Health Evolution

   It was only in the 1900s that humans began to consume vegetable oils, which are very high in unsaturated fats. Before this time, our predecessors used animal fats.   Going back to our evolutionary past, the big divergence in human evolution occurred some 2.6 million years ago, when they began consuming meat, fat and bone marrow from animals ( r ). This gave humans a distinct advantage over other hominids as they could now survive on animals and plants. This gave them greater flexibility in a changing environment (the climate was cooling and the Earth began its path through a number of ice ages – this lead to a scarcity of plant food as forests gave way to savannahs, but there still remained plenty of animals) and ultimately enabled modern man to outlive their other hominid brethren. This sudden increase in nutrition and calories allowed the human brain to begin developing. It become larger.   Then around 790 thousand years ago, man discovered fire. This enabled ma...

   ‘Vegetable’ oils are a misnomer, created to give the image of health. These oils are actually seed oils, and include and include sunflower oil, canola oil, peanut oil etc.   Seed oils are made up of significant amount of polyunsaturated fats (or fatty acids) (PUFAs) and are very low in saturated fats (SFAs), when compared to animal fats, which are dominant in SFAs and monounsaturated fats (MFAs).   PUFAs This abundance of PUFAs in seed oils is what makes them so unhealthy. [Monounsaturated fats can also form significant parts of these oils, like olive oil or peanut oil, but these will be discussed in another article as they lie somewhere between SFA and PUFAs.] PUFAs cause improper signalling in the fat cells (adipocytes). They cause the fat cells to keep sucking in energy and fat with abandon! They also embed themselves in the membrane of the fat cells, making them loose and stretchy. PUFA disrupts adipogenesis – the ability to create new fat cells.   The re...