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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @dtonon 7 Jan \ parent \ on: What has your experience been with the carnivore diet? alter_native
Let's see when is this "before".
Humans began to cultivate and consume vegetables, grains, and legumes in significant quantities during the Neolithic Revolution, which occurred around 10,000 years ago. This period marks the transition from a nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers to a sedentary lifestyle based on agriculture.
10,000 years is a sufficient period for significant genetic changes to occur in human populations, especially in response to environmental pressures and changes in lifestyle, such as diet.
10,000 years is almost nothing compared to recorded human evolution, starting with the famous "Lucy", I believe she was a Homo Erectus.
Yes, there have been some genetic changes because of agriculture. Notably a more widespread ability to digest lactose, in some populations.
But we are still exquisitely well designed for eating meat. Here's a quote from the book The Carnivore Code. It's about how archeological records show that when agriculture was introduced - yes, the population did rise dramatically. But health got worse.
In western Illinois, perched atop a bluff near the confluence of the Spoon River and Illinois River, lie thirteen earthen mounds that hold treasure. It is not the type of golden treasure our good friend Indy would have been after, but historical treasure. These are burial mounds that provide evidence of the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherers who lived in this area from around 950 AD to 1200 AD—a time period in which a very interesting thing happened. For reasons unknown, the population appears to have undergone a massive shift in the way that they were eating. They went from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a lifestyle based primarily on maize (ancient corn) agriculture. Multiple theories exist as to why this may have happened. It may have been out of necessity due to increasing population numbers or perhaps the development of a new technology that allowed tilling of the soil. Other possible reasons include overhunting and the decline of large animal populations. There are still others who point to the hypothetical Younger Dryas meteor impact that caused climate changes and mass faunal extinctions.
For whatever reason, these groups shifted their practices, and the population increased ten times in the span of the 250 years after they adopted agriculture. But there was a dark side to this growth. Comparison of bones from these pre- and post-agriculture groups reveal striking differences indicative of a marked decline in health with the introduction of agriculture.9,10 Dickson Mounds researchers noted a clear decrease in both femur length and tibia diameter in children from the post agricultural period. Adult skeletons from this area displayed the same pattern as well as a significant reduction in stature after farming was introduced.
Similar discrepancies in height have been found in other ancient civilizations. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey reveal that 12,000 years ago, the average height of hunter-gatherers was five feet, nine inches for men and five feet, five inches for women. But with the adoption of agriculture, adult height plummeted—dashing any hopes these poor pastoralists would have had of dunking a basketball or playing competitive volleyball, if those sports had existed at the time. By 3,000 BC, men in this region of the world stood only five feet, three inches tall, and women a diminutive five feet, reflecting a massive decline in their overall nutritional status. Many studies across varied populations show a strong correlation between adult height and nutritional quality. One study looking at male height across 105 countries came to the following conclusion:
“In taller nations…the consumption of plant proteins markedly decreases at the expense of animal proteins, especially those from dairy. Their highest consumption rates can be found in Northern and Central Europe, with the global peak of male height in the Netherlands (184 cm).”11
In this large study of nutritional quality, it is intriguing to note that the intake of animal foods directly correlated with greater height in males. The authors point out that even under conditions of caloric equivalency in plant-heavy versus animal-heavy cultures, height levels were higher in the latter societies. Other studies have come to similar conclusions regarding the key role that nutritional quality plays in determining adult height:
“Evidence across studies indicates that short adult height (reflecting growth retardation) in low- and middle-income countries is driven by environmental conditions, especially net nutrition during early years… This review suggests that adult height is a useful marker of variation in cumulative net nutrition, biological deprivation, and standard of living between and within populations and should be routinely measured.”12
In addition to declining height, there is also evidence that the Native Americans buried at the Dickson Mounds suffered increased bacterial infections. Such infections leave marks on the outer surface of the bone, known as the periosteum, with the tibia being especially susceptible to such damage due to its limited blood flow. Examination of tibias from skeletons found in the mounds shows that post agriculture, the number of such periosteal lesions increased threefold, with a whopping eighty-four percent of bones from this period demonstrating this pathology. The lesions also tended to be more severe and to show up earlier in life in the bones from the post agriculture peoples.
Another type of bone lesion, known as porotic hyperostosis, occurs in the skull and thinner bones of the body and is suggestive of nutrient deficiencies such as zinc and iron. These striking lesions cause the thin bones to have a “spongiform” appearance as the marrow expands and the other layers erode. At the Dickson Mounds, eye sockets and skulls demonstrated porotic hyperostosis, again with markings that display an increase in occurrence and severity after hunting practices were deemphasized in favor of farming. The incidence of joint and spine arthritic degeneration also appears to have doubled between these two periods. Defects in tooth enamel, suggestive of inadequate intake of the fat soluble vitamins unique to animal foods, increased across this time span as well. Clearly, eating less animals and more farmed plants was a disaster for the health of these peoples. Despite an increase in the population, their overall health took a serious nose dive.
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