HOW STARCHY CARBS ADVANCED THE HUMAN RACE
Starchy
carbohydrates were a major factor in the evolution of the human brain
say researchers in the Quarterly Review of Biology, challenging the
long-standing belief that the increase in size of the human brain around
800,000 years ago was the result of increased meat consumption.
“Global increases in obesity and diet-related metabolic diseases
have led to enormous interest in ancestral or ‘Paleolithic’ diets,” said
Professor Jennie Brand-Miller. “Up until now, there has been a heavy
focus on the role of animal protein in the development of the human
brain over the last two million years. The importance of carbohydrate,
particularly in the form of starch-rich plant foods, has been largely
overlooked. Our research suggests that dietary carbohydrates, along with
meat, were essential for the evolution of modern big-brained humans.”
According
to the researchers, the high glucose demands required for the
development of modern humans’ large brains would not have been met on a
low carbohydrate diet. The human brain uses up to 25 per cent of the
body’s energy budget and up to 60 per cent of blood glucose. Human
pregnancy and lactation, in particular, place additional demands on the
body’s glucose budget, along with increased body size and the need for
mobility and dietary flexibility.
Starches would have
been readily available to early human populations in the form of tubers,
seeds and some fruits and nuts. But it was only with the advent of
cooking that such foods became more easily digested, leading to
“transformational” changes in human evolution, said co-author Professor
Les Copeland.
Researchers also point to evidence in
salivary amylase genes, which increase the amount of salivary enzymes
produced to digest starch. While modern humans have on average six
copies of salivary amylase genes, other primates have only an average of
two. The exact point at which salivary amylase genes multiplied is
uncertain, but genetic evidence suggests it occurred in the last million
years, around the same time that cooking became a common practice.
“After cooking became widespread, starch digestion advanced and became
the source of preformed dietary glucose that permitted the acceleration
in brain size,” Professor Copeland said. In terms of energy supplied to
an increasingly large brain, increased starch consumption may have
provided a substantial evolutionary advantage.”
According
to the researchers, a diet similar to that which gave us our large
brains in the Paleolithic era would be positive for human health. That
diet should include underground starchy foods such as potatoes, taro,
yams and sweet potatoes, as well as more recently introduced starchy
grains like wheat, rye, barley, corn, oats, quinoa and millet. “It is
clear that our physiology should be optimised to the diet we experienced
in our evolutionary past,” Professor Brand-Miller said. “Eating meat
may have kickstarted the evolution of bigger brains, but cooked starchy
foods, together with more salivary amylase genes, made us smarter
still.”
Read more:
- The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution
- Hardy, K., Buckley, S., Copeland, L. 2018. Pleistocene dental calculus: Recovering information on Paleolithic food items, medicines, paleoenvironment and microbes. Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Hardy, K. 2018. Plant use in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic: Food, medicine, and raw materials. Quaternary Science Reviews. 191:393-405.
- Copeland, L., Hardy, K. 2018. Archaeological Starch. Agronomy 8(1), 4; doi:
