Vivian Saravanan

7 May 2018
Dr. Reedy

Do humans have a natural, evolved diet or is it based purely on cultural rules?

The question, “what is the ideal diet for humans?” has been a ubiquitous and omnipresent one

for at least several thousands of years. It has captured the interest of human literature from before the

Bible (and indeed in the Bible itself), to modern times when contemporary food preparation methods is

a very popular genre of publication across all media. [1]

The reasons are likely the obvious one: Everyone eats. Well, almost everyone- there of course a

few unfortunate souls for whom intravenous alimentation is necessary. But it is always at a great cost.

financially and in quality of life. Ingesting food, digesting it, absorbing nutrients from, fermenting it

with microbes, and excreting it, while a much more complicated and involved process than intravenous

alimentation, is both far more efficient and far more nutritious despite the best efforts of the leading

experts.

The ingestion of food is one of the most basic functions of life. As heterotrophs, humans must

necessarily ingest exogenous metabolic products in order to sustain the progress of the 3.8 billion year

old chemical reaction of life. Without receiving these exogenous metabolic products, the individual

dies before it is even a fetus, and its lineage is truncated.

The question, it seems, is, “which metabolic products are the best ones to ingest, and from

which organisms can they be ingested?” Other animals often have well-defined diets. Pandas, for

example, eat nothing but bamboo. Grazing animals, like cows fare best when fed grass. It’s a simple

enough question, and in fact, there are many people who adamantly believe they have chanced upon the

secret answer, and wish to espouse their dietary regimens to the world so that all humans may never

again be plagued by the question.

 The issue is that the variety of “ideal” diets have their benefits and their costs, and individuals

desire varying results. A ballerina wishes to cultivate her body to be lean and muscular yet slender

because she has assimilated the tradition of slenderness as an aesthetic appeal in ballet dancers. A sumo

wrestler wishes to gain as much musculature and subcutaneous fat as possible in order to be large

enough to reliably knock out his similarly huge competitor. Should they eat the same diet?

It’s actually a very complicated question. See, there is more to diet than just the food. The idea

is that they could indeed eat diets with very similar nutrient profiles, but modulating the quantities and

the behaviours in order to achieve the results they desire. Ballerinas often eat very restrictively between

800 and 2000 kilocalories in a day, and take careful measures to prevent weight gain, going as far as to

induce vomiting after overeating. They cannot be lenient when their professions require results. Sumo

wrestlers are well-documented to exercise throughout the day to work up a tremendous appetite and

then eat well over 10,000 kilocalories immediately before going to sleep. They cannot be lenient when

their professions require results.

The notion of “calories in; calories out” as a method of modulating body size is not the whole

picture. And what is the ideal body size? That itself is a point of contention.

I propose that the ideal human diet must be determined on an individual basis using empirical

data, a well-characterised picture of the desired result, and a “study of one” approach. There’s no easy

answer. The attitudes towards food and health that each individual assimilates, and the biological set

points for appetite and expression of nutrient partitioning peptides like the PPAR family of inducers,

are highly idiosyncratic. And as a result, both the ideal and the means to achieve the ideal are

idiosyncratic as well.

In the search for the ideal human diet, many have looked into the evolutionary environment of

early humans to try to glean insight into their diets. This is often well-intentioned, but sadly misguided.

Humans did not have a lot of dietary choice. One popular diet founded on this ‘evolutionary past’

philosophy is known as the Paleo diet which purports to simulate the dietary conditions of paleolithic
humans. Such humans were previously thought to eat animals as the basis of their diet. But new

evidence shows that animal consumption was relatively rare. Fossilized starch granules have been

found in hominid teeth, and isotopic analyses indicated that plants and aquatic organisms were more

prevalent in the diets of early humans. [3] The bias towards dietary prevalence of animals appears to

have been due to the fact that plant material does not enter the fossil record as well as animal bones do.

Humans may be the creatures best adapted to omnivory ever to exist. And indeed, it is most

likely that humans also adapted over time to eat what they could find.

This is, perhaps, good news. If you don’t happen to be surrounded by an environment saturated

with highly palatable food designed by large teams of research scientists to get you to spend money on

it as many times as possible before you die. Of course, this food environment was not always the case.

During the first 200,000 years that modern humans were around, famines were a frequent problem, and

even from 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture, to 100 years ago, a lack of food security was

a rampant problem and famines were relatively common.

