Egg yolks good/bad ?

[Larry Roseman]

Absolutely right FredinChina,

Here is a non-peer reviewed article that discusses your point several paragraphs in:

"Until recently, the earliest human hearths were dated to about 250,000 B.C.; last year, however, the discovery of charred bone and primitive stone tools in a cave in South Africa tentatively pushed the time back to roughly one million years ago, closer to what Wrangham’s hypothesis demands but still short."

 

Check it out here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Why-Fire-Makes-Us-Human-208349501.html#Mind-on-Fire-cooking-evolution-1.jpg

 

And the man of the cave did the BBQing then, just like today 

[Joshua Naterman]

One needs to also consider the very important impact that fire and consequently, cooking had on changing the direction of human evolution. Everyone assumes it's just meat. Yes meat played a role in how our digestive tracts changed and our brains got bigger etc, but the increase in calories afforded by meat is only a part of the picture. Cooking allowed a large increase in calories and needs to be recognized. For the same amount of calories ingested, the body gets roughly 30 percent more energy from cooked oat, wheat or potato starch as compared to raw, and as much as 78 percent from the protein in an egg. So one can argue that our intestinal tract length is a result of cooking our foods just as much as you argue it is because we are omnivores.

 

The argument about nutritional deficits in strict vegetarians/vegans is inappropriate if you are referring to B12 deficits. Before the time of modern society B12 was sourced from streams and groundwater and wherever else the microbes that produce B12 are hanging out (on plant matter). With the advent of public sanitation, our water is safer to drink but there is no B12 in it, so vegans need to supplement. This supplementation is, therefore not indicative of something wrong in the vegan diet but a consideration of living in contemporary society.

 

I wonder about what has driven our evolution and if what increases fitness (defined as how much offspring you create) is the same thing that increases longevity. So, what we are intended to be (omnivores) could be what is best for improving fitness but is it the best for longevity? Of course with not enough longevity your chance of producing offspring decreases, so the 2 are related somewhat. Anyways, I'm certainly no expert in evolution/anthropology, but it's a ways from open and shut in my opinion.

All very good points.

 

Cooking allowed humans to eat many carbohydrates that were simply inaccessible without such a process, in addition to introducing cavemen to the earliest pleasures of the Pittsburgh Rare Filet Mignon, though I doubt they would have recognized the name Seriously though, all of these changes are probably important.

 

There is always going to be a divergence between peak performance and peak longevity at some point, particularly when you talk about performing dangerous skills However, athletic individuals tend to live longer than non-athletic individuals AND have lower incidences of chronic illnesses despite greater cell turnover, so trying to make the idea of "omnivorism may improve your performance, but may come at the cost of some longevity vs. vegetarianism" carry a huge amount of weight will probably be a difficult task. I say this because there is no denying that having a huge amount of plant matter in your diet is good for your health... we all know that. I think this will be difficult because the typical omnivorous diet is fairly low in vegetable matter, and without a side by side comparison with equal vegetation and meat vs non-meat diets we'll never really know. One thing we do know is that the potential downside of a red meat-containing diet is fairly small, cming at a cost of what I believe is a hypothetical ~3-4 year decrease in lifespan, according to the meta-analyses I saw last year. Not sure if anything new has come out since then, and there is no information as to whether a meat diet + vegetarian levels of plant matter would have any of the same effects. We do know that many of the phytochemicals in plants can specifically counter the potential pro-carcinogenic and atherosclerogenic processes that red meat is purported to promote, so I think that these are important limitations to consider when looking at available research.

 

I'm not sure that the absorbance of the proteins from cooked eggs would have anything to do with changes in the intestinal length... a natural full carnivore has a much shorter digestive tract than we do, yet they eat raw meats. The increase in length for the intestinal tract seems to coincide with the need for breaking down much more protected cells, like those with cell walls, which we happen to lack the enzymes for. To me it doesn't seem like a creature without the ability to digest one of the key components of plants would be designed to only eat plants. Still, the suggestion that our bodies have somehow shortened their intestinal tracts in response to cooked foods is interesting. Certainly, the cooking of  plants and the subsequent destruction of cell walls would be important in this process, but it seems as if starches are what people cooked... Pretty much every culture has a strong history of eating raw greens, but I can't say what the oldschool ancestors did...

 

It would be interesting to see if this happened to other animals as well, perhaps animals that reproduce very quickly and reach maturity quickly so that we could see what happens over the course of many generations fairly quickly. If there's one thing that I think we all over-estimate, it is the speed with which evolution can occur. There are a lot of things happening in animal research that suggest that this is much, much faster than we think.

 

a question: The microbes you speak of pretty much only exist in poop,a nd the large intestine (where the poop comes from). Are you suggesting that people were eating or drinking enough poop to get this vitamin in sufficient quantity to avoid disease? Many cultures have prized organ meats, and it happens that the liver is the primary B-complex storage organ. Just an ounce has enough for several days. B12 deficiency is something that happens later in life, and if you don't get a very high chemical gradient (a megadose, basically) then without intrinsic factor (something you lose as you age) you can't absorb the B12. This makes your only real option a sublingual tablet.

 

We happen to make plenty of B12 in our large intestines... the problem is that we can't absorb it through the intestinal wall. Other animals can,  which is pretty interesting to me. I don't know why we are apparently so different.

 

I cannot find any replicated research suggesting that plant food sources available to pre-industrial people in any real , or consistent, quantity have any meaningful amount of B12 in them. In theory we have some supplements available now, but those too have not been consistently shown to be effective in small mammals, which serve as excellent digestive models for humans. There are no human studies that I can find. Could you share the source you are using for the groundwater comment?

