Study puts fermented foods, not fire, as pivotal moment in human brain growth
plantbasednews.org
plantbasednews.org
"Backing up this hypothesis is the fact that humans have relatively smaller large intestines than other primates. This indicates that our ancestors were eating food that was already partly broken down by fermentation."
IIRC another interpretation of the smaller large intestine is that early humans were eating more bioavailable food (i.e. meat) than other primates, which doesn't need to be broken down as much as more fibrous material (seeds, leaves, stalks etc). Can someone more knowledgable than me confirm or deny?
From: https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2023/06/19/the-old...
I just don't buy that fermentation from random food piles is a driver for evolution...
To stick with other primates for now. Gorilla's have an obscene amount of muscles; adults need 8000 calories per day, compared to 2000-3000 calories for an adult human.
Somewhere, even though they eat low bioavailable food, even though they had to eat all day the heave muscle guys & girls had better chances of survival. Why do we think the brain's need are more special then a feature like muscles? Am I missing something here?
There is a decent amount of unfermented and uncooked food with lots of nutritional value a smarter brain can find, mainly meats (fatty parts especially) & nuts (if you are smart enough to open them), that would relatively on parr with the Gorilla way.
I'm sure as soon as tools, fire etc, became part of human culture it became even easier for those with more intelligence to became favorable. But that also needed to be in line with the development of more complicated social structures, either genetically or culturally.
As in: why can a gorilla sustain it's immense needs to build muscles by eating a lot, but humans cannot do this to build a large brain?
To ask that question differently: why would humans need to change to meat/fermentation/cooking in order to grow brains, if they could "just" eat more, as other primates do?
The question why & when humans gut could start to shrink. It seems more the other way around in my view, brain development helped develop cooking & other preparation methods and in turn to the need for less complicated guts.
Again, the question is not if they can (they can't) but WHY. Or, differently, what is the cause, and what the effect.
As for gorillas - that's mostly leaves, shoots and stems. All very hard to digest, a human wouldn't get much nutrients out of that.
It's of course entirely possible that both fermented foods and a meat diet were pivotal, just at very different time periods and in different contexts.
That said, fermented foods could very well have played a part in it.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks any surviving development in an organism is due to this "one weird trick" thing, as opposed to a multitude of factors that rendered that organism fit for their environment, at least enough to pass said development on, anyway. Meat, fermented foods, fire, and a slew of other variables likely played a role.
Talking about evolution as though there was some single exploding popcorn kernel that caused change is a pretty narrow take on things. Sites like the one in the link only serve to perpetuate such shallow thinking on the matter, and in this case, likely to push a narrative.
That’s kind of one of the predominant theories in evolution though: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
> Eldredge and Gould proposed that the degree of gradualism commonly attributed to Charles Darwin is virtually nonexistent in the fossil record, and that stasis dominates the history of most fossil species.
The theory deals with the morphology of animals in the fossil record but that’s the gist of it: the actual evolution happens really fast, usually to adapt to a large environmental change, and species enter a stable state where they very slowly change if at all.
With the qualification, that they can be "fast" in geological time scales, which are rather big. It might look like rapid change in the fossil record, but that is a very compressed representation.
But cooked meat, on the other hand, can explain this difference.
As to the gut: "The guts of carnivores are usually shorter and less complex than those of herbivores because meat is easier to digest than plant material."
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Anatomy_and_Physiology_of_Anim...
As to the brain: These foods may give an animal the option to invest more into brain size, but that won't happen unless there is a local gradient in the evolutionary fitness landscape that gives a higher roi for larger brains in comparison to alternative investments, like more muscle mass, or just being content with the lower power consumption relative to intake, which makes the animal more resistant to starvation risks, etc.
Here are authors, they don't seem affiliated with the OP's "Plant based news" article.
Can't really fault an organization from promoting a study that aligns with them.
Authors and Affiliations Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France
Katherine L. Bryant
Hungry Heart Farm and Dietary Consulting, Conley, GA, USA
Christi Hansen
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Erin E. Hecht
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/02/did-fermented...
