Eat meat. That's the dietary advice given by a team of scientists who examined the dietary role of fat in a study that combined nutritional analysis with anthropologic research about the diets of ancient hunter-gatherer societies. The article is titled Cavemen Diets Offer Insights to Today's Health Problems.
The foods that humanity originally evolved to eat and those we now eat in modern civilization are in many cases significantly different--yet our basic underlying genetic inheritance remains basically the same as it was before, and has evolved only very slightly since then. Thus, many of the foods we now eat are discordant with our genetic inheritance. The principle of evolutionary discordance.
This resource contains more than 40 peer-reviewed, published research reports. For example, the abstract for one reads like this: Both anthropologists and nutritionists have long recognized that the diets of modern-day hunter-gatherers may represent a reference standard for modern human nutrition and a model for defense against certain diseases of affluence. Because the hunter-gatherer way of life is now probably extinct in its purely un-Westernized form, nutritionists and anthropologists must rely on indirect procedures to reconstruct the traditional diet of preagricultural umans.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is committed to expanding the public understanding of human evolution. This web site is dedicated to bringing you the excitement, latest findings, and profound implications of the scientific exploration of human origins. Check out the page on Tools and Food.
Created in April 1998 as the "Virtual Department of Biological Anthropology," the BioAnth website was established as a forum for information on and discussion of topics related to broadly defined aspects of biological and cultural human variation and adaptation. Follow this link for more information on and discussions of topics related to broadly defined aspects of biological & cultural human variation & adaptation.
The Max-Planck-Institute of Evolutionary Biology consists currently of two departments, Evolutionary Ecology and Evolutionary Genetics, which employ a variety of methods and approaches to do basic research in evolutionary biology. A third department in Evolutionary Theory has been newly created. To learn more about this organization and to see some of their studies click here.
There you will find short essays with substantiating links to scientific sources and additional commentary. Subscribers to the SGFM newsletter are notified about additional postings to the "Columns" section as they occur.