene variants that increases the risk of type 2 diabetes from archaic humans that the Europeans didn't.
This likely explains why 90% of the indigenous people where I live are predicted to get type diabetes in their lifetime compared to 50% for everyone else. However, I doubt many of pre-contact people here, who ate mostly animals (especially bison), got type 2 diabetes, but that's just a hunch.
I think most people could have predicted that Pimas on a diet of western food (i.e. mostly highly processed, mostly refined carbs, refined veg oil, and lots of sugar) would be less healthy than Pimas eating their traditional diet (mostly maize, beans, squash, with some meat). However, I suspect that, prior to contact with Europeans, they were not as healthy as their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. I doubt the fibre has anything to do with their state of health - the Inuit didn't eat any fibre and were very healthy on their traditional diet of almost all meat.Yes, interesting.
Perhaps you're familiar with the 'Pima Indians' of Arizona who are highly studied with respect to genes/environment/obesity/diabetes as they have the highest prevalence of diabetes in the world. They have been compared to the 'Pima Indians' of Mexico who share a very similar gene pool but have much lower rates of diabetes. Research published in the journal, 'Diabetes Care' (link below) found that the Pima Indians in Mexico eat a low fat (around 25% calories from fat), high fibre (>50g/day) diet but have much higher physical activity levels than their counterparts in Arizona. (Previous studies had shown the Pimas in Arizona to have a higher fat, lower fibre diet).
Although it might be that the pre-contact people had a high meat (and therefore low carb) diet, this research suggests that it is possible to reduce the risk of onset of type 2 diabetes whilst following a low fat diet by changing the environment in other ways such as other dietary factors and exercise).
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/29/8/1866
High levels of dietary fibre can put a brake on how much food is consumed and can therefore reduce the risk of obesity and therefore type 2 diabetes. Another way of reducing risk of obesity is to live in a cold climate where there is increased need to use food to supply heat. Different ways to achieve similar outcomes.I think most people could have predicted that Pimas on a diet of western food (i.e. mostly highly processed, mostly refined carbs, refined veg oil, and lots of sugar) would be less healthy than Pimas eating their traditional diet (mostly maize, beans, squash, with some meat). However, I suspect that, prior to contact with Europeans, they were not as healthy as their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. I doubt the fibre has anything to do with their state of health - the Inuit didn't eat any fibre and were very healthy on their traditional diet of almost all meat.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/8...ker-and-shorter-than-their-forager-ancestors/
One of the reasons I am convinced that the human diet should not include carbs is our teeth. The effect of carbs on our teeth is quite profound (i.e. they are destroyed - unless you brush and floss diligently, which humans didn't for most of our existence) and I think it clearly shows that carbs are not a significant part of our natural diet. These hunter-gatherers added a of starch to their diet with terrible results:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140114112713.htm
Well, I haven't eat any fruit or veg for more than 2 years and I don't have scurvy or any other health issues (other than some peripheral neuropathy that is slowly improving). A constant supply of meat is just as good as fruit and veg for preventing health issues related to vitamin c deficiency. The idea that humans need a dietary source of vitamin C is interesting, but meat will supply all the vitamin c a human needs, as long as they are not consuming lots of refined carbs.Humans are one of the few animals that can't synthesize vitamin C - this is thought to indicate that our ancestral diet included a constant supply of fruit so loss of the ability to synthesize it was selected against.
I don't think that the idea that humans ancestors could not have survived an African wild animal-only diet due to their low far content is vegan propaganda. The author believes that meat-eating was an essential step in human evolution, as stated in this paper, https://nature.berkeley.edu/miltonlab/pdfs/meateating.pdf (which includes references to insects this time) but that the meat-eating supplemented plant-eating rather than replacing it entirely. The author also states that circumpolar peoples can survive on a virtually animal-only diet but this is because the animals they eat have a high fat content. In other words, it is possible for modern humans to live-off a mostly animal diet if those animals have sufficient fat stores. However, our ancestors on the African savannah would not have been able to do this as the local animals did not contain enough fat. Because humans have a slower gut-transit time than carnivores,they cannot eat enough low-fat animal produce in a day to supply all their calories. I don't think the author mentions 'rabbit starvation' but I would have though that phenomenon would be another problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoningWell, I haven't eat any fruit or veg for more than 2 years and I don't have scurvy or any other health issues (other than some peripheral neuropathy that is slowly improving). A constant supply of meat is just as good as fruit and veg for preventing health issues related to vitamin c deficiency. The idea that humans need a dietary source of vitamin C is interesting, but meat will supply all the vitamin c a human needs, as long as they are not consuming lots of refined carbs.