IMHO HN staff should, as the often do in such cases, update the OP link to point to the Harvard Gazette article.
As for the questioned passage, it appears to originate from the author of the Harvard Gazette article, reading there:
"This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the human large intestine is proportionally smaller than those of other primates, suggesting that we adapted to food that was already broken down by the chemical process of fermentation."
Thankfully, the perspective study itself appears open access:
.https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3
And we can thus check it for addressing the meat consumption hypothesis, and indeed, we find:
"[…]
A smaller colon may reflect a reduction of dependence on fibrous plant material, given that a major function of the colon is to house bacteria that aid in the breakdown of enzyme-resistant carbohydrates to SCFAs. Did a shift to meat-eating, as suggested by Milton, permit this drastic reduction in colon size in the human lineage? Indeed, humans and members of the order Carnivora share a small colon size. However, the gut transit time in Carnivora is much faster than in humans. Although Milton postulates that this difference is due to our evolutionary history as plant eaters96, another explanation is that colon reduction follows from a reduced need to break down fibrous plant material within the digestive tract due increased bioavailability of nutrients before food is consumed—i.e., external fermentation (Fig. 1).
[…]"
As for the affiliations:
I can't find much on the obvious outlier among the author list, albeit I didn't check for very long, only an old interview here which appears partially misleading NOT due to content but due to what seem like incorrect social media references:
https://voyageatl.com/interview/meet-matthew-bagshaw-christi...
And an archive of their website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190122012150/https://www.hungr...
The work breakdown given at the end of the paper in the contributions section looks like the following:
"K.L.B. and E.E.H. conceived the paper, K.L.B. and E.E.H. compiled data and analysis, K.L.B., E.E.H., and C.H. wrote the manuscript, with E.E.H. focusing on metabolic and nutrition components, E.E.H. on human evolution components, and K.L.B. on fermentation and culture components. All authors contributed to the final editing process."
Hope that clears things up for people arriving later to the comments section, and perhaps offers further avenues for exploration, albeit I'd advise caution as to avoid accidentally creating a tempest in a teapot
The study was in Nature, not 'plantbasednews'.
Just because a blog with a bias, like 'plantbasednews', reports on a study, doesn't invalidate the study.
The 'blog' is just cherry picking the studies that align with their bias.
I believe that a lot is written about what is a healthy diet, but in reality, as long as there is no obvious excess or deficiency, and you don't have a specific disease, then any diet can be healthy. Vegan, carnivore, paleo, keto, kosher, whatever... even junk food. The human digestive system is very good at working with anything you throw at it.
The only thing is the less varied the diet, the more you need to care about potential deficiencies. Usually, there is a way, but unlike with a varied diet where you can rely on random sampling, you may need to be more explicit.
The psychological side is quite a bit more complex though. While a healthy diet is almost always possible from the point of view of our guts, we may not want to, because our natural incentives may not align with what modern society offers. What used to be rare is now abundant and easily accessible.
Except the SAD standard american diet.
Most plant material (i.e. "fiber", digestible by e.g. cows), carion, most raw meat (if we ate what dogs ate, we'd have constant stomach issues...)
Humans have extremely acidic stomach acid (1.5 - 3.5 pH), close to that of vultures and dogs (1 - 2 pH).
Early humans and their predecessors, were very likely (at least partially) carrion feeders, and consumed raw meat for millions of years before they started cooking.
The use of tools made from stones to break open bones for marrow and to possibly butcher animals suggests that early humans exploited carcasses that they found or scavenged from other predators' kills. Marrow and brain tissue, which could be accessed by breaking open bones and skulls, are highly nutritious and would have been valuable food sources for early humans.
Over time, as hominins developed more sophisticated tools and techniques, they likely became more efficient hunters, gradually shifting from scavenging to actively hunting for their food. However, the practice of scavenging would have played a critical role in the dietary habits of early human ancestors and contributed to their evolutionary success.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/64/5/394/2754213
Modern humans have genes to process alcohol and some populations don’t have the gene (Asian flushing). Alcohol and fermented fruit were probably sources of calories and drinkable water for many populations.
