Theories on Human Brain Evolution via Diet Types.

Now this blog post is not a true and definite account on why the human brain evolved through diet. This blog post will be discussing the theories or opinions on human brain evolution.

According to evolution, human are related to chimpanzees, gorilla, and orangutans via the Hominidae toxonomic family. (Wikipedia)

Suzana Herculano-Houzel said that adding neurons to a primate brain comes with a cost of 6 calories per billion neurons. (NBC News)

The analogy is, if you want more, you gotta pay more. So in the case of humanlike brain, an additional 733 calories a day is required. Therefore a raw, vegan diet would have been time consuming and perhaps dangerous to get that additional 744 calories per day.

"For gorillas to evolve a humanlike brain, they would need an additional 733 calories a day, which would require another two hours of feeding, the authors wrote. A gorilla already spends as much as 80 percent of the tropic's 12 hours of daylight eating.

Similarly, early humans eating only raw vegetation would have needed to munch for more than nine hours a day to consume enough calories, the researchers calculated. Thus, a raw, vegan diet would have been unlikely given the danger and other difficulties of gathering so much food." (NBC News)

So the theory from the NBC News article is that meat provides more calories, and cooking helps release more nutrient and mineral. Obviously, the human discovery of utilizing fire is how cooking can be done.

Another theory of human brain evolution is glucose, but not meat. The author claims neurons run on glucose, not meat. (Despain)

"Although meat does provide some valuable micronutrients and essential fats, there may not be anything incredibly special about meat nutritionally except that it freed up carbohydrate calories for feeding brains that were roughly three times larger than chimps without the use of gluconeogenesis (synthesis of glucose)." (Ungar)

Once again, everything that I've discussed so far is based on theory. From my opinion, if a pair of identical twins have two different diets, one is a meat-eater while the other is a vegan, then they will be able to digest the food. We humans are omnivores; we can digest cooked meat, raw sushi, and even plant-based food. As long as we get our daily recommended value of nutrients, we will survive regardless of our diet types.