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some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds... Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later: Some hunter-gathe
by jcl 17y ago
some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds...
Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later:
Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have lower toxin levels and enable a plant to work symbiotically with animals/predators to increase reproductive success.
- noodle 17y agoindeed he does. but, at the end of a large "eating a lot of plants is bad for you" essay, to tack on the short note "oh wait, fruits? maybe those aren't bad for you" type of statement undercuts the credibility of the entire argument for me.
- randallsquared 17y agoIt does? I think the vast majority of plants that most people (at least, where I live) eat are non-fruit. Potatoes, beans, rice and other grains...
- tokenadult 17y agoThe vast majority of plants that most people eat have been so altered by selective breeding that they are quite unlike wild plants. When Richard Dawkins spoke in my town in March 2009, he made a special point of ridiculing a video purporting to show that the banana was intelligently designed by a divine creator, and finished his comments on that issue by showing a picture of a wild banana, which looks very different from the cultivated bananas that are universal in world commerce. The same is true of potatoes, rice, maize (especially), and most common foodstuffs. The evolutionary history of cooking http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y agoExactly what I was thinking as I read the parent. Around here we have wild raspberries and grapes. They look so different I had to taste them to be sure and even then they taste different. The grapes are extremely acidic and taste awful (but make great wine :-) Remember that by definition we only eat the edible fruits!!! Most plants bear some kind of fruit and most of them are inedible to humans.
- noodle 17y agoi would consider fruits to be a nontrivial group. not saying they're a major part of everyone's diet necessarily, but they're not quite something to be brushed aside as not significant.
- billswift 17y agoEspecially since many "vegetables" are fruits in the botanical sense; tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, bell and hot peppers.
- blasdel 17y agoHunter-gatherers don't live long enough to get the kinds of cancer that post-industrial westerners do.