The idea that humans are not adapted to eating exclusively wild animals is rather a strange idea, given that many did just that, and sounds like vegan propaganda. The paper you quote seems also to be rather biased and a lot of it doesn't make sense to me. It's odd that the person that wrote this is from "Division of Insect Biology", yet doesn't mention that many hunter-gatherers ate lots of insects. I think it's also odd that her conclusion was that we should eat more fruit and vegetables and not more meat. After reading the commentary I would have concluded people wanting to eat in a healthy manner should strive to eat less refined carbs/sugar and less processed food. I confess I don't understand her arguments against the idea that humans survived off mostly meat prior to the invention of agriculture. The people around where I live for sure survived on a close to all-eat diet before Europeans arrived. In fact, the early Europeans had to adopt the local diet or they died. Modern people who eat an all animal derived diet (as I do) do fine even when the source of meat is domestic animals. I suspect that my teeth and digestive system are adapted to eating meat, based solely on fact that I eat meat and digest it without any issues. Most wild plants have to be processed in some way before humans can eat them to make them digestible or to remove toxins. Meat doesn't. Humans can't survive long-term eating only fruit. Humans can thrive on a meat only diet.
I'm guessing that the !Kung would eat more meat if they could:
https://peregrinenutrition.com/blogs/peregrinations/what-did-the-bushmen-actually-eat
They people around here ate bison, mostly. They did this with just stone-age tools. The bison only had sufficient fat for human consumption for only a short time of the year, specifically females late in the summer. They would hunt during this time and preserve enough to last them through the year, supplemented by occasional hunting. They ate a few berries during the short time they were available. but it wasn't a significant part of their diet. They did that for at least 5 millenium. I can assure you that their digestive system and teeth, as well as mine, are well suited to eat a virtually all meat diet. Humans are omnivores, so can eat both plants and animals. Humans invented tools for processing meat and controlled fire for cooking meat long before modern humans evolved, so cut up and cooked meat is what we've been eating since we came into existence - so eating raw meat with or bare hands and teeth is not really applicable to us in discussing our diet. It's pretty easy to get all the nutrition we need fro eating animals only. It's very difficult to get all the nutrition we need eating only plants. Our ancestors ate plants to prevent starvation and ate as much meat as their environment allowed. I'm really not buying that animals on the savanna did not have enough fat for humans to survive on. I don't think there is good evidence that meat eating supplemented plant food - it's the other way around.I don't think that the idea that humans ancestors could not have survived an African wild animal-only diet due to their low far content is vegan propaganda. The author believes that meat-eating was an essential step in human evolution, as stated in this paper, https://nature.berkeley.edu/miltonlab/pdfs/meateating.pdf (which includes references to insects this time) but that the meat-eating supplemented plant-eating rather than replacing it entirely. The author also states that circumpolar peoples can survive on a virtually animal-only diet but this is because the animals they eat have a high fat content. In other words, it is possible for modern humans to live-off a mostly animal diet if those animals have sufficient fat stores. However, our ancestors on the African savannah would not have been able to do this as the local animals did not contain enough fat. Because humans have a slower gut-transit time than carnivores,they cannot eat enough low-fat animal produce in a day to supply all their calories. I don't think the author mentions 'rabbit starvation' but I would have though that phenomenon would be another problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning
The reason that the author talked about eating more fruit and veg rather than less carbs and processed food is that she was specifically replying to Cordain et al who were advocating increased consumption of animal foods based on hunter-gatherer diets. Whole foods versus processed foods would be a different debate.
You don't have the digestive system typical of a carnivore (large canines, simple gut, fast transit time) but I assume you cope with your diet by use of tools (such as a knife), cooking and by eating domesticated animals that have been bred for a high fat content. (In contrast,the Giant Panda has the digestive system of a carnivore but eats a 100% plant-based diet. The way it copes with this is to spend virtually all day eating and doing not much else.) I suspect the people where you live, if they survived off an all-meat diet, would have included some fatty meat in their diet such as beaver, goose or fish. Unless you live very far north, it is likely that there was also some carbohydrate consumption from gathered berries and leaves.
At the end of the day, there isn't enough planet for all human beings to eat an animal-only diet, even if it was desirable to do so.
They people around here ate bison, mostly. They did this with just stone-age tools. The bison only had sufficient fat for human consumption for only a short time of the year, specifically females late in the summer. They would hunt during this time and preserve enough to last them through the year, supplemented by occasional hunting. They ate a few berries during the short time they were available. but it wasn't a significant part of their diet. They did that for at least 5 millenium. I can assure you that their digestive system and teeth, as well as mine, are well suited to eat a virtually all meat diet. Humans are omnivores, so can eat both plants and animals. Humans invented tools for processing meat and controlled fire for cooking meat long before modern humans evolved, so cut up and cooked meat is what we've been eating since we came into existence - so eating raw meat with or bare hands and teeth is not really applicable to us in discussing our diet. It's pretty easy to get all the nutrition we need fro eating animals only. It's very difficult to get all the nutrition we need eating only plants. Our ancestors ate plants to prevent starvation and ate as much meat as their environment allowed. I'm really not buying that animals on the savanna did not have enough fat for humans to survive on. I don't think there is good evidence that meat eating supplemented plant food - it's the other way around.
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