Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains | Hacker News Reader

Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains

scientificamerican.com

210 pointshourislate131 comments

One of the first human foods was actually bone marrow which is basically pure fat.

This happened about 2MYA by Homo habilis who figured out that you could use rocks to bust open bones.

Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures.

One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones.

Well it's a massive source of free calories. It's absolutely brilliant. It's just sitting there and there are no other predators or species around to fight with at that point.

It's also very safe to eat even days after since the marrow is wrapped in bone.

Next time you're out at a fancy restaurant and they have bone marrow GET IT...

Then realize you're eating one of the first foods that modern man ate and think of the gift he gave us.

"who figured out that you could use rocks to bust open bones."

Most carnivores use their teeth to crush bones - lions and hyenas both do it. Heck, we buy doggie treats related to marrow and I have watched my own dogs crush bones to get to the marrow.

Marrow is quite accessible to all, including me - omnomnomnomnom.

Reminds me of family holiday meals as a child, with all the uncles arguing over who gets to slurp the marrow out of the bones.

Except on Thanksgiving, when they argued over who gets the "Pope's nose."

I use to feed street dogs in Thailand. I gave them BBQ-cooked chicken legs, and gosh, there would be nothing left in 10 seconds.

While I'm sure you did this out of good will, please don't give chicken bones to dogs.

They tend to splinter, leaving sharp spikes that may hurt the dog's intestines.

Beef and pork bones are better since these don't shatter.

Just to clarify, chicken bones themselves aren't a huge issue. It's cooked chicken bones, actually any cooked bones at all, that splinter and cause problems.

Of course, birds have small bones so dogs can conceivably choke on them when uncooked as well, but it's generally not a huge concern. The splintering however, is a result of cooking[1].

[1] https://www.rspcapetinsurance.org.au/pet-care/pet-ownership/...

I see, didnt know that. Thanks for letting me know.

I have a chicken in the slow cooker almost every single day. If the bones have cooked for more than 12 hours, it’s not possible for them to harm anyone. They’re too soft. By the time is they have simmered 24 hours, they are easily chewable.

Extended simmering (>6 hours) releases much of the nutrients in bones, too - collagen, gelatin, fats, minerals. I frequently slow-cook whole chickens and small bones become so soft they can easily be eaten after about 24 hours. Of course, you don't want to over-do this due to issues like histamine and lead.

Breaking down whole chickens with all bones and connective tissues is one of the areas where a good pressure cooker really shines. I like to make big piles of chicken and beef stock using a pressure cooker, then reducing it on the stovetop. I freeze most of it, and reduce some of the beef stock much further down to demi glacé, freeze it in ice cube trays and use it for sauces and soups.

A popular soup in Korea is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seolleongtang

There are restaurants in Seoul with huge cauldrons of the stuff that have been continuously under boil for decades.

The mineral content is so strong that it never seems to ever pick up the salt you can season it with tableside, but it's otherwise almost tasteless.

I'm been a huge fan of bone broth lately. 9g protein/cup vs none in normal chicken/beef broth - and I find it tastier to boot. (Though it's almost always out of stock at the local grocery store)

they don't stock stock but broth?

Can you elaborate on the histamine/lead issue?

I'm not sure about histamines, but animals accumulate heavy metals in their bones and teeth (including humans). Some lipid-soluble forms of metals will accumulate in fat too, like mercury in tuna or marlin.

Unfortunately there's evidence that metals like lead, arsenic, and cadmium are increasingly present in animal feeds. This is especially true in fish feed. Since farmed animals don't typically eat other farmed animals this won't have a biomagnification effect, but it's definitely happening in the wild (hence fish feed made from wild fish being especially contaminated).

The bottom line is that if you eat the bones, it'll dramatically increase the possibility of you metabolizing and storing the contaminants in your own body.

You'll be fine if you have a bit here and there. I personally believe (with no solid evidence) that this is where pasture-raised animals in most areas will be superior to feedlot livestock from who-knows-where. Heavy metals can be everywhere, but we know that they're increasingly present in feedlots. If the farmer near you has pastures, organic certification, and the cows aren't downstream from a pulp mill or landfill, chances are pretty good that it's worth the extra few dollars per pound.

Chickens end up with lead in their bones from pollution in their feed and environment. Normally, it stays in their bones and is discarded. However, extended simmering such as over 12 hours starts to release the lead. It’s a very small amount, anyhow.

As far as histamine this is one resource: https://help.kettleandfire.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001159707...

Given populations of primates who use rocks to break nuts and shellfish open, I would not be shocked if this is a trait that primates evolved many times in various contexts. Still, most felids and canids (as others point out) crush bones routinely for marrow. Between that and the likelihood of more than just one ancestral tool users I’m skeptical anytime claims of one major factor leading to big brains come out.