I'm questioning how this could have preceeded the formation of advanced brains at a level to contribute to the formation of advanced brains.
E.g. https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/03/30/monkeys-routinely-eat-f...
brain health isn't the big factor, it is outweighed by the not heaving out your guts by food poisoning.
This isn't true at all. Beer can go bad and give you food poisoning.
There are a ton of other studies exploring how beer/wine fermentation for alcohol also contributed to early human growth. Precisely because of this property.
try telling that to the parrots in the trees, they're a social animal and seem happy enough.
I did some searching and cannot find any evidence to support that.
Only the contrary, for instance: Some non-human animals are documented to consume fermented foods, but it appears to be somewhat infrequent, and limited to a narrow range of foods. from https://fermentology.pubpub.org/pub/2h9z1g3y
The article continues:
As a part of this unique relationship that humans have with fermented foods, it's perhaps not surprising to learn that humans have some adaptations associated with the consumption of fermented foods. Now, these technically aren't unique to humans. These are adaptations that are shared with African apes as well. In particular, there's two genes that we know about that signal this kind of special relationship with fermented foods among the great apes.
The first is the ADH4 gene. We have a special variant of this gene. It's an alcohol dehydrogenase gene. It basically lets us break down alcohol more effectively than many other primates. Alcohol is a byproduct of many types of fermentation. There are three major types of fermentation, two of which produce ethanol as a byproduct. Therefore, being able to break down ethanol provides us with an advantage in terms of being able to consume fermented foods.
The other gene is the HCAR3 gene. This gene codes for a receptor that's thought to make humans and great apes more sensitive to signals that come from certain types of microbes, particularly Lactobacillus. Lactobacillus are one of the key groups of microbes that are involved in food fermentations. Together, these two genes suggest that there's a kind of unique relationship between African apes and humans, and fermented foods.
At least, that's the human explanation. It's more likely that she just preferred the taste of fermented apples and getting drunk was just a pleasant side effect.
Aged steak - a famous Western delicacy - is partially rotten meat.
The problem is the simpler, 'meat' based answer, leads people to say "Brains grew big because eating meat, I think I'm going to pull up to the table and down a few pounds of ribs and wash it down with a nice brisket".
Cutting edge research into the Gut Biome shows its overlooked significance, connected to pre and probiotics and food, but also mental health, even going as far as questioning how much of "us" are really the gut biome.
People can heal various ailments even mental disease by getting transplants, it's a completely new and wild field of study, and holds much more weight than say eating or not eating meat.
His book "Warum die Menschen sesshaft wurden" is summarized in https://oe1.orf.at/artikel/213690/Warum-die-Menschen-sesshaf...
For a scientific journal reference, see "The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey", Antiquity (2012), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00047840
> Our evolutionary analysis strongly suggests that R[uminococcus] hominiciens likely originated in the ruminant gut and later transferred to humans, possibly during domestication.
> The human-associated strains possess functional adaptability highlighted by the acquisition of genes that can degrade specific plant fibers of monocots such as maize, rice, and wheat—major components of the human diet.
"One such proposed dietary change is increased meat eating, which has been argued to have been central to human evolution"
Behold the long comment train on a tangent unrelated to the study.
Yep, it's also why the Giant Panda needs to eat so much bamboo in a day, they also have a carnivore-like short gastrointestinal tract.
The idea that humans were fermenting via persistent food caches a million years before we discovered fire, and doing it consistently enough to affect brain evolution is, well, a stretch.
This is related to what I've heard called the carrier bag theory. Once you can acquire food, the next technological step is being able to bring it with you. A gourd, a large folded leaf is sufficient. Once you're doing that fermentation is inevitable.
Because you need to do it over generations, so consistently that it effects the species evolution, selecting for a developing brain you can't support without the fermentation.
Similar developments, such as lactose tolerance, required a society that had already domesticated lactating animals.
> Explanatory power compared to other hypotheses
> The emergence of meat-eating, tuber-harvesting, and cooking have all been proposed to account for human brain expansion; why should our just-so story be given any additional credence? Below, we consider several explanatory advantages of the External Fermentation Hypothesis versus other current hypotheses.
