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Which type of diet suit us the most?

We would have seen and heard a lot of people having heated discussions on the above topic. Nowadays-even doctors around the world have started recommending people to stick to a vegetarian diet to remain healthy and to stay away from coronary diseases. The non-vegetarian diet is losing its popularity.

But it is essential for us to understand how our dietary shaped our evolution. Non- vegetarian food is after all not bad to our health since it is this diet that aided us a lot in our evolution.

We should not forget that our ancestors were not vegetarians. In fact scavenging made humans discover tools, a giant-step forward in their evolution. We are omnivores by nature, but today we have been domesticated to a large extent that we no longer need non-vegetarian supplements to our diet, but can just stick to a vegetarian diet for survival.

Humans branched off from a common ancestor that gave birth to the current day apes, too. Our ancestors were arboreal beings who lived in trees in forests. Landscapes across the world started changing during this time with forests giving way to vast grass lands (say some 5 million years ago) forcing the most primitive of our ancestors to become terrestrial. Even when they were arboreal our ancestors were used to supplement their diet with meat, as protein and fat were essential for their survival.

One of the first arboreal species that was forced to walk on land and eventually give birth to the modern day men, the Australopithecus afarensis, found life in land to be very challenging, as they were not used to it. They were preyed upon by primitive cats that ruled the forests then. Australopithecus resorted to scavenging just like the modern day hyenas and foxes, for survival.

They were not carnivores by nature, so they did not have any natural weapons like, claws or canines to hunt down other preys, their herbivorous diet (Fruits etc.,) was getting hard to find. Being great opportunists and they resorted to scavenging to stay alive. This clearly explains that our first ancestors were scavengers and not herbivores and scavenging helped them to survive, otherwise, humans would have never got a chance to inhabit this great planet.
Homo erectus (from which the modern day humans Homo sapiens evolved) was also a scavenger even though they started to hunt down their prey in the later stages of their evolution.

They resorted to scavenging whenever they had a chance. Homo erectus did not scavenge only dead animals, but they went a step beyond and ate the bone marrow of the dead animals, found in the wild.

Bones were usually left untouched by carnivores and other scavengers and Homo erectus discovered that the marrow found within the bone was highly nutritional, compared to meat and at the same time was easy to find as there was no competitors for bones. They discovered the first tools not to hunt but to crush the bones to get the marrow, thus taking a giant-leap forward in the evolution by using tools.
Even Homo sapiens during their early stages of evolution were scavenging a lot and during the ice age they resorted to a diet that only comprised of meat and other animal products.

Only when the humans became the dominant species and when the fear of survival was overwhelmed by the quest for establishing our species, humans started to cultivate food and resort to a vegetarian diet.
Today physical activity in humans is highly restricted and hence they are not able to burn the fat in the Non-vegetarian food and this fat starts to give a hell lot of trouble to them.

So they have to reduce their non – vegetarian diet in order to stay healthy. This makes vegetarian food a better option, but the vegetarian diets must be supplemented with non-vegetarian food like meat or fish, to provide essential fat and proteins to the body, which could help us to stay healthy.

Recent studies have shown that small amounts of fat is essential in controlling extra proteins within the cells, which otherwise could harm the cell. A diet, which comprises both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food, would be the best option available for humans to stay healthy.

A.K.Siva

Helpful Links
http://www.veganeating.org/
http://www.abscofitness.com/

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