The trouble for humans is that humans are the least metabolically efficient primates. They are

tremendously inefficient with food energy. At rest, when compared to the metabolic needs of the

species Pan troglodytes and Pongo pygmaeus-- two species often possessing similar amounts of lean

body mass as humans-- humans require approximately three times the food energy. [4] This is mostly

due to the fact that human brains are metabolically expensive organs to sustain. Accounting for only 2-

5% of body mass, the human brain accounts for 25% of the total energy expenditure of an individual at

rest. [4]

Humans are also highly social animals, and tend to live in groups largely limited by the capacity

of the surrounding environment to support their metabolic needs. It was indeed the meme of agriculture

that first allowed humans to produce enough food to sustain a city population and allow a large portion

of the population to devote their time and energy to the development of other useful memes like culture

and technology. [1]

 Perhaps the most curious notion of all in the search for the ideal human diet is that humans have

adapted to the diets that they have chosen to eat. I say “chosen,” because it is true that humans elected

to eat cooked tubers, fruits, and animal tissues rather than sticks and twigs. But then again it is not

really a choice in consideration of the immense energy requirements of humans and the low energy

density of fibrous plant parts. When humans are completely deprived of more energy-dense substances,

the palatability of sticks and twigs slowly increases. But they have normally been considered mostly

inedible by humans who have been generally clever enough, by virtue of their expensive brains, to

avoid such a fate.

Memes influence genes, and so it makes sense than that looking at genetic changes that have

occurred in humans as a result of diet might reveal insights into what humans eat.

There are at least two very sound, well-known examples of memetic (“cultural”) influence on

on heredity occurring in human phenotype. The best known example is lactase persistence in modern

humans. Cattle-rearing cultures present humans who tend to be able to digest milk without

gastrointestinal distress from the constituent disaccharide lactose at a greater rate than cultures that did

not raise cattle. It was very advantageous for humans to raise cattle for milk because humans

essentially used cattle as biological machines to turn indigestible-to-humans cellulose into digestible-

to-humans proteins and fats, increasing food security.

A more ancient example of diet-induced change to humans is a genetic one: compared to Pan

troglodytes, humans have a three-fold increase in copy number of the salivary amylase gene. [2][6][7]

Salivary amylase is an enzyme that specifically cleaves the 1,4-glycosidic linkages in amylose (starch),

and an increase in copy number of the gene coding for it has been shown to directly correlate with an

increase in expression of the enzyme. [6] Pan troglodytes and other primates have very little use for

this gene. Though it does cleave maltose (a disaccharide) and slightly break down some of the

metabolic components in soft plant matter, raw starch is not a particularly available energy source, and

the increase of expression of amylase in humans was radical.

 In fact, this genetic modulation of salivary amylase expression in correlation to starch reliance

is still occurring in human populations, as it was noted that hunter-gatherer populations expressed

about half as much salivary amylase as their agrarian counterparts in Europe and Asia. [6]

The significance of this has profound implications. At face value, it indicates that all humans

have found starch digestion to be a favorable adaptation, and that human populations for whom starch

is a staple food have improved their starch digestion over time. But what is starch? Starch is a glucose

polymer that exists in most plant substances in very small quantities as very hard, insoluble, crystalline

granules. Some plant organs, such as tuberous roots and some seeds, contain large quantities of starch

which the plant can metabolize back into simple sugars and use for energy during stages of their life

cycle when they lack adequate photosynthetic organs. Though of great use to plants, starch is of very

little value to most animals as a source of energy because of its hard, crystalline nature.

See, in order to digest a substance, enzymes must be able to interact with them in an aqueous

solution. This is the problem with starch: the 1,4-glycosidic linkages that must be accessed by the

enzyme amylase are not available for hydrolysis in its crystalline form due to being locked up in a solid

crystalline matrix. The solution? You must heat the starch granule to a temperature higher than its

gelatinization temperature in an aqueous environment. Gelatinization is the chemical process wherein

crystalline amylose dissolves into the surrounding water and forms a hydrocolloid. At a molecular

level, the 1,4-glycosidic linkages that make up the amylose are in an aqueous solution post-

gelatinization and as such are available to be cleaved by the enzyme amylase.

Gelatinization occurs at very high temperatures, often near the boiling point of water. The

adaptation of humans to digest gelatinized starches by increasing the copy number of the amylase gene

indicates that humans have adapted to better digest cooked foods. Additionally, the gracility of the

human jaw combined with the complete lack of sagittal crest further support the theory that humans are

adapted to eat cooked food. [8]

 It seems that the meme of cooking has become a necessary behavior for the survival of humans,

because you can get more food energy out of anything at all if it is cooked. [8] It’s an intriguing claim.

When you read the nutrition information on, for example, a packet of crisps, the food energy (“Calorie

content”) was calculated by complete combustion of the food to carbon dioxide and a very tiny amount

of ash in the presence oxygen inside a bomb calorimeter as per the Atwater convention. [8] And though

animal systems are very efficient at absorbing and assimilating food energy, they do not do it

completely.

It is difficult to characterise the degree of absorption and assimilation of food substances by

humans largely because undigested matter is metabolized to a high degree by trillions of

microorganisms in the colon. In the case of ileostomy patients, whose food never makes it to the colon,

it was found that they required 30% more alimentation to maintain their pre-ileostomy body size [8].

The best evidence Harvard primatologist, Richard Wrangham, offers in his book Catching Fire is the

case of raw-food dieters. He noted that after two years following a raw food diet, 100 percent of

human females were amenorrheic [8]. They were infertile. Which is a very severe selective handicap.

Obvious problems with this evidence is that raw food dieters are largely self-selecting and might have

other very restrictive attitudes about food, and their diets were not controlled for nutrient intake.

