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Did fermented foods fuel brain growth?
- giantg2 3y agoIf only this were true for my fermented drinks of choice.
- mlhpdx 3y agoIt may be, as the principle still applies. It'd interesting to contemplate that the "pivotal" mutation may have been something as subtle as a taste preference that lead to the consumption of the "spoiled" food caches, and the resulting surplus of energy. Of course, for that to be the case we'd have been caching food because of some previous mutation, and back and back we go...
- giantg2 3y agoI don't think it applies at the alcohol levels of beer and wine. That tends to cause atrophy with enough use.
- beretguy 3y agoLike… kefir?
- unglaublich 3y agoMy pet theory is that our advances in brain capacity improved our ability to obtain, plan, prepare and preserve food, paving the way to further brain development. It's a positive feedback loop. So purposeful fermentation might have played a role, just like fire, and hunting, and gathering techniques, and farming. It probably wasn't a revolutionary and sudden change, but gradual developments.
- radicaldreamer 3y agoI wonder if there are natural limits to this... brains so smart that they hinder reproduction and are selected against (maybe we're already there)
- berkes 3y agoThat's easy: brains so smart that it eliminates all natural enemies causing an exponential population explosion. But not smart enough to overcome the challenges such an explosion must overcome It's easy because it's exactly where we are now. Strip mining natural resources, runaway climate- and ecological change. And no way to solve it.
- rvnx 3y agoWasn't it a reference to a correlation between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence ?
- berkes 3y agoNot intentional. But thanks for pointing to it. Gives me a lot of new reading material!
- NotAnEconomis23 3y agoFertility and intelligence is only half of the picture. (an important piece, though) What about intelligence and life expectancy of the individual and of children? Also, what about other types of intelligence? IQ, EQ, etc? While very complicated, a multigenerational sampling with more information is really required. There is so much more to this picture, than a negative fertility correlation.
- thisislife2 3y agoRelated: A surprising food may have been a staple of the real Paleo diet: rotten meat - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/meat-rotten-putrid-paleo-diet-fire-neanderthal https://www.sciencenews.org/article/meat-rotten-putrid-paleo... Is the process of rotting also part fermentation? (God, I hope this doesn't start a new fad of eating rotting meat, among the Paleo dieters).
- kyllo 3y agoEver had a dry-aged steak?
- 1270018080 3y agoThe steaks where they cut off all of the rotten parts so you're not eating rotten meat? Yeah.
- xutopia 3y agoA fermentation process occurs deep within the meat tissue. The outside parts are usually moldy but not rotten if done correctly.
- jjulius 3y agoRight. The entire steak ages and changes, not just the exterior. Even so, some places, like Flannery Beef, will blend some of the ends into their "adventurous" burger blend.
- mlhpdx 3y agoWell, rotting increases the accessible carbs, which sounds antithetical to the neo-paleo diet. Hopefully we're safe from the new "unpreserved meat" fad.
- stephc_int13 3y agoWell. Aged beef is a thing. And aged poultry has been a thing for a long time. And if you ask the northern people and some in Africa, aged fish is a delicacy. Aged means controlled rot. Pretty much like fermentation for cabbage etc.
- retrac 3y agoOne thing I rarely see noted in these discussions is that no other animal treats or processes their food like humans, even without fire or fermentation. We effectively pre-chew our meals with our hands, breaking everything into a nice bite-sized pieces, with mashing or grinding of what would otherwise be too hard to eat. We will sort through thousands of tiny berries carefully, to make sure we don't eat something unpleasant. We will go hungry even when edible food is around, because we know it will be even more ripe later.
- Melatonic 3y agoWe also eat a huge variety of food (probably more than any other animal) so it makes sense that we need to be more picky.
- NewJazz 3y ago.... Pretty sure there are plenty of animals that store food for winter, or mash and grind nuts, or sort through berries.
- yieldcrv 3y agoplenty of species delay gratification, and with food, in the ways you described and other ways do you need examples of that? do you have a GPT4 subscription?
- DarkNova6 3y agoThere are ant colonies that grow their own fungi.
- NewJazz 3y agoI knew about aphid farming, did not know some ants grow fungi! https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/farmer-ants-and-their-aphid-herds https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/farmer-ants-a... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungus-growing_ants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungus-growing_ants
- someuser2345 3y ago> We effectively pre-chew our meals with our hands, breaking everything into a nice bite-sized pieces, with mashing or grinding of what would otherwise be too hard to eat Crows use cars to break open nuts they would otherwise not be able to eat; eagles drop turtles to break their shell. > We will sort through thousands of tiny berries carefully, to make sure we don't eat something unpleasant When orkas kill sharks, they only eat the liver of the shark and leave the rest alone. Wild civets also choose only the best coffee berries, which is part of why we make coffee from their poop. > We will go hungry even when edible food is around, because we know it will be even more ripe later. I don't think we go hungry, we just look for better food elsewhere until that edible food is fully ripened.