> Plant Based News is a mission-led impact media platform focused on elevating the plant-based diet and its benefit to human health, the planet, and animals.
And
> The world’s leading scientists agree that time is running out in the fight to stop the climate crisis. Shifting away from an animal-based food system is one of the most impactful ways we can slow global warming. It’s also a critical move in preventing future pandemics and bringing equity to our global food system.
I'll take it with a grain of vegan salt.
I have no problem with the paper in Nature, and no problem with PBN promoting it. I think they’re overreaching saying it was fermentation not fire. It may well have been both. Fire 2m years ago and fermentation more recently once we had containers to ferment things in.
That’s really the core of my point.
You could very well be right on fire / ferment and whatnot. We have so very little substantive paleontological information to go off of.
One can reduce their impact on this planet without becoming a (hypocrite) zealot, unless you can convince me you don't have a car, avoid any form of plastics, avoid pesticides, avoid processed vegan food, do not import avocadoes, natto and tofu from overseas etc.
We can both play this game, or we can be just a little more pragmatic and a little less dogmatic.
99% of the meat grown in America comes from factory foods. Despite this, every time the horrible treatment of animals is brought up online all of a sudden everyone is getting their meat from farms where the cows get a message twice a day. Statistically, there isn't much more. I still eat meat, very little these days, but lets be honest about it. Your final 'whataboutisms' don't help either. None of that matters. The truth about meat in America, at least, is undeniable.
At the very least in the EU there is no shortage of it and the legal restrictions are strictly enforced.
Anyway, you are doing yourself a favour not ingesting mass-production. There is a very very good reason virtually no country wants to import US-chicken.
The person you are responding to is right. The anti-meat/ pro-plant position may not have direct industry ties, but the bias is evident in several ways, of which I'll present just a few:
---
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27592...
> But what has for the most part been overlooked is that Katz and THI and many of its council members have numerous industry ties themselves. The difference is that their ties are primarily with companies and organizations that stand to profit if people eat less red meat and a more plant-based diet. Unlike the beef industry, these entities are surrounded by an aura of health and wellness, although that isn’t necessarily evidence-based.
https://peakhuman.libsyn.com/dr-david-klurfeld-on-meat-not-c...
- Dr. David M Klurfeld] was on the World Health Organization working group to decide if meat causes cancer in 2015 with a bunch of vegetarians and vegans and says it was the most frustrating professional experience of his life - There were 22 scientists - half of which were epidemiologists - They claimed they used 800 studies but they actually only used 18 - There was a group of people that were strongly against the vote - He thinks a number of the people made up their minds before they even arrived
https://jilliansnutritionnook.com/plant-based-to-meat-based-...
> Looking back I think there were many factors that shaped my previously held stance on nutrition. I believe my education set me up to be susceptible to a plant-based diet. I was educated that too much red meat is not good. I was educated to value fruits and vegetables over meat. With this mind set, I was predisposed into believing red meat was bad for me and that the only animal protein (if any) I should eat was chicken and fish. I became further disgusted by red meat through documentaries and books with a vegan agenda. Red meat causes climate change, red meat decreases our life expectancy, red meat is morally bad. This pushed me further away from red meat and meat in general. I became more focused on this ideology of health rather than listening to my own body. Without me even realizing it, I began to shape my identity around a plant-based diet. It was really hard for me to break up with this idea of what I thought was healthy and it took me months of self-education to open up my eyes.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/9/251
> The emphasis on health ministry within the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) movement led to the development of sanitariums in mid-nineteenth century America. These facilities, the most notable being in Battle Creek, Michigan, initiated the development of vegetarian foods, such as breakfast cereals and analogue meats. The SDA Church still operates a handful of food production facilities around the world. The first Battle Creek Sanitarium dietitian was co-founder of the American Dietetics Association which ultimately advocated a vegetarian diet. The SDA Church established hundreds of hospitals, colleges, and secondary schools and tens of thousands of churches around the world, all promoting a vegetarian diet. As part of the ‘health message,’ diet continues to be an important aspect of the church’s evangelistic efforts. In addition to promoting a vegetarian diet and abstinence from alcohol, the SDA church has also invested resources in demonstrating the health benefits of these practices through research. Much of that research has been conducted at Loma Linda University in southern California, where there have been three prospective cohort studies conducted over 50 years. The present study, Adventist Health Study-2, enrolled 96,194 Adventists throughout North America in 2003–2004 with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Adventist Health Studies have demonstrated that a vegetarian diet is associated with longer life and better health.
https://aleph-2020.blogspot.com/2019/05/introducing-narrativ...