I bet more than one factor was at play, and it probably involved some early forms of coordination through communication, the ability to carry things in hands while running, tool use, diet, and selection pressures.

I’m like 80% sure that hyenas are absolutely bone crushers. They get a ton of calories from breaking open bones (with their teeth/jaw)

Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert which had been picked clean by vultures.

One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the bones.

Wait - I thought hyenas were specifically bone-busting / eating:

"Spotted hyenas are some of Africa's most proficient predators. A frenzied scrum of them can dismantle and devour a 400-pound zebra in 25 minutes. An adult spotted hyena can tear off and swallow 30 or 40 pounds of meat per feeding. Latecomers to a kill use their massive jaw muscles and molars to pulverize the bones for minerals and fatty marrow. Hair and hooves get regurgitated later. "The only thing left is a patch of blood on the ground," says Holekamp." [1]

1 - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/whos-laughing-...

May be hyenas also adapter over million year period to bust open bones. But i wonder why they did not develop a brain like ours!

Evolution doesn't converge for all species to some single point. It was enough that hyenas got adapted to their environment, and their mutations didn't make much difference towards larger brains.

Brains are only developed if there is an advantage and I guess a brain without fingers, our eyes etc isn't maybe as useful as using the fat for energy.

Yp, brain uses tremendous amount of energy so there's a cost. Use too much of it to build the brain and you starve...use too little and same result since you're outsmarted. Rinse repeat until it's perfected.

Heyenas have 2 extra legs to waste energy on. Not much left in the budget for a big brain.

Rats have a similar brain-to-body mass as humans. Cats are fairly intelligent, are they not?

Note that the part you quote talks abut the latecomers to a kill going for the bones. That suggests that maybe hyenas don't like the bones, but will eat them if they aren't able to get the better parts of the kill.

Another part of that same article, talking about a rare hyena that made it to old age, mentions "She still had perfect teeth, too, since her rank assured her the best cuts of meat, whereas the teeth of lower-ranking animals get chipped and worn from crunching bones", which fits in with the bones not being something that they actually want.

So maybe if an animal is killed by a hyena pack that is small enough for everyone to get a good chunk of meat, they leave the less desired bones behind?

I was going to say...haven't you ever seen a dog go after a bone?

A number of replies to this comment point out that modern animals also eat bone marrow. However, that may have not been the case a couple million years ago.

In “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, Diamond points out that animals in Africa are particularly vicious and dangerous due to their coevolution with humans. Animals outside of Africa rapidly went extinct as evolved humans spread to the rest of the world, since they didn’t have the same evolutionary opportunity.

I know little about evolutionary biology or zoology, but I’m curious if the modern behavior/capability of animals to eat bone marrow could be the result of evolutionary pressure from coevolution with humans.

The chances of a highly nutritious, energy dense food being just left to go to waste by nature are practically zero. There are many, many examples of animals becoming highly evolved/specialised to exploit such food sources in habitats that don't feature humans (e.g. the oceans). The GP comment was an egregious example of a "Just-so story".

>The chances of a highly nutritious, energy dense food being just left to go to waste by nature are practically zero.

Well, humans are nature so..

Carnivore diversity was much higher in the Late Pliocene -- which means more frequent and varied scavenging opportunities.

There might have been a very small, precious window where early hominins had the chance for this discovery because of abundance.

[1] Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/701477?jou...

Marrow is/was so well known as the best part that it appeared in poetry and prose.

KVJ Bible Psalms: 63:5 (there are many others)

> My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat,

Thoreau in Walden,

> I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, ...

"in the middle of the dessert"

This was probably a mistake but I love the way it sort of works both ways.

How can bone marrow be one of the first human foods? Humans had to learn the use of tools first to access bone marrow. Humans needed a better brain to figure out how to create and use tools.

Also, predators are very intelligent. They can and will break open bones. Domestic dogs do that. Hyenas are renowned for their bone-crushing abilities.

Bone marrow is not the only source of fat. There are plenty of plant-based foods rich in fat

Most - if not all - primates can use simple tools like rocks to crush things. Our ancestors used the simplest of tools even before they were considered human.

> Next time you're out at a fancy restaurant and they have bone marrow GET IT..

As a child I remember enjoying lamb chops, but specifically remember going straight for the delicious yet delicate marrow. I'd suck it out or poke around the short piece of bone with knife to scrape it all out. My parents would even give me their bones pieces to eat while telling me "that's the best part!". Turns out they weren't kidding.

How about Pho which relies, at least in nothern Vietnam, heavily on bone marrow? You need to cook the bones IIRC at least 12 hours until the marrow dissolves. Does the long cooking process "harm" any nutrions?

I don't subscribe to New Scientist's trick title or the theories of nutrient limited mammalian brain evolution.

