Food

[joshua 1 9]

The FDA just banned trans fat. Science can not always agree on what foods are safe to eat. There are people that claim major disease like heart disease, diabetes and cancer can be controlled through eating a proper diet. An ounce of prevention we are told can translate into a pound of cure. So if science does not know for sure what is good healthy and safe to eat then why not turn to evolutionary theory. Perhaps that can help us determine what foods we should eat for peek performance and max health.

 

[dgiharris]

Science has a pretty good handle on what foods are "safe to eat".

the real question though, is figuring out with a degree of certainty the affects different foods will have on you over time and to quantify those affects vs varying human traits. This is also complicated by various factors such as race, age, sex, fitness level, medical conditions, etc.

And when you say Science can not always agree on what foods are safe to eat you make it sound like Harvard says, "broccoli causes cancer" while Yale says "broccoli is good for you". No. There is a lot of foods that "science" has a consensus on . That isn't the problem. The problem is figuring out specific effects food has on you long term and quantifying those effects...

FWIW, Nutritional science is a fairly new field of study and research takes time. But for the most part, the Science has a decent handle on what we definitely should or should not eat. Vegetables YES, nutritionally empty high fatty foods, NO.

Now the tricky subject would be genetically modified foods. Now there is something worth discussing on whether we should or should not eat them and to what extent they harm or help us...

 

[HitchSlap]

If it was grown by the sun and came from the ground, and won't kill you, then food.

 

[pgp_protector]

If it was grown by the sun and came from the ground, and won't kill you, then food.

Marijuana?

 

[Loudmouth]

The FDA just banned trans fat. Science can not always agree on what foods are safe to eat. There are people that claim major disease like heart disease, diabetes and cancer can be controlled through eating a proper diet. An ounce of prevention we are told can translate into a pound of cure. So if science does not know for sure what is good healthy and safe to eat then why not turn to evolutionary theory. Perhaps that can help us determine what foods we should eat for peek performance and max health.

Exercise is probably 10x more important than food for increasing your health.

 

[HitchSlap]

Exercise is probably 10x more important than food for increasing your health.

I'm not even sure how you would quantify this. Food is just as integral as exercise in maintaining or improving health. We know that foods high in sugar, refined carbohydrates, and trans fats / saturated fats put people at increase risk for obesity and heart disease. All the latest evidence also suggests sleep is as important as food and exercise.

 

[HitchSlap]

Marijuana?

For some, I suppose.

 

[joshua 1 9]

If it was grown by the sun and came from the ground, and won't kill you, then food.

Some food seems to be better than others. They talk about simple carbs verses complex carbs. Berries are said to be good for the brain. Grains are good for easy to convert energy.

 

[juvenissun]

The FDA just banned trans fat. Science can not always agree on what foods are safe to eat. There are people that claim major disease like heart disease, diabetes and cancer can be controlled through eating a proper diet. An ounce of prevention we are told can translate into a pound of cure. So if science does not know for sure what is good healthy and safe to eat then why not turn to evolutionary theory. Perhaps that can help us determine what foods we should eat for peek performance and max health.

Evolution is broken again in this case. We cook our food. Nothing else does.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Marijuana?

This gets into a different evolutionary theory having to do with desire. IE there are four groups of plants. Sweet, beautiful, intoxicating and controling. The theory is plants control animals more than the animals control the plants. For example the more beautiful flower controls the bee to provide it with pollination.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Evolution is broken again in this case. We cook our food. Nothing else does.

We cook our food. Maybe by accident, if the food was too close to the fire. The cooked food is easier to digest and therefore an evolutionary advantage over uncooked food. Animals then need us to cook food for them so they have this advantage. This could have been a part of the domestication of animals. For example a hunting dog helps us get the food if we cook it and give them a few scraps or share it with them.

 

[joshua 1 9]

All the latest evidence also suggests sleep is as important as food and exercise.

Sleep becomes the third category usually referred to as stress control. Maintaining healthy relationships is included. Meditation, yoga, prayer tai chi and so on is also a part of this.

 

[dgiharris]

Evolution is broken again in this case. We cook our food. Nothing else does.

why would cooking our food break evolution? There are COUNTLESS examples of animals in nature "Learning" something and then passing that something on to future generations. Wolves, primates, and whales come to mind.