[Joshua Naterman]

I thought the first oven was the pit BBQ

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

It's more of a stew as far as I can tell.

 

An omelet would put this thread back on topic...

[Joshua Naterman]

Info for people who care:

 

I just did a little math, and it turns out that there are 1.91 times more biotin molecules in a whole egg than the number of molecules of avidin, on overage.

 

The information used for this is the average amount of biotin in a whole chicken egg when raw (approximately 13.4 micrograms, or 0.0000134 grams), the molecular weight of biotin (244.31 grams per mole), the molecular weight of avidin (published research showed me an average of 63,000 grams per mole which is 63 kilodaltons, but you can find 53 kDa to 69 kDa, which doesn't make a difference in what I am about to tell you), and the approximate amount of avidin in a whole raw egg (1.8 milligrams or .0018g).

 

If you don't know how to do the math yourself, learn dimensional analysis. It sounds a lot cooler than it is lol

 

So, every molecule of Avidin can bind FOUR molecules of Biotin. There are only two molecules of biotin for each Avidin to bind, which means that if you are eating whole raw eggs you are absolutely not going to absorb hardly any of the biotin.

 

This is just a public service announcement for people going off of all the BS floating around the internet saying "there is WAY more biotin than avidin, so it doesn't matter!"

 

Cook your egg whites for sure, because that's where the avidin is. You do that and you will decrease your risk of getting salmonella by several orders of magnitude AND you will guarantee that you will not develop a biotin deficiency from the avidin in the raw egg white because you'll be deactivating it without damaging any of the good stuff in the yolk.

 

There is still a risk of getting salmonella, but this is how you would minimize it of you were going to eat raw egg yolks.

[Kevin Conley]

...there is no evidence to suggest that dietary cholesterol intake has anything to do with cholesterol levels in your blood.

 

First off, I am glad to see more people getting a better understanding of cholesterol! The only thing I will note (and this is really just for people who don't want to do a bunch of reading) is that dietary cholesterol has a Michaelis-Menten kinetic type effect on blood cholesterol levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaelis%E2%80%93Menten_kinetics).

 

This is important to note since if your  dietary cholesterol level hits ~100mg you are going to see less and less of an effect on blood cholesterol changes based on dietary cholesterol. So, what is 100mg? 1/2 an egg yolk, or a deck of cards of skinless chicken, or if you are a vegetarian who wont eat eggs: some milk, yogurt, and cheese.

 

My point is: Dietary cholesterols effect on blood cholesterol changes matter if you are vegan. Just something to keep in mind (as exceptions can give those you are talking to fuel).

 

Also of interesting note is that the American Heart Association recommends to , "Cut back on foods high in dietary cholesterol. Aim to eat less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol each day."

 

Yet, after 100mg, it doesn't even matter (i.e. not clinically important). Unless you are not a vegan, dietary cholesterol has negligable impact.

 

P.S. If you guys want sources, let me know and I will post them pronto. They are good reads too.

 

Edit: sorry to detract from a good converstion as I started looking to where it was going(!!).

[Kevin Conley]

You don't need exogenous cholesterol. The body produces what you need.

The editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology is now recommending people should attain an LDL cholesterol level under 50mg/dL.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3603726/pdf/bumc0026-0124.pdf

 

Any wild guesses on how to reach that goal? 

 

Eggs contain choline. There is research in a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that choline in eggs, poultry, dairy and fish produces the same toxic TMAO as carnitine in red meat:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1109400

Oh God, not this slop again...

[Kevin Conley]

I'm not sure where I read that, but I found these articles that talk about B12 found in soil and water:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/48/3/852.full.pdf+html

http://www.aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_14/issue_2/0224.pdf

 

Were people eating poop? This old article discussed the lower B12 status of expat Indians compared to those still living in India. 

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7290546.

The author's suggested reasons include:

• In India, water is contaminated with various bacteria, including those from human and animal feces.
• The practice of defecating in open fields and lack of proper sewage.
• The mode of toilet hygiene where water is used instead of toilet paper.

Interestingly, on your point that we don't absorb B12 produced by our gut flora, there has been research (I can't find the paper(s) sorry!) where vegan people's filtered faecal material has been fed back to them and it has improved their B12 levels. 

 

Why don't we absorb B12 but other animals we eat do? According to some Wikipedia-ing, herbivorous animals must either obtain B12 from bacteria in their rumens, or (if fermenting plant material in the hindgut) by reingestion of cecotrope feces.

 

And, my apologies for wandering off topic   . Hope this helps: 

From what I was reading , some of the algae B12 is absrbed, but it seems not to be in an active state (relative to human needs). For some reason, it seems to interfer with our use of B12.

 

1) Vitamin B-i 2 from algae appears not to be bioavailable - Pieter    C    Dagnelie,    Wija    A    van    Staveren,    and    Henk    van    den    Berg -- Am J C/in Nutr l991;53:695-7.    Printed in USA. © 1991 American Society for Clinical Nutrition)

 

2) Characterization    and    Bioavailability    of    Vitamin    B12-Compounds from    Edible    Algae - Fumio WATANABE*1,,Shigeo TAKENAKA2H,iromi KITTAKA-KATSURASh3u,hei EBARA4and Emi MIYAMOTo -  J Nutr Sci Vitaminoi, 48, 325-331,    2002

 

 Sorry for the bad formatting, but I don't want to take a super long time~.

 

 

As for the India thing, that is interesing (hahaha). I will be looking at that soon!