Compare brain size of carnivore species with herbivores - there is no overt division in average or max brain size. Generally, herbivorous mammals seem to evolve brains just as large as carnivorous ones. Elephants, orangutans, gorillas grow big brains on a vegetarian diet.

If predator diets contain a special surplus of evolutionary-brain-growing nutrients, a few predator species should manifest that claim ~ besides our own artful and fire cooking one.

Brain size to body size matters a lot too. Sperm whales have about 6x the brain we do, but far more than 6x the body to control.

Just looking now.. Mice have similar brain/body-mass ratio as humans. There is no strong (or visible) distinction in brain size between carnivores and herbivores in these comparisons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Compa...

You don't have to compare brain-mass/body-mass. You have to compare brain-mass/body-mass^(2/3).

> This phenomenon can be described by an equation of the form E = CS^r, where E and S are brain and body weights, r a constant that depends on animal family (but close to 2/3 in many vertebrates

I know this is the conventional wisdom but it doesn't really make sense. Controlling a sperm whale's body doesn't seem like a hard computational problem.

I assume you mean relative to controlling a human body?

Relative to anything smaller really.

Echolocation in a "true" 3d environment is a very hard computational problem, which is why many aqueous mammals developed larger brains.

Look at it this way:

FIRST -----

It's not a causal relationship, more energy is available -> brains start growing.

There must be evolutionary pressure for brain growth in the first place. Otherwise larger brains are selected against because it's wasteful compared to what the competition does, even if there is more energy. Only if there is such a pressure does the availability of more energy make a difference.

Other species put energy surpluses into things like elaborate but useless physiological features (interpreted as signalling their health to potential female mates), such as large tails or feathers that are either useless or sometimes even actually hinder and have no other function (that we found). So just "more energy" does not point towards any specific development, such as brain size. What happens with it, if anything, depends on other factors.

If a predator species is doing just fine finding food and mates, no need to grow the brain, no matter how much energy there is.

SECOND ------

A huge difference between herbivores and predators is the amount of time they spent on getting food. Herbivores spend pretty much all their time eating. "Meat eaters" spend most of their time resting. The additional energy is used to delay the time between meals. (Herbivore) meat grows a lot slower than plants. Alternatively, there would have to be a lot less predators, and they would have to roam greater distances - which may not work out energy wise when you add it all up. It would be interesting to do some calculations, what happens to energy if you tweak those variables, i.e. a predator species eating significantly more and using the additional energy to sleep less, what are the limitations, what happens to the system, where are the constrains?

Humans eat meat and we also spend most of our time doing something (other than eating). Of course, we managed to get more nutrients and more energy by cooking, putting part of our digestion outside our bodies, so it's not limited to "energy dense meat" vs. "grass", we are much more flexible that way.

But brain to body size is determined by meat and fat consumption.

Gorillas are big primates for their brain size. Chimps eat quite a bit of meat, and are not only generally ranked "smarter", but have a bigger brain for their relative body size.

Gracile Chimps (bonobos) eat "fruits, nuts, shoots, stems, pith, leaves, roots, flowers and tubers. Mushrooms are occasionally eaten, and invertebrates such as termites, worms and grubs make up a small proportion of their diet."

- their brains are JUST AS BIG as their carnivorous cousin species. So we have a direct comparison between two very closely related great apes that strongly indicates no evolutionary brain growth advantage of carnivorous diet.

This theory seems to have a single example of an exceptionally large brained predator to claim that predation enables exceptionally large brains - humans. Humans are omnivores - traders, cookers, testers, diversifiers - some human cultures don't eat any meat - and they don't all have little heads as a result.

Ive always liked butter and fatty cuts btw, (from well treated hence healthy livestock) but I'm not buying into this pop-sci that eating extra will feed my brain, or that this is what separates our kind from the dumb herbivores - meat fat feeds almost exclusively my paunch ! :]

> “We have no examples today of animals that scavenge but don’t hunt,” he adds.

I've seen a number of articles in the last few years talking about how scavenging meat seems to be much more common amongst animals we typically consider herbivores (like deer) than previously realized. There are also a number of opportunistic omnivorous scavengers that rely more on scavenging than hunting it they hunt at all. This claim seems bogus to me.

Most ungulates eat their own afterbirth. Sure, that's easier to digest than most carcasses would be, and less likely to spread disease, but it shows that meat digestion is possible.

If I'm to believe [0], that applies to many if not most mammals, some humans included.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placental_expulsion

I was shocked when I first heard a colleague in my college's biology department talk about this. He said that when he puts nets up to collect birds for banding, it's essential not to leave them up too long at a time: if you do, passing deer will spot the trapped birds and eat them.

Wouldn't other animals with strong bites be capable of crushing bones to eat the marrow inside? The theory is big on assumptions, but I guess that's how it goes when you're trying to figure out what happened millions of years ago.

