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What Can the Diet of Gorillas Tell Us About a Healthy Diet for Humans? : science

My diet of gorillas is pretty healthy, if that's what you're asking.

Now, is that an all-gorilla diet, or do you mix it up with the occasional bonobo, capuchin or orangutan?

Absolutely nothing.

Exactly. Gorillas are herbivores that extract fatty acids produced from bacteria fermenting vegetation in their guts. We don't do that, and haven't for over 5 million years.

Well... Not nothing , but relatively little.

Yep, and gorillas get like 95% of their daily water from food.

I think I need to drink water.

I just read Richard Wrangham's "Catching Fire," which argues homo sapiens have relatively small guts and weak jaws (compared to apes) because we evolved from cooking ancestors.

He spent some time eating a chimp diet and found it completely unpalatable and difficult to chew and ingest -- a pretty good argument for being inappropriate to sustain human health.

Further, some 50% of the female modern human raw foodists his colleagues studied were so malnourished that they had ceased to menstruate, so clearly they could not have reproduced.

If our biological imperative is to spread DNA around, then a diet that prevents that doesn't make sense to us as a species.

Is it a good read?

I heard an interview w/ the author on NPR a while back, but havent heard much on it since....

It was fast and relatively enjoyable.

I didn't look at all his cites, but it seems well-supported on the anthro side (his field).

I did happen to want to read the paper he cited for supporting his argument that we are evolved to metabolize Maillard reaction products.

Those are what give grilled meat and browned carbs their lusciousness.

They are amines and acrylamides that cause cancer in lab rats in large amounts.

Every year the media rolls out the "OMG, GRILLING KILLS!" headlines.

I was disappointed that the paper he cited didn't back his argument at all: it was about how diabetics appear to not metabolize amines very well.

Meh. So I don't know what kind of caution is due his other cites, although the ones on raw foodism were strong (in that they were actually about studies of raw foodists.) (If you want to know more about Maillard, it turns out that I pulled pretty much every clinical trial I could find.

My conclusion: Cancer risk in humans not substantiated.

Grill away if that's what you like.)

Thanks for the insight

I've always been skeptical of raw-foodists especially being a strength athlete.

I've never seen a muscle bound vegetarian.

It's hard enough gaining muscle with a regular diet.

Why make it harder by going veggie?

First off I'm not a vegetarian, but I just wanted to show you this guy .

He's 6'3", 253 lbs, and is an NHL enforcer.

This pretty much means that he's much tougher than a coffin nail, and he supposedly does all this being a vegan.

This guy actually says "good luck" before dropping the gloves.

Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxFS2JAyleo&feature=related

Wow.. I wish I knew what he was eating.

Note that nakamurasan said "raw foodists." Big difference between that and vegan.

Cooking makes a huge difference in how digestible proteins and other nutrients are to us.

Across the world, different cultures eat diets composed of different amounts of animal protein, from 100% (like the inuit) to zero.

What they have in common is that they all cook.

I bet he became a NHL enforcer and then became a vegan. In fact: Georges' Blog - June 4, 2009 I am pleased to announce that as of today I am officially a vegan. http://www.georgeslaraque.com/default.asp?mn=1.39.20 Pro career 1996 – present http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Laraque He hasn't even played a game as a vegan.

Thanks for the correction.

I'm interested to see if he'll be able to maintain his weight on a vegan diet.

He's going to have to eat a fuck load of beans.

I had a friend in HS who decided to become vegan and he hated rice and he hated beans.

After about a month he ended up in the hospital.

Of course he hadn't listened when I told him he needed complete proteins in his diet.

I read the title as "What Can a Diet of Gorillas Tell Us...";

I think I'll go make a sandwich.

Thanks, but I really don't like eating leaves, bark, and insects.

I take it you didn't read the article or the other comments.

If you struggle through the whole meandering article, this is the conclusion: "So what can the diet of gorillas tell us about what constitutes a healthy diet for humans?

Little if anything.

"




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