Chrisonomicon

Sunday, November 17, 2002

Had a craving for fried potatoes this morning. Peeled, sliced, tossed with an onion, crisped to gold in the slick, new, non-stick skillet purchased for very meals. Weekend cravings for fatty dishes, satisfying base, gastrointestinal wishes for carbs and oil and salt, velvet dips into forbidden garners, Or, from the garner-door, on ether borne, / The chaff flies devious from the winnow'd corn. And with those, fried eggs with pepper. Afterwards, hours upon hours of televised football. Indulgent, fat-fried weekend—and a potential contribution to the evolution of our species. Speaking stricty from a scientific perspective, of course.

[I]t is not just changes in diet that have created many of our pervasive health problems but the interaction of shifting diets and changing lifestyles. Too often modern health problems are portrayed as the result of eating "bad" foods that are departures from the natural human diet--an oversimplification embodied by the current debate over the relative merits of a high-protein, high-fat Atkins-type diet or a low-fat one that emphasizes complex carbohydrates. This is a fundamentally flawed approach to assessing human nutritional needs.

And:

Indeed, the hallmarks of human evolution have been the diversity of strategies that we have developed to create diets that meet our distinctive metabolic requirements and the ever increasing efficiency with which we extract energy and nutrients from the environment.