I'm imagining that the humans might have taken the bones somewhere else to deal with them, possibly breaking them open with stones.

The article talks about primates but there are similar theories about other brain-and-marrow gastronomes.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/laelaps/inside-the-brai...

One of the reasons why dogs gnaw on bones is to get at the marrow inside.

Some animals like snakes simply swallow prey whole. Dogs and pigs are known for eating hastily with minimal chewing, and I'd imagine many other predators are the same. No idea how efficiently their respective digestive systems extract nutrients from solid mammal chunks.

> Dogs and pigs are known for eating hastily with minimal chewing,

Because they have no or smaller cheeks. But they have very acid stomachs.

The Comparative Anatomy of Eating

http://www.vegsource.com/news/2009/11/the-comparative-anatom...

Omnivore or Herbivore?

https://livinontheveg.com/omnivore-or-herbivore/

Milton Mills, MD: Are Humans Designed to Eat Meat?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXj76A9hI-o&t=66

I was under the impression that it had more to do with lips than jaws. Hyenas can outbite humans a thousand times over, but they can't drink a milkshake through a straw!

In other words, breaking bones is the easy part; sucking out the marrow is the tricky bit.

Hyenas are known to eat bone. The bearded vulture is the only known bird that eats bone marrow, and cracks open bones by dropping them on rocks from a great height.

I thought this was known.

When my first born was a toddler, she would go into the fridge and eat butter.

I expressed concern to my grandmother, a life long nurse who was born in 1920 said to me; “the brain knows that it needs fats to grow, just let her eat butter. It is what her body is saying she needs”

She is super smart and it wasnt an issue otherwise.

The translation of deficiencies into food cravings has always fascinated me. People with pica, for example, often compulsively eat non-foods that are in fact related to a deficiency they have. Anemics sometimes crave dirt (which does contain iron).

But how does it "know"?

Probably a memory of the taste and the vitamins that follow it.

My wife craves mints when she's low on iron.

But do mints provide any iron?

If they are fortified they do, or better up if they are some kind of mint-flavoured supplements.

Depends on which kinds. Spearmint can contain up to 15% of your DV of iron.

I don't think your body "knows". I think your mind is very, very good at pattern recognition. It knows that when certain signals exist, a certain condition exists, and when certain foods are eaten, those signals are lessened. It doesn't know what foods will do what until after you've eaten them, possibly multiple times.

I would tend to attribute this to the fact that butter is delicious before I'd say it was an instinctual craving for fats.

And it's delicious to us because we need it. What comes first?

While I'm inclined to agree in this case, the body is fairly easy to re(mis)calibrate [1].

It's very easy to start craving candy bars/cake/ice cream/etc. It's tougher to find a valid rationale for that craving.

[1] For example: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201400...

Fat from marrow and brains to be clear, other articles make that distinction in the title, and do not jump to the fat conclusion in the title.

somewhat related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_Was_the_End

And the only reason they went after the marrow and brain was because they were eating the leftovers, according to the article. They couldn't really eat other parts of the animal unless they wanted to become food to other predators.

It's still a bit bizarre watching the western world switch form carbs good, fat bad to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade.

Going from a high carb diet to a high fat diet was amazing.

"Wait instead of feeling omnipresent urges to overeat and snack, my satiety system actually works? I stop getting dips in energy throughout the day?"

Said it before but a diet of bacon and eggs would be superior to the diets of most Americans.

I find when you make major changes to your diet, your urges to eat, cravings, etc adjust to the new diet after a couple of weeks.

I eat a pretty balanced diet that includes plenty of carbs. I also only eat once a day (at about 6-7pm). I get no cravings during the day until just before it's my regular time to eat. I should add, most of the carbs I eat are fruits, beans, whole grains, rice, quinoa, etc... not: white bread, juice, cereal, etc that digest quickly.

I think fruit, especially the modern stuff, is bad for you. In particular the stuff you want to avoid is. fructose, which is toxic for humans. Fructose is harder on the human liver than alcohol on a gram by gram basis, and over consumption of fructose can cause cirrhosis and fatty liver disease.

Edit: source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing.

Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.

I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol. Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently. Whereas fatty liver caused by fructose is because of the quantity in a short period, overwhelming the liver.

If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs, sugar/sucrose, etc that are roughly half fructose, half glucose that are put into so much processed food with no fiber to slow digestion. A 12oz can of cocacola has 2-3x (39g) the sugar as a piece of fruit. Added sugars account for 14%[0] of the daily calories in the average american's diet (note, added means not natural sugars like that in fruit.. but sucrose, hfcs, etc). Any increase in fatty liver disease would be caused by the inordinate added sugar intake of american's, not fruit.

0. https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/data-statistics/know-your-limi...

> I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing.

I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says.

> Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.

