
Bill Clinton: Vegan, anti-smoker, imperial puppet.
If you want to get ahead, get a brainThere is overwhelming evidence that we can not be a vegetarian species. In 1972 the publication of two independent investigations confirmed this.
-1-2They concerned fats. About half our brain and nervous system is composed of complicated, long-chain, fatty acids. These are also used in the walls of our blood vessels. Without them we cannot develop normally. These fatty acids do not occur in plants, although fatty acids in a simpler form do. This is where plant-eating herbivores come in. Over the year, the herbivores convert the simple fatty acids found in grasses and seeds into intermediate, more complicated forms. By eating the herbivores we can convert their stores of these fatty acids into the ones we need.
About 2.5 million years ago animal foods began to occupy an increasingly prominent place in our ancestors' menus. Smaller molar size, less robust facial muscles and alterations in incisor shape from that time all suggest a greater emphasis on foods such as meat that require less grinding and more tearing.
An increasing proportion of meat in the diet would obviously have provided more animal protein, a factor perhaps related to the increase in stature which appears to have accompanied the transition from
Australopithecines through
Homo habilis to
Homo erectus.-3But greater availability of animal fat was probably a more important dietary alteration. Crude stone tools allowed early humans to break bones and allowed them access to brain and marrow fats from a broad range of animals obtained by scavenging or hunting. These and other carcass fats were probably as prized by early hominids as they are by modern human hunter-gatherers.
-4Not only did more animal fat in the diet mean considerably more energy, it was also a source of ready-made, long-chain, polyunsaturated fatty acids, including omega-6 arachidonic acid (AA), omega-3 docosatetraenoic acid (DTA) and omega-3 docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). These 3 fatty acids together make up over 90% of the fatty acids found in the brain matter of all mammalian species.
-5Our brain is considerably larger than that of any ape. Looking back at the fossil records from early hominids to modern man, we see a remarkable increase in brain size from 375-550 ml at the time of
Australopithecus, to 500-800 ml in
Homo habilis, 775-1,225 ml in
Homo erectus, and 1,350 cc in modern humans (
Homo sapiens). While there is still speculation about why this should have happened, this increase in brain size could not have been supported physiologically without an increased intake of preformed long-chain fatty acids which are an essential component in the formation of brain tissue.
-6 It would never have occurred if our ancestors had not eaten meat - with its fat. Human breast milk contains the fatty acids needed for large brain development, cow's milk does not. It is no coincidence that, in relative terms, our brain is some 50 times the size of a cow's.
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