DailyDirt: Eating The Right Stuff

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Sep 13th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

We've all heard the phrase, "you are what you eat" as advice to avoid junk foods (even ethically-shady foods). It does make some intuitive sense that the foods we consume have a significant impact on our health, but it's often difficult to separate the fact from fiction for what constitutes heathy eating. There are raw food trends and diet fads to avoid just about any conceivable food category. Here are just a few interesting links on the topic of the things we eat having some rational health benefit.

Cooking food allowed our ancestors to grow bigger brains since we didn't have to spend as much energy on hunting and gathering. Big brains need a lot of calories, consuming about 20% of the calories we ingest even though the brain is only about 2% of our body mass. [url]
There's a common myth that taking vitamins can produce almost magical health benefits, but more scientific studies are finding that vitamins aren't necessarily a boon to society. Linus Pauling, the famous chemist who won two Nobel prizes, promoted the idea that vitamin C was particularly beneficial... but the science doesn't quite back him up. [url]
Iodine has been added to dietary salt since 1924, originally to prevent goiter, but there's some evidence that iodine also plays a critical role in brain development. Economists studying the differences between areas of low iodine consumption versus higher iodine intake have found that people in areas that avoided iodine deficiencies have gotten smarter and may explain part of the Flynn Effect (which observes that developed countries saw a rise in IQ scores of 3 points per decade throughout the 20th century). [url]

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Filed Under: cooking, flynn effect, food, healthy, intelligence, iodine, iq, linus pauling, nutrients, vitamin c, vitamins

6 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 13 Sep 2013 @ 5:12pm

ha, if a little bit is good, a LOT must be better, right?
hopefully, people won't overdose on iodine based on that correlation of iodine and IQ points!
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Anonymous, 13 Sep 2013 @ 5:55pm

First article, a crock pot full of crap. If the other two articles are that idiotic, I don't want to bother with them.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 13 Sep 2013 @ 6:02pm

Cooked Food vs Bigger Brains
There�s another factor: chewing raw food requires bigger, stronger jaw muscles, which need stronger anchoring points on the skull, which leaves less room for the brain to expand.
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Andrew D. Todd, 15 Sep 2013 @ 12:15pm

Re: Cooked Food vs Bigger Brains-- and Making Traps
I've always been impressed by Clifford Jolly's T-Hypothesis. There's a kind of monkey called a Gellada (Thereopithicus), which lives in Ethiopia. To anyone but a purist, it's a kind of baboon. At any rate, it makes its living by walking, hunkered down like a cotton-picker, through stands of wild grain, using both hands to pick with. The seed-heads aren't very big, so to get a decent meal, you have to pick a lot of them, which means using both hands efficiently. The Jolly-T hypothesis argues that early man did much the same thing. It's an act well within the scope of normal ape-like behavior, and it explains how early man started walking upright. About twenty-five years ago, during my second year of Anthropology graduate school, I did a further development on this in a weekly seminar paper, which I never published (*), arguing that early man was a creature which built traps to catch things like frogs, and similar tools, and became intelligent by inventing new and better traps. It was a rather singular paper in that one of the sources I referenced was a revision of a military survival manual, intended for men who crashed airplanes, or were shot down, in remote places during the Second World War. The manual's advice is to survive in the jungle by becoming an efficient ant-eater or termite-eater, or something like that.

(*) There weren't any blogs back in those days, nor any personal websites, or anything like that.

See: _The Seed Eaters: A New Model Of Hominid Differentiation Based On A Baboon Analogy_, Clifford J. Jolly, Man, New Series, 5(1), 5-26, 1970
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Sep 2013 @ 3:29pm

paleo diet!
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Sep 2013 @ 7:15am

Just like over-filling your gas tank won't make your car run better, over-eating vitamins won't make you healthier.

You suffer from vitamin deficiency, but you don't gain anything from vitamin excess.
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