True and false. The fiber aspect is true, and a strong argument to stay as far away from juice as possible, but the vitamins story is ... mixed. It depends on what fruit you're talking about, where it was produced, and how it was handled.

For vitamins and other micro nutrients I personally think organ meats are highly underrated.

> I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol.

By looking at my source.

> Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently.

This is also true of Fructose. Except unlike Alcohol 100% of it goes to your liver. Also unlike alcohol there are no obvious cognitive effects for fructose, so we're free to consume as much of it without suffering any immediate and obvious consequences.

> If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs ... processed food ... coca cola ...

Take a guess what I also recommend avoiding. But "avoid HFCS and processed food" is well into the "no shit" category of dietary recommendation these days, which is why I don't really bother to talk about it a ton. Whereas there are a large number of people who think that fruit and especially fruit juice is healthy, and I disagree.

> "I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says."

To expand on this, what the hell is "balanced diet" anyway? In what sort of environment is fruit year-round "balanced"? In anything other than a tropical environment, fruit being part of a "balanced diet" is an ecological impossibility barring the modern global agro-industrial complex that ships you fruit from the other side of the planet no matter the season.

The idea of food even having seasons seems alien to most of us these days! At most whether a fruit is "in season" is a matter of how cheap it is, or whether the texture is precisely right. A food that is out of season might have a slightly undesirable texture and cost more, because it's been sitting in a warehouses and cargo vessels for too long.

The "balanced diet" as we know it today is a cultural artifact, not some biological truth.

In an ideal world, a "balanced diet" would mean eating only locally, in season and have none of this fad diet nonsense (vegetarian, vegan, carnivore, keto, etc). This would produce a universal diet that adapts to environment, wild life and the success and failures of local agriculture. It would be a cyclical diet, ever changing.

Maybe balanced diet is a poor choice of words... Local diet? Seasonal diet? Cyclical diet? IDK.

I do get annoyed about the definition of keto as a "diet", especially a "fad" diet. Ketosis is a biological process, and the "keto" diet is just designed to produce the state of ketosis on purpose. As such there really is no "keto" diet, as there are a pretty wide range of dietary choices that could produce the state of dietary ketosis.

Also, literally every religious tradition in the world follows the "keto" diet on a semi-regular basis: it's called fasting.

I'm not knocking ketosis itself. Just the absurd hoops people jump through to pretend their doing keto... how about just stop eating for a bit and you'll get a more robust ketosis. No need for hundreds of recipe books about keto desserts, keto friendly cakes and breads.

Just want people to keep things simple. That's why I was saying that stuff about cyclical dieting. In summer, there's a lot more carbs. In winter you'd change to eating more meat and fat. Since animals fatten themselves up for surviving winter. Eats what's currently in your environment. Prepare it properly. Move regularly throughout the day. Take time to relax and rest.

"The modern stuff"?

We’ve selectively bred our fruit for a millennia or two to make it significantly larger and sweeter than the versions we evolved with. The advent of pesticides as exacerbated the problem, as pesticide sprayed fruits produce a much lower level of useful anti-oxidants.

I guess it depends on the country. Fruit and vegetables in the US have had most of the taste bred out of them in favor of produce that can survive transportation while still looking good and will last a long time on the shelf and fridge.

America probably goes the furthest in this regard, but the trend is also older than America the country.

Examples:

The strawberries you and I eat are actually a hybrid species created in 1715. The wild variety, the woodland strawberry, is about 1/4 the size and much more tart.

Bananas largely come from one of two species, the main one having been domesticated 8,000 years ago. Humans of that era domesticated it for some reason other than the fruit, because the fruit was inedible, it took a few thousand years before we could eat it.

The lemon was hybridized citron and the bitter orange around 1100. Citron has a very thing rind, with the edible center part being typically the size of a golf ball. The bitter orange is ... not very sweet.

The oranges you and I buy in the store, tellingly called the “sweet orange” is a hybrid first mentioned in 314CE.

Breakfast cereals are about one of the worst things you can actually eat for breakfast. At best it's just a bowl of wholegrain carbs (e.g. oatmeal, muesli), and at worst just a bowl full of refined carbs and sugar (frosted flakes, Froot Loops). They're so devoid of nutrition that they usually have to fortify it with vitamins and minerals just so that people don't end up malnourished from eating it.

You'd genuinely be better off eating cheeseburgers for breakfast than most breakfast cereals.

> Breakfast cereals are about one of the worst things you can actually eat for breakfast. At best it's just a bowl of wholegrain carbs (e.g. oatmeal, muesli)

What's the problem with that? They are not supposed to be your sole source of macro-nutrients. If you get your protein and fats in other meals during the day it's perfectly fine.

> They're so devoid of nutrition that they usually have to fortify it with vitamins and minerals just so that people don't end up malnourished from eating it.