Somewhere along our evolutionary path, someone accidentally cooked something and liked the way it tasted. This spread until all homosapiens that knew how to make fire used it to cook their food.

If you want to "break" evolution, man-o-man do you need a much better example...

 

[dgiharris]

Exercise is probably 10x more important than food for increasing your health.

Agreed, exercise is extremely important for health (man I need to start exercising again )

Also, the human body is a food guzzling machine probably only bested by the goat .

We can eat a very wide range of foods compared to other animals on the planet. We can eat basically 99.9% of all animals and a wide range of vegetables and fruits. Vegetation like leaves and plants is a little trickier, grass is okay though not all that appetizing.

I did some google fu on exercise vs diet and turns out I couldn't find a definitive source to say one was more important than the other though... Obviously the sites say BOTH are important.

It would be fun to pit 100 couch potatoes who ate healthy against 100 workout nuts who ate not-so-healthy and see who fairs better health wise over time...

 

[Shemjaza]

Evolution is broken again in this case. We cook our food. Nothing else does.

Except we can survive fine without cooked food. Also clothes, glasses and the internet.

 

[juvenissun]

why would cooking our food break evolution? There are COUNTLESS examples of animals in nature "Learning" something and then passing that something on to future generations. Wolves, primates, and whales come to mind.

Somewhere along our evolutionary path, someone accidentally cooked something and liked the way it tasted. This spread until all homosapiens that knew how to make fire used it to cook their food.

If you want to "break" evolution, man-o-man do you need a much better example...

Why did chimps have that accident? Do they have a much much better chance to get the accident?

 

[juvenissun]

Except we can survive fine without cooked food. Also clothes, glasses and the internet.

If that were the case, evolution might have a chance to be true.
But, sorry, your dream is completely shattered.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Why did chimps have that accident? Do they have a much much better chance to get the accident?

I am not aware of any chimps that use fire. We can study the effect of their diet. For example, fruit eating chimps have a smaller gut than leaf eating monkeys. The higher quality diet allows them to have a larger brain. We find this more in humans. Higher quality of food, smaller gut and a larger brain.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Except we can survive fine without cooked food. Also clothes, glasses and the internet.

40,000 years ago some very interesting artifacts began to show up. Fishing nets, sowing needles and fishing hooks. Before this clothing was more like paper made from the fiber of the fig tree. Some tribes in Africa still make clothing like this for their festivals. If you remember the story of Adam and Eve they tried to cover themselves with a fig then God made them animal skins for a cover. We know at the time man began to go north into an eco system dominated by Neanderthal. He was able to adapt to the colder weather and Neanderthal ended up going extinct. Survival is not evolution. We are looking for why or how the various species (including man) evolved. I am looking at how higher quality diets have an evolutionary advantage over low quality diet. Of course this is duel evolution sense higher quality food had to evolve. The question maybe is domesticated food of higher quality than wild food?

 

[Shemjaza]

If that were the case, evolution might have a chance to be true.
But, sorry, your dream is completely shattered.

Do you actually have any evidence for that? I don't think anyone would disagree that human benefit greatly from the technology of cooking... but we are quite capable of living off a variety of uncooked foods. And in warmer climates we can live fine without clothes.

40,000 years ago some very interesting artifacts began to show up. Fishing nets, sowing needles and fishing hooks. Before this clothing was more like paper made from the fiber of the fig tree. Some tribes in Africa still make clothing like this for their festivals. If you remember the story of Adam and Eve they tried to cover themselves with a fig then God made them animal skins for a cover. We know at the time man began to go north into an eco system dominated by Neanderthal. He was able to adapt to the colder weather and Neanderthal ended up going extinct. Survival is not evolution. We are looking for why or how the various species (including man) evolved. I am looking at how higher quality diets have an evolutionary advantage over low quality diet. Of course this is duel evolution sense higher quality food had to evolve. The question maybe is domesticated food of higher quality than wild food?

Humans seem to have out competed and absorbed the Neanderthals long before we had large scale domestication. I think herding and farming allow for much larger quantities of food to be produced and so larger populations.

Evolution and technology can affect one another. Take lactose tolerance, it would be a completely invisible mutation if it didn't happen in populations with domesticated goats or cows. However, it has spread over the world.