- Melatonic 3y agoI do not have any expertise specifically in fermented food and brain health however I always found it super interesting that pretty much every culture (both independent of one another and sharing with cultures close by) came up with their own unique sets of fermented foods. Unfortunately most of these are now forgotten (mainly with the advent of refrigeration and mass farming). Everyone knows about standard types of yogurt and pickles and whatnot - there is a whole world of legume ferments (mainly beans) that use much more 'advanced' types of microorganisms. Examples would be things like Natto from Japan mentioned in the article (using Bacillus Subtilis). Unlike the simple yeasts that break down milk sugars in yogurt and produce various organic acids (like acetic acid for example) the bacteria in Natto can consume the resistant starch in beans and produce short chain fatty acids like Butyrate (very beneficial for health) AND can break down the complete protein in soybeans into their constituent amino acids. I believe Natto originally came about because cooked and cooled soybeans were then wrapped in rice leaves for transport and Bacillus Subtilis happens to naturally live on those leaves. It is also really unfortunate that in the west we miss out on tons of fungi based foods (not talking about anything psychedelic here) as many mushrooms contain tons of prebiotic fiber like substances that feed the probiotics already found in our gut.
- wil421 3y agoThey came up with fermentation because they needed a way to keep foods from spoiling. Same with salting, smoking, or dying out. The interesting part to me is the first person who tried the fermented food or the animal meat that fell into the ocean and brined.
- andrewflnr 3y agoThey were probably really, really hungry. That expands your horizons for what's edible.
- someuser2345 3y agoThey might also have just been bored.
- philip1209 3y agoThis previous thread about "Homemade Sriracha" had some fun discussion about basic at-home lacto-fermentation, if that interests you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469590
- jiocrag 3y agoQuestionable. Plenty of animals cache, and therefore "ferment," their food. Why have they not developed hominid brains?
- stephc_int13 3y agoHunting probably helped a lot. The ability for a tribe to eat large animals is something that likely helped humans benefit from the different tradeoff of brain size/guts size. I am not convinced that fermented food helped as much as meat.
- timeon 3y agoMaybe you could publish a paper.
- sph 3y agoKeep in mind that Harvard dietary research is notoriously anti-meat, due to having a large number of Seventh-Day Adventist on board. It makes absolutely no chronological sense to assume fermented foods to have been in our diet before meat, and has been theorized already that our brain size was only possible thanks to eating highly caloric fat and protein from animals. Imagine how much time we'd have wasted just feeding on grass and roots just to have enough energy to maintain our massive brain. Though it's hard to say in evolution whether the chicken or the egg came first, it's pretty simple: scavenge meat left from predators, enormous amount of caloric surplus, which concurrently enables expanded brain and a lot of "free time" not spent thinking about food, time that could be spent creating tools to make feeding even easier. The rest is history. This is also the reason human babies are so helpless: our brains are so large and energy-intensive that it takes years after birth for it to finally develop.
- account-5 3y ago> Though it's hard to say in evolution whether the chicken or the egg came first... I thought it was obvious the egg came before the chicken because: dinosaurs. ;)
- saalweachter 3y agoIt's worth noting that most animals, even animals you think of as herbivores, will opportunistically eat meat. A video of a deer catching and eating a bird went around a while back.
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- rspoerri 3y agoHow cooking might have influenced brain development, from tedx: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw
- philip1209 3y agoFor people interested in eating at fermentation-focused modern restaurants - - Noma is the obvious (expensive) choice and the author of an eponymous fermentation book. - Silo in London is a lesser-known restaurant that does a lot of in-house lacto fermentation and garums If you have any other to add, please to comment. (I specify "modern" because a lot of traditional cuisines incorporate fermentation, such as kimchi, sauerkraut or even koji in soy sauce)
- 2024throwaway 3y agoNoma is closing at the end of this year unfortunately. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/1/14/23553765/noma-rene-redzepi-fine-dining-art-restaurants-cuisine https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/1/14/23553765/noma-r...
- philip1209 3y agoWhen I was there in November, they talked about it more as a "reinvention". I think it will move away from fine dining and toward D2C products with pop-ups, but it won't completely go away El Bulli-style. Noma has gone through multiple "Versions", and with every major version change they publish a book. So, we can at least hope for a cool book in 2025.
- ggpsv 3y agoFor anyone interested in fermenting foods themselves, look into Sandor Katz. I found one of his books [0] more accessible or beginner friendly than the Noma book. [0]: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1108679733 https://search.worldcat.org/title/1108679733
- stainablesteel 3y agothe fermentation idea sounds interesting, and i can buy it to some degree, there's never one magic switch when it comes to evolution, there's always multitudes. > The problem with this theory is that the earliest evidence places the use of fire at approximately 1.5 million years ago — significantly later than the development of the hominid brain. but this, isn't really a problem. evidence != truth, its always pushed back upon new findings, and its sensible to assume we will never know the true date, but we will definitely know it was earlier than our best evidence. nonetheless, that million year difference is a whammy. that's a lot of time for divergence and development of just a single organ.
- languagehacker 3y agoFermented foods have probiotic benefits, and your gut is often called the second brain, so why the heck not
- ArunRaja 3y ago- Fermented foods - Fire : cooking - Farming - Meat - Tools usage Possible things that may had impact on brain development.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- krylon 3y agoOnce again, sauerkraut saves the day? I don't need an excuse to enjoy sauerkraut, but it doesn't hurt. Guten Appetit, everyone!