You can't end up malnourished from eating cereals, you can only end up malnourished from not eating anything else. And no one is eating only cereals. Anyway, since you yourself said they are fortified with vitamins and minerals, it sounds like they are just fine after all.

They are only fortified with a couple of vitamins that society has decided is the most important for not causing the whole population to end up with scurvy. If you eat a balanced diet, you will eat a random selection of everything. All things contain different nutrients that are important for us and since we don't know exactly which ones, we say balanced diet when we mean everything.

I suspect it's the result of adding iron to flour. For many peopel it irritates their gut and may have a whoel host of negative effects. There is no reason why it should be neccessary to add it into all food, it made flour based products basically toxic, since the body has no way to get rid of iron. Eating grains never had any negative effects before this "fortification" began.

The problem before (and I think what is still the problem):

1) We talk about very broad macronutrient classes as though much could be said about them that is meaningful. Fats are not interchangeable; carbs are not interchangeable; proteins are not interchangeable. Talking about grams of fat doesn't actually tell you much (nutritionally).

On a related note, calories are also not nutritionally generic, and our bodies are not simple input/output machines. Calories in / calories out is a gross oversimplification.

2) A substance that is eaten, and the same substance elsewhere in the body, do not have a direct 1-for-1 relationship.

Dietary cholesterol, for example, is not directly deposited in artherosclerosis, and the pathology may have nothing to do with consumed cholesterol at all. (That is, the problem may not be how much you eat, but what causes it to build up as deposits that aren't cleared away.)

3) Measuring blood plasma is a poor metric for many, many things. Intercellular, extracellular, and stored elsewhere (liver, pancreas, bone, etc.) often have nothing to do with plasma values.

And we know this. But we still use it because it's all we can easily do for now. So when we measure your nutrition by comparing blood plasma values of magnesium, for example, we are using a metric we already know correlates poorly with actual magnesium status.

4) Environment matters. Cellular environments are extremely complex. Speaking about nutrition without discussing the thousands of other molecules and tissue structure it interacts with, and where, isn't very helpful.

These factors-- conflating macronutrients, conflating consumption with pathology, using bad metrics for nutrition, and ignoring cellular environment-- are much of what results in all of this nutritional confusion.

We substitute fads or the latest half-understood data for real knowledge, because we don't have much real knowledge. (Despite being able to fill textbooks with what we do know.)

It's just the meat industry copying big tobacco's playbook. Whole carbs are fine and an important source of other nutrients and fiber. Refined carbs and sugars are the problem. The scientific evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you is overwhelming.

...to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade

Not at all. I remember it was a thing in the seventies. The low-carbs diet has been viciously attacked for many decades, so it comes and goes every few years. I first heard of it when Atkins popularized it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet

See how Wikipedia says it's "a fad diet" and its claims "questionable", implying that it doesn't work at all.

But now take a look at this other article, a couple links further:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis

"In glycolysis, higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis, fat reserves are readily released and consumed.[5][7] For this reason, ketosis is sometimes referred to as the body's "fat burning" mode.[8]"

So it turns out it works?

Is it dangerous? Maybe, but I wouldn't trust the sources that I already know are lying to my face. Not to talk about my own experience, but that's valid for me, YMMV.

In HN there were some submissions past year about this guy that did the research in which Atkins based its diet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

Edit: I forgot to say what I started writing this comment for to begin with, that many millions did the Atkins diet at the time and vouched for it.

The notion that low-carb diets are superior has deeply unsettling political implications, for exactly the same reason that low-meat diets don't: what are the staple crops of humanity?

The top ten in order are: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, sassava, soybeans, sweat potatoes, yams, sorghum, and plantains. These are all carbs! If we accept that low carb diets are better for people, then we must either accept that we are going to feed humanity sub-optimally, or that humanity is well past the healthy carrying capacity of the planet. There is simply no way in hell we can get 7.5 billion people eating keto, or anything close to it.

Vegan activists are proposing a dietary future that is very much in line with the current global agro-industrial status quo. However low-carb proponents are proposing a diet that, if universalized, would necessarily put them in the camp of people like Pentti Linkola.

Please, understand that Atkins diet is not a diet recommended for everybody. It's a diet created to help people that suffer an imbalance in their diet (or worse, in their metabolism) that has made them get fat and they want to lose weight.

That's why "balanced diet" is an absurd recommendation for fat people. If you're following a balanced diet, you probably don't need to lose weight. Atkins himself recommended a balanced diet, just avoiding refined carbs, for most people.

One personal comment: I wouldn't follow any diet proposed by activists of any kind, specially when their main motive is their particular ethics that, at least for me, suggest a strong bias. Unless of course I share that same ethical vision. Edit: I actually wouldn't follow any life advice from activists of any kind, I'd rather have my own agenda.

