Masterjohn At AHS: #3

This is a fantastic post from Chris Masterjohn, go read it!

http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2011/08/reflections-on-ancestral-health.html

One of the most interesting presentations I saw was by Dr. Craig Stanford, who talked about gorilla and chimpanzee diets.  Gorillas don't eat just leaves, I learned, but eat fruit whenever it's available.  They never hunt, and wouldn't even kill an animal if you half-killed it first and put it right in front of them.  They have very little tolerance for animal foods and zoos have been killing them slowly by feeding them these foods.  Chimpanzees differ from gorillas both in their hunting and fruit-eating behavior.  When fruit goes out of season, chimpanzees migrate until they find more fruit.  As a result they eat it year-round.  Most of them also do enough hunting for each chimp to be eating some 50-100 grams of meat per day. 

Speaking of frugivores, I was quite interested to see a comparison between humans and various apes that Melissa showed in her talk.  Leaf-eating apes had very large guts, but fruit-eating apes had smaller ones, much closer to those of humans.  In showing this, she made the point that humans are adapted to foods with higher caloric density than leaves, such as cooked food, starch, and fat.  It is interesting to also note the association between smaller guts and fruit-eating in other apes, and to note that one way humans have increased the caloric density of their diet is to select fruits rich in sugar and low in toxins and aversive tastes.  This increase in caloric density is exactly what we need to fuel our large brains, and humans have been eating calorie-rich natural foods such as meat, starch, fat, and fruit for eons before the modern epidemic of obesity.