> Dietary policies, mass media, and activists increasingly portray plants as mostly beneficial and animal source foods (ASFs) as mostly harmful. Yet, both sides of this poorly informative plant/animal binary represent heterogeneous food groups, which can be either benign or harmful from an ethical, environmental, or health perspective. It is not helpful to base policies on such simplistic categorization, which derives from reductionist approaches to nutrition, distortions by journalists, societal anxieties, and various forms of bias.
If a study comes out saying meat is great, "keto" sites promote it.
If a study comes out saying plants are great, "plant" sites promote it.
I don't think a site called 'plantbasednews' is hiding their bias.
Even Trump says something correct about the border every once in a while, but you'd be a fool to take him at face value.
By contrast a more neutral source that lacked said motivation could be taken more at face value. By putting your agenda out in front, you're implying that you prioritize that agenda over everything else, including most likely the actual truth, because agendas become less and less politically attractive the more nuance they try to convey.
This is a site to report 'plant based news', reporting on a study about 'plants'.
The site does not label itself as : "Completely un-biased news site weighing the thousands of studies dealing with all food types and providing equal 50-50 coverage of both plants and meat studies so people on the internet don't cry about bias".
We all eat plants. Even lots of plants. But most of us are not vegan.
So if these people are vegan and pushing a vegan agenda ... I wish they'd make it more clear than "plant based."
Incidentally, kimchi is easy to make, delicious, and healthy. AND most kimchi recipes are not vegan - they include one or two fishy ingredients.
There is just as strong an ideology and religious fervor around 'carnivore', and 'keto' communities.
Then when someone suggests eating some plants, they yell 'vegan'. And the more someone in the middle tries to argue 'no, really, you need some fiber', the more they yell back 'your vegan'.
If the person in the middle starts arguing back, and siting studies, the extreme side starts viewing them as extreme, even if they are in the middle.
Think the effect is called Overton Window.
I would hope no vegan would argue against Kimchi. Kimchi is great.
The speed of food poisoning can be hours for some pathogens. It depends on the pathogen and the amount, and if the body detects the bad food and expels it quickly.
When I make kombucha I am quite careless in the process, but it always turns out fine.
Fungi are more dangerous. If something starts growing hair, it's out.
Dairy fermentation is more dangerous ¹, and quite hard, so I avoid that.
Alcohol is obviously a toxin too, and rather common in fermentation ;)
In nearly all cases, I'll trust one of the best fine tuned measurement devices to protect humans from toxins: my taste and nose.
(Q: how do you know the milk is beyond it's expiry date? A: Smell it! Far more reliable than a date printed on some package)
¹https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6356804/
Edit: another thing to be careful with, are kernels, pits, seeds and peels. Peels can often contain lots of sprayed on chemicals that will probably kill your fermenting bacteria. Pits and kernels can contain insane amounts of toxins that we usually won't eat because they are enclosed. But crushing/long fermenting might release them
Also watch out for methanol. Fruit pectin gets fermented into methanol so using pectase is recommended to break it down, especially if one ferments citrus juice.
If people whose day job IS testing food recipes, all end up with different results from the master recipe made by their colleague, then it indicates certain external factors need to be controlled to ensure consistency.
The factor they narrowed down to, was consistency of temperature, and the solution they offered was to suggest a temperature-controlled box to ensure best results.
Do you mean kombucha? Kefir?
They get their fermentation from the air, ferment much lower, and do not rely on the skoby to keep it all working. On some level there is similarities, but its not the same
Deliciously alcoholic.
How do you know what it likes?
Oooook. Call me when you have some of those.