There are people who recommend obese people adopt diets that induce ketosis. These people are not suggesting diets that should be followed by everybody. However there are also people who say that carb intake should be greatly reduced across the board for everybody, that even something seemingly extreme like a 90% reduction of carbs in the average diet wouldn't be enough to induce ketosis but would nevertheless be far healthier.

However the current size of the human population is incompatible with anything other than the vast majority of people getting the vast majority of their calories from carbs. For that reason, people recommending a large reduction on carb intake across the board will almost certainly continue to be marginalized, pushed to the sidelines in most mainstream discussions.

However, while both are low carb the ketogenic diet and the atkins diet are different. Keto generally refers to a diet very low carb, protein as needed, and higher fat (generally most calories come from fat). Atkins was a low carb, high protein diet.

Atkins diet is a ketogenic diet. First week is next to zero carbs. Then slow carbs are introduced gradually, always trying to keep the ketosis, that stops around 60 or 70 g of carbs a day.

No idea what "keto" label currently means. If you take a moment to review my previous comment, you'll see what exactly I was responding to.

Edit: just to make it more clear, Atkins didn't tell how much proteins or fat you should eat, that's up to you, just that you must keep ketosis on so you need to keep carbs under certain limits and completely avoid sugars.

Indeed Atkins advised tracking ketosis with test strips in his book.

It's interesting how the two articles differ. The article about low carb diet is written in a very hateful style, while the one on Ketosis is very technical and includes no judgment on "fadness" or whatever.

Same thing about saturated fat. There are multiple articles that contradict each other, going as far as having a different selection of sources. One links only articles that support how harmful saturated fat is, while the other cites a some sources that say this, and some that say "there's no effect found".

It shows that trusting wikipedia might on something that's not physics or math might be losing proposition.

Whale blubber and mammal livers are high in vitamin c and considering primates lost the function of the GULO (L-gulonolactone oxidase) gene, one could surmise from megafauna extinctions that hunting was essential to most nomadic hominids.

Also, GULO is one of many interesting genes to contemplate resurrecting.

This is new news? O thought it was established a while ago that humans have only made the progress we have because of an increase in animal fat consumption.

Hell, with a few exceptions, you can cluster mammals in a pretty accurate grouping of intelligence by the percentage of animal fat in their diet.

It's an ongoing debate:

> In a wide-ranging review published in February’s issue of Current Anthropology, Thompson joins a team of researchers to weave together several strands of recent evidence and propose a new theory about the transition to large animal consumption by our ancestors. The prevailing view, supported by a confluence of fossil evidence from sites in Ethiopia, is that the emergence of flaked tool use and meat consumption led to the cerebral expansion that kickstarted human evolution more than 2 million years ago. Thompson and her colleagues disagree: Rather than using sharpened stones to hunt and scrape meat from animals, they suggest, earlier hominins may have first bashed bones to harvest fatty nutrients from marrow and brains.

> Then, starting in the mid-1980s, an opposing theory arose in which Homo’s emergence wasn’t so tightly coupled with the origins of hunting and predatory dominance. Rather, early hominins first accessed brain-feeding nutrients through scavenging large animal carcasses. The debate has rolled on through the decades, with evidence for the scavenging theory gradually building.

> Because large animals such as antelope pack a serious micro-and-macro-nutrient punch, scientists have thought their meat contributed to humanity’s outsized brains. A consensus arose in the 1950s that our ancestors first hunted small animals before moving on to larger beasts around 2.6 million years ago. Flaked tool use and meat eating became defining characteristics of the Homo genus.

You know, "science advances one funeral at a time" and all that.

Plus, I'm sure there is some kind of power-fantasy attachment to the older theory that basically puts humans on top of the food chain as apex predators due to our intelligence.

> Plus, I'm sure there is some kind of power-fantasy attachment to the older theory that basically puts humans on top of the food chain as apex predators due to our intelligence.

Probably has more weight than it'll ever be given credit for.

"Early man noticed cats and hyenas are bigger, faster, stronger, starts picking the bones of their kills. Hundreds of generations later, man's need for more fat and meat exceeds what's available from scavenging. With his increased brain and brawn, he begins digging pungee pits to kill his own animals."

Not very glamorous.

> Probably has more weight than it'll ever be given credit for.

Well, there is one way out: once the previous generation loses power, the next one can feel smugly superior by saying how petty they were.

Initially it was a caloric surplus from meat, but the largest gains came as a result of cooking, which makes food more digestible.

So everyone get in keto diet and get smart.. When I grew up bone marrow is my favorite meat but now in US it is hard to find

Tangent: this is a Scientific American "reprint" (reshare?) of a Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 licensed article originally published here: https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/brain-evolution-fat/

I don't know if that matters to others, but I personally prefer the original source for articles like these.

Ghee is considered "Brain food" in Indian culture. It is included in many food items and also in Ayurvedic Meds.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/amp39Gheeamp39-and-its-m...

