Want to lose weight?

Eat like Australopithecus, but be aware that you won't be able to meet your energy needs. It takes meat and there's a program on the Science Channel tonight called How Food Made Us Human about the theory that meat is what made us evolve our large brains. Of course, that doesn't explain why human ancestors started eating meat instead of staying in the trees, but then in science not everything has to have a reason. It could be just be a simple, fortunate mutation.

From watching the "primitive" hunter-gatherers shown in the program, it certainly doesn't look like it was just handier to start hunting, killing, butchering and cooking animal flesh. None of the hunters were fat. Their lifestyle takes too much work. Furthermore, the program demonstrates how cooking food, even vegetarian animals like mice, gives animals more energy and makes them fatter. Cooking makes food easier to digest by breaking it down before we eat it and allows our digestive processes to release more sugars into our blood.

Extremely lean meat, however, isn't sufficient. It has too much protein to meet our energy demands without overloading our livers. That's called rabbit starvation, because rabbit flesh has very little fat. Fat is where the energy comes from and together with protein, it makes bigger brains possible. Bone marrow is rich in it. Brains take quite a bit of energy, and the myelin which insulates nerve fibers is made of 80% fat and 20% protein.

(There's no link, because I couldn't find one to this documentary. Maybe it's too politically incorrect to promote meat consumption.)