This is just complete conjecture, and while interesting, isn’t a study. It’s a postulation.
Also wondering if alcohol metabolization can be traced in dna or similar to align this theory.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8308604/
"Paleogenetic reconstruction of alcohol dehydrogenase genes across the hominid phylogeny indicates a dramatically enhanced catabolic capacity in one particular ADH (ADH4, as encoded by the ADH7 allele), starting at about 10 Mya [26]. ADH4, although only one of multiple ADH forms present in mammals, is found primarily in the mouth and digestive tract and thus effects the “first pass” at the digestion of ethanol. This enzyme became dramatically better at metabolizing ethanol following the phyletic split between the lineage leading to modern orangutans and to the other great apes, including ourselves. It thus correlates well with increasing terrestrialization among the African apes, possibly yielding greater access to fermenting fruit crops on the ground, and thus resulting in increased ethanol within the diet [26]. "
This would've been mostly in the African continent, right? I'd imagine it would be hard to get consistent fermentation going in more tropical climates.
It would take some strong convictions to turn multiple meals now (seal + bird) into a future meal that could potentially be stolen by scavengers.
Up to 500 whole auks are packed into the seal skin, beaks and feathers included. As much air as possible is removed from the seal skin before it is sewn up and sealed with seal fat, which repels flies. It is then hidden in a heap of stones, with a large rock placed on top to keep the air out. Over the course of three months, the birds ferment, and are then eaten during the Arctic winter, particularly on birthdays and weddings.
I am still bewildered as to how the method was discovered. Taking valuable seals and birds to run multi-month experiments does not seem like it would make you a popular fellow. Best case scenario, you discovered a way of making what sounds a vile, but technically edible, flesh paste.
The extended quote from the Wikipedia page notes some people have died from preparing it improperly
Polar explorer Knud Rasmussen's death is attributed to food poisoning by kiviaq.[5][6] In August 2013 several people died in Siorapaluk from eating kiviak that was made from eider rather than auk. Eider does not ferment as well as auk, and those who ate it contracted botulism.[7]Hunting cultures often have periods of surplus. Most likely this wasn't so much deliberate fermentation as an attempt to store their surplus; the fact that it turned well was a happy accident.
Regular shark meat is poisonous. But if you bury it in the sand and leave it for 6 weeks, the toxin decomposes and humans no longer die from it. But it stinks.
How hungry must have those Icelanders been that they tried this?
What kind of shark is that? I grew up eating salted shark meat and it was the only kind of fish I'd eat as a kid.
I also make milk kefir, water kefir, sourdough and kombucha and while none of these cultures require the higher temperatures, they do thrive in the higher temperatures.
I also grow quite a few species of mushrooms and have learned that a lot of species incubate quite aggressively at higher temperatures (25-35°C).
Apart from this, when I was a teenager, I remember I read in a Belgian scientific magazine called "Athena" that studies confirmed red meat to be the key to our ancestor's brain evolution.
Medicine is food, food is medicine.
You get yogurt by using bacteria to process milk. In order to do their processing, the bacteria need to be alive. So, for example, adding living yogurt to milk will get you more yogurt, but adding dead yogurt to milk will get you milk with some dead yogurt in it.
Whether or not refrigerated yoghurt-ish products are live or not is another question. If you live in a jurisdiction which restricts the term "yoghurt" to products containing live cultures, you can rely on whether or not the refrigerated product uses the term in its description. Otherwise I have no idea.
I would imagine you are also getting omega-3 from the fish.
If they find evidence that the next step was caffeine, I have no more questions...
But there are other starches too.
Just think what the world could have been like if not for the environmental devastation of the 16th century. ;D
On the other hand I don't think that this must be a one-factor kind of a game changer thing. I could totally think that two to three changes occured in the food chain (meat, starches, food preservation, improved social skills), that combined amplified each other's effect and lead to the development.
I've been eating more fermented, marinated and pickled stuff lately and while it's nutritious, it's not very calorie-dense - hard to imagine something like this supplying enough energy to power a large brain.