There is no one "Indian" culture. In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, goat bone marrow is relished a lot, and fatty fish brain is relished and considered brain food.

Does this mean Ghee is generally not used in WB? Sure there will be local variations due to a variety of factors - invasion of other cultures (islamic, christian, chinese etc) The Ghee thing does have its general influence in Indian culture.

Ghee is used in WB but bone marrow is loved a lot by young and old alike and I thought it pertained to the report.

> It is included in...Ayurvedic Meds

“Ayurveda medicine is considered pseudoscientific” [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda

I know it will be considered pseudoscientific. I've used it and had positive results. What I am posting here is based on my own experience and observation from living here in India. I didn't come here advocating it. Just stating what I experienced. It may not always have a scientific basis in the modern sense.

Poisons in very low quantity are used to treat diseases. Could it be that Ayurveda uses milk to treat the imbalance of the "doshas"?

As a food, Ghee was used so very sparingly that it was almost not used at all. We cannot compare the quantities we consume today with those before the Dairy Revolution.

Speaking from experience here. I live in India and have experienced it first hand.

The writers of the Rgveda certainly were members of a pastoralist society, so they would have had a decent amount of dairy, if not quite the same quantities as today.

It was likely both. Protein offers diminishing returns after you have 'enough', fat offers good amounts of energy and nutrients. Also, humans likely have always eaten some plant material, but wild plants are quite poor in calories and macronutrients.

Makes sense. The brain needs fuel. Without adequate fuel there's no way for it to grow, unless the body gave up some of its need for the same fuel. So I would presume there's that as well. That is, the body also evolved to feed the brain.

Well fat to grow but it burns sugar

I was under the impression one of the things the brain "burns" is cholesterol. Yes? No?

It can burn glucose (table sugar is sucrose).

It can also burn other stuff [0] and have almost no requirements for glucose, all of which can be provided through gluconeogenesis from amino acids and the glycerol backbone of fat.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874681/

It prefers to burn glucose. You have to be starving it to get it to use ketones.

What does that tell you?

Your body also prefers to metabolize ethanol (which provides quite a bit of energy, by the way) before anything else in the bloodstream.

What does that tell you?

Absolutely nothing. I could go with the "get rid of poison" narrative, but that is a bit too extreme and is usually taken with a great deal of psychological resistance. I couldn't blame you.

Also, I believe that a well-formulated ketogenic diet is pretty far from starvation, enabling me to do exactly the same, if not more, as when I was running on carbohydrate. Of course, you might believe otherwise, but do take the time to think critically about where this belief stems from.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3900881/

A keto diet is good for cutting weight while bodybuilding, or doing any sporting endeavor and you got fat, but prolonged periods on it will damage the brain.

"Of course you may believe otherwise" and so on

I must be missing something. What is the relevant portion of the article you linked? They even praise the ketogenic diet.

In case you wonder, the brain uses around 25% glucose and 75% ketones even in deep ketosis. Glucose in the blood is stable, and spent glucose is replenished through gluconeogenesis on demand.

I would like to know what your point is here. Thanks.

It doesn't praise ketogenic diet anywhere. Quote it then. My point is that the ketogenic diet is useless for anyone but eppilieptics or those wanting to lose weight fast, bodybuilders or sports that require weight limits

"Within minutes, glucose depletion and associated compromised bioenergetic pathways cause extensive neuronal death in the core of the infarction, and over time in the surrounding tissue"

Someone on here is going to read your bad advice, and god forbid, follow it. Here's my two cents

The paper you linked mentions the diet twice, and both mentions are positive:

> Early diagnosis of the GLUT1 deficiency syndrome is important because adherence to a ketogenic diet (Glossary) [15] is an effective treatment for most patients [83]; in general, ketogenic diet efficiently suppresses epileptic seizures in childhood drug-resistant epilepsy [87].

Regarding your quote, please read the sentence right before it:

> A thromboembolic occlusion of a brain-supplying artery leads to an acute disruption in blood supply to a specific brain territory, causing cerebral ischemia (Figure 1b). Within minutes, glucose depletion and associated compromised bioenergetic pathways cause extensive neuronal death in the core of the infarction, and over time in the surrounding tissue [90, 91].

The sentence you quoted is in the context of a fucking stroke and has absolutely nothing to do with diet. Are you aware of that?

And again, the brain still has glucose readily available (and uses it) when on a ketogenic diet.

Please do try to inform yourself and/or read more carefully before judging others' views.

- The break down of fats for energy is called beta-oxidation and is not performed by brain cells.

- The brain relies on the liver to produce ketone bodies instead.

- Our cells break down carbohydrates, then proteins and then fats

A diet high in fat only contributes raw calories to the brain - the fuel is unusable directly. The argument basically boils down to: more calories led to bigger brains.

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