In addition to gelatinizing starches, cooking is a form of “pre-digestion.” It denatures proteins,

making their functional groups more accessible to digestive enzymes and their access less dependent on

in situ acid-base chemistry in the gut (depending on the amino residues comprising the peptide, the

natural version might sterically hinder non-selective proteases from accessing the amide bonds linking

the peptides, resulting in poor digestion). It dissolves hemicellulose in plant foods, allowing cell walls

to be more easily broken by teeth to release the nutritious intracellular contents like sugars.

And so, because humans have adapted at least two memes-- domesticated animal exploitation

and cooking-- that drastically increased the availability of nutrients independent of environment, I can

only conclude that humans have evolved to eat whatever they can get their hands on.
 The human diet has been incredibly diverse for hundreds of years as a direct result. Using

processing methods like cooking, pickling, fermenting, curing, and conversion to animal tissues and

secretions by animal agriculture, humans have been able to take advantage of even the most vaguely

edible substances in their environment. Seaweeds, tender plants, insects, pollen, lichens, and non-

starchy roots, and fermented inedible plants are examples of foods that have faded in popularity around

the world as more palatable, energy-dense alternatives have replaced them. Yet these substances are

still eaten.

So it seems that there is no ideal evolved human diet. Humans adapted to their own diet.

The ideal human diet is perhaps something that we might instead discover in modern times, due

to the modern luxury of food choice. However, the research is still conflicting.

High-carbohydrate plant-based diets low in fat and protein and low-carbohydrate diets high in

fat and protein seem as diametrically opposed as one can achieve. Yet both these dietary approaches

have large followings of people adamantly endorsing them with glowing reviews. And indeed, studies

have shown that both approaches have favorable results when compared to the Standard American Diet

(SAD). [5]

The epidemiological transition has seen humans begin to die more and more from diseases of

overnutrition rather than from malnutrition, deficiencies, or infectious disease. It seems that any change

at all away from the SAD, reduces dietary variety and the availability of food deemed consumable to

the individual, partially inhibiting the ease of overnutrition in the modern food environment.

I propose that dogmatic adherence to ‘restrictive’ diets (diets which prohibit the consumption of

certain classifications of food) is a memetic adaptation of modern humans to the current food

environment. For if you are a vegan, Paleo, or compliant with any other categorization of restrictive

diet, a great portion of pre-made food is no longer acceptable to eat, and so you will not eat it. This

percieved reduced availability of food energy might result in a long-term reduction of food

consumption. If, for example, someone who is not adherent to a restrictive diet plan feels hungry at
work, they might purchase an energy-dense snack from a vending machine. An adherent individual,

however, will be forced to wait or have brought their own snack.

Additionally, adopting an unconventional dietary plan, while often self-selecting, results in the

necessity for more attention to be paid to dietary choices. Becoming part of an ingroup by identifying

under one of the many diet-specifying labels (“Paleo;” “vegetarian;” et cetera) can reinforce

compliance to the modified diet. [1]

The dogmatic avoidance of particular ingredients, while scientifically questionable, may play a

key role in the antagonism of food consumption of an individual by reducing food availability. Though

humans must rely on the metabolic products of other organisms on food, it seems that excess ingestion

of these metabolic products is detrimental to human health. And so the most important question one

must ask in determining the ideal human diet might not be “what do we eat?” but “how much?”

The great irony of trying to identify a perfect diet for humans is that human diet, since its

inception, has always been a dynamic reconciliation of the consumption of a diet imperfect due to sub-

optimal conditions and the evolutionary selective pressures assisting humans in adapting to that diet.

And now that conditions for most humans have improved such that there is enough of a degree of

choice to allow for them to choose a ‘perfect diet,’ it seems that the closest thing to a perfect diet for

humans was in not having so much choice after all.

References:

1. Albala, K. (2013). Food: A Cultural Culinary History. Lecture. The Great Courses. The Teaching

Company, LLC.

2. Burton, Frances D. (2009). Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution. Albuquerque : University

of New Mexico Press.

3. Chandler‐Ezell, K., Deborah M. P., and James A. Z. (2006) Root and Tuber Phytoliths and Starch

Grains Document Manioc (Manihot esculenta), Arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea), and Llerén

(Calathea sp.) at the Real Alto Site, Ecuador. Economic Botany.

4. Leonard, W. R. (1994). Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Nutrition: The Influence of Brain and

Body Size on Diet and Metabolism. American Journal of Human Biology. DOI:

10.1002/ajhb.1310060111

5. Mansoor, N., Vinknes, K. J., et al. (2015). Effects of low-carbohydrate diets v. low-fat diets on body

weight and cardiovascular risk factors: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.

Cambridge University Press.

6. Perry, G. H., Dominy, N. J., et al. (2007). Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy

number variation. Nature Genetics.

7. Wrangham, R. (2017). Control of Fire in the Paleolithic: Evaluating the Cooking Hypothesis.

Current Anthropology. Harvard University. DOI: 10.1086/692113

8. Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.