Word: fats
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...love affair with sugar--and also with salt, another crucial but not always available part of the diet--goes back millions of years. But humanity's appetite for animal fat and protein is probably more recent. It was some 2.5 million years ago that our hominid ancestors developed a taste for meat. The fossil record shows that the human brain became markedly bigger and more complex about the same time. And indeed, according to Katherine Milton, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, "the incorporation of animal matter into the diet played an absolutely essential role in human evolution...
...appetite for meat and sweets were essential to human survival, but they didn't lead to obesity for several reasons. For one thing, the wild game our ancestors ate was high in protein but very low in fat--only about 4%, compared with up to 36% in grain-fed supermarket beef. For another, our ancestors couldn't count on a steady supply of any particular food. Hunters might bring down a deer or a rabbit or nothing at all. Fruit might be in season, or it might not. A chunk of honeycomb might have as many calories as half...
...marathon undertaking--and then you had to hack up the catch and lug it miles back to camp. Climbing trees to find nuts and fruit was hard work too. In essence, early humans ate what amounted to the best of the high-protein Atkins diet and the low-fat Ornish diet, and worked out almost nonstop. To get a sense of their endurance, cardiovascular fitness, musculature and body fat, say evolutionary anthropologists, look at a modern marathon runner...
...minerals they had thrived on. Average life span increased, thanks to the greater abundance of food, but average height diminished. Skeletons also began to show a jump in calcium deficiency, anemia, bad teeth and bacterial infections. Most meat that people ate came from domesticated animals, which have more fat than wild game. Livestock also supplied early pastoralists with milk products, which are full of artery-clogging butterfat. But obesity still wasn't a problem, because even with animals to help, physical exertion was built into just about everyone's life...
...sugar substitute. Farmers armed with powerful fertilizers and high-tech equipment are growing enormous quantities of corn and wheat, most of which is processed and refined to be tastier and more convenient but is less nutritious. They are raising vast herds of cattle whose meat is laden with the fat that makes it taste so good. They are producing milk, butter and cheese by the tankerload, again full of the fat that humans crave...