>Reduced gut sizes could only evolve
Well maybe with a less calorie-dense diet the reduced gut sizes would make it easier to fit into the slimmer-fitting jeans and shirts ;)
Sorry if that seems to be nitpicking, but I see too many "studies" like this. A study is supposed to report the truth of something that the author studied.
But this is an idea that the author liked and explored, and then wrote up.
Maybe we can keep calling these studies, and come up with another term for fact based studies. And not "theory" please, that word in a scientific context just confuses everyone.
Edit: "research paper" might be a good name (I saw someone else call it that in a post). i.e. "Research paper posits/theorizes/suggests that Fermented ....."
Also the paper itself doesn't call itself a study, it calls itself an article.
Also, research journals are really just fancy forum boards where researchers in a particular fields talk to each other, and even occasionally shit talk. They aren't ever supposed to be a source of truth, and in fact the first thing we learnt as grad student is how to critically read a research journal article and try to poke holes in the study. We are supposed to assume that the articles are wrong, until we can be convinced that they are likely to be correct.
Sometimes I think Google Scholars is a mistake. The general public aren't supposed to be exposed to research literature.
Then you have the type: "I saw this interesting thing", and that's also close enough to the truth. Geology, Astronomy, Archeology are examples.
That's a study.
But if I look at my own navel and decide "I like this idea because it makes sense to me", that's not a study. That type should get a different name. Theoretical Physics is the high quality version of this.
I'm not saying there's no value in this type of thing!! Just that it's not a study.
Maybe call them "research papers".
> Sometimes I think Google Scholars is a mistake. The general public aren't supposed to be exposed to research literature.
Yikes!!! So basically you want people to be sheep and just listen to what they are told, with no access to underlying material?
I'd rather people look at the source, and understand it poorly, vs not look at it at all.
No. It's when someone else does "this" and reproduces the result only using your article, only then that's close to truth.
Unfortunately, I think even serious studies have this flaw (of being beholden to funding). The person or group providing the funding need to get a return on their investment. Ie even those more serious studies are a form of conjecture, with only a subset of data being approached, or some important element being excluded.
Sorry but this sounds disingenuous to me. Isn't one of the hallmarks of fermented foods that you can prepare them at home, fairly cheaply in lots of cases? It is to me...
However, I see:
> Hungry Heart Farm and Dietary Consulting, Conley, GA, USA
> Christi Hansen
Which doesn't sound like a university.
Is don't understand the obcession with making everything binary, and then from there having to have a single winner take all assumption.
recently learned that you need nitric oxide, and when you don't eat veggies, you can still get it from salami, which is fermented meat.
Also trying to make garum these days, will take half a year until it's done though.
The problem isn’t nitrates and nitrites themselves though, but rather what’s present when they’re digested. Something has to convert nitrates to nitrites, or you need to consume nitrites, then something has to activate the nitrites into something harmful.
With meat, the presence of haem for example allows for the formation of a type of N-nitroso compound (nitrosylated-haem in this case) which is cancer-causing. Vegetables don’t tend to come with such compounds, but actually come with compounds which inhibit the development of harmful nitrite-based compounds. Most of these are antioxidants.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible for vegetable-derived nitrites to harm you. It’s just far, far less likely.
Fried meat that was previously cured is by far the most dangerous source of these cancer-causing compounds. The most well known example is probably bacon.
edit: need=use
The flavour profiles are different, and the limits for consumption are much different as well. Too much of both is dangerous, but too much NaNO3 is arguably easier to reach and more harmful in the short and long term. NaNO3 can lead to immediate issues with hemoglobin production for example. In the longer term, high volumes are carcinogenic.
Your primary concern with NaCl is managing safe blood pressure in the longer term, and in the shorter term, it's relatively easy to avoid toxicity or other more minor complications like dehydration.
If you eat it regularly, do you also smell like it?
I ask because people who eat a lot of garlic (or masala spice) often have strong body odor due to consuming these spices.
They also had more familiar-to-us breads, as well as unfermented cooked grain gruels. Again though which of these things you call bread and which beer is a value judgement. Some of the porridges could be drunk and some of the beers thick enough to eat with a spoon.