RE: evolution and diet

From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 12:45:17 MDT

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    "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"
    http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html

    This is an excellent article by Jared Diamond that appeared in Discovery
    Magazine in 5/87. According to Diamond, agriculture is the worst mistake in
    the history of the human race.

    Someone here (Damien S., I think) wrote in a related thread that Diamond
    disagrees with my view that it was for nutritional reasons that agriculture
    led to poor health; that Diamond believes instead that the poor health of
    early farmers was a result of increased infectious disease caused by
    over-crowding and by living with animals. However from this article it would
    appear that such is not Diamond's view.

    Diamond acknowledges that the pre-agricultural diet was a healthier diet,
    and lists variations on this theme as the first and second of three reasons
    for the poor health of early farmers. The third of his three reasons is
    indeed increased disease from over-crowding, but he adds parenthetically
    that arguments of archeologists who claim this as the only reason are really
    just chicken-and-egg arguments, because "crowding encourages agriculture and
    vice versa."

    Excerpt from the article:
    "There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
    agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
    diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
    starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
    nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants-wheat, rice, and
    corn-provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet
    each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.)
    Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the
    risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that
    agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many
    of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the
    spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it
    was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this
    is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and
    vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in
    small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease
    had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance
    of large cities."

    -gts



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