Because animals don’t have our type of versatile mitochondria except maybe tortoises?
Could also be the loss of or the ability to produce proteolytic enzymes (protease) in animals (specifically carnivores) as they age (or causes rapid metabolic shift down) that decreases their longevity or the ability to digest (break down) raw proteins?
Same goes for amylase and lipase (digestive enzymes)!
I refer to our ability to utilize glucose and our ability to extract it from carbs at all. We evolved from herbivorous ancestors and retain a much reduced ability to metabolize carbs because we’ve lost the guts to do so. We gave up big guts to get big brains. I think we still utilize glucose primarily to feed the brain when necessary via gluconeogenesis, but the better fuel are ketones.
We have big brains because we are the only species on earth that cook our food (highly concentrating it in laboratories?)! So in that sense we are increasing carbohydrates in food and increasing a refined glucose content (the difference between pre and post agriculture and may also explain tooth decay post agriculture). We are as human beings in a sense digesting food outside our body before we eat it and why we lose our versatile bushman ability as omnivores (adaption and transmutation) to digest and breakdown raw plants including meat! I think a bushmen would outlive (longevity) his post-agricultural brothers? And I do mean a true bushman who is not sitting their roasting meat or veggies like tubers over a flame or cooking things in metallurgical pots (tubal cane) and pottery?
What is so specifically unique about human beings is we are so versatile that we can switch tracks when ever we want and go back to eating the way we did before we started cooking food (processing and refining it; horticulture), it does not take millions or kazzillions of years to do so!
References:
[1] “…Vegetable Carbohydrates Cooked Uncooked – Carbs (carbohydrates) in vegetables can definitely be affected by cooking. They are not affected as quickly or as extensively as phytonutrients like flavonoids or carotenoids, but they are still subject to changes from baking, boiling, steaming, and roasting. The exact impact of cooking on vegetables-and on other foods as well depends on how long you cook them, how high a temperature at which you cook them, and how much moisture you use when cooking them. But here are some basics about vegetables, cooking, and carbohydrates that you should know. …” …More
Note: That is unless you are boiling and rinsing them several times and extracting the oligosaccharides out of them?
One factor in Lifespan is related to how often you as a species can reproduce.
Another factor in Lifespan is dictated by nutrient availability, actual and predicted.
I believe this is valid in both the microscopic and macroscopic worlds.
I think both the brain and the heart prefer ketones.Though that’s a tough call, as you always have both glucose and ketones available, even fasting for a long time.
No doubt cooking makes some plant materials more easily metabolized into glucose.
None-the-less the plant material most widely and readily available during the Pleistocene was predominantly cellulose, which no amount of cooking/boiling is going to make digestible.
From this source:
Humans are known for sporting big brains. On average, the size of primates’ brains is nearly double what is expected for mammals of the same body size. Across nearly seven million years, the human brain has tripled in size, with most of this growth occurring in the past two million years.
…With some evolutionary irony, the past 10,000 years of human existence actually shrank our brains. Limited nutrition in agricultural populations may have been an important driver of this trend. Industrial societies in the past 100 years, however, have seen brain size rebound, as childhood nutrition increased and disease declined.
All those selectively bred and cultivated carbs, cooked or otherwise, didn’t do much for our brains. And we know they did a lot to our metabolic health. Again, where is the ‘good carb’?
When I see “millions of years” and the word “evolutionary” hence “evolving” they lose me, first where is the proof, you have to be able to prove that before you can make far reaching theories and hypothetical statements so the rest of what is being said means nothing?
It is the intellectuals way of brain washing the reader into believing his or her views without any proof, would rather watch cartoons than read such fairytales, so without true science as your base how can you draw any conclusions from somebody making things up or believe any of the other content they are writing about!
At least Fairytales actually have some truth to them?
@atomicspacebunny as you pointed out with a quote from Attila, there is no ultimate ‘proof’ in science. There are better and better approximations to the point where any additional data simply flesh out the knowledge more fully. There is overwhelming evidence for the evolution of human beings over the course of more than 10 million years. There is zero evidence that something else happened. Did you simply glaze over my previous post:
‘Special creation’ is a specifically Christian belief looking desperately for a sciency pretense. Even the Roman Catholic Church long ago accepted evolutionary theory as a valid explanation for the development of life on this planet.
That is quite the contrary I could show you overwhelming cross validated mathematical evidence that the earth itself is only a few thousand years old, so where are they getting these millions of solar years?
What your calling “zero evidence” is the exact opposite? There is zero evidence for what your trying to convince yourself that there is evidence for?
The human brain has always been and always will be the same size we just figured out a way to over supply it with carbohydrates!
Are you trying to earn the site troll badge?
Or have you recently become an evangelical?
I am not a moderator here, but it seems that now that the discussion has changed from the original post into a discussion about belief versus science, nothing else is going to be accomplished by this discussion.
Has nothing to do with religion just pure science, draw from it what you will whether it be religion or whatever?
We are discussing science of human nutrition not religion let’s be clear on that!
Just need to be clear on having proof when we make baseless statements that have nothing to do with science?
Well, when you brought in Methusaleh (sp?) a while back, that would be religion.
Please present it.
Documented history within a religious text does not have anything to do with worship, there are text outside your classical religious text that also confirm the existence of such people!
I could but that is not the point of the discussion (astro physics, geology and plate teutonics) we just need to be aware when one inserts fiction into the history of human physiology and biology without any proof or facts?
So just trying to stay on topic!
I thought as much. And I agree with @VirginiaEdie here.
As for inserting fiction into the history of human physiology and biology without proof or fact, you are the essence.
I could give that a scathing review (op-ed) but again just trying stay on topic?