ANT371H1 Study Guide - Final Guide: Enzyme, Nutrition, Weaning
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ANT371 – Human Nutritional Ecoloogy
Lecture 1 – Food and Ideology
Traits unique with human nutrition:
- Cooking
- Agriculture (domestication of plants and animals)
- Technology
- Manipulation of environment
- Physiology (layout of the gut)
- Brain
- Food culture (cultural practices linked to foods)
- Japanese macaques also show evidence of food culture – they wash potatoes in the
water
- Integrative approach to nutritional ecology
- Qualitative and quantitative approaches
- Bring a holistic perspective to human nutrition
- Inhabited the bodies of our foraging ancestors
- Not all human ancestors used the same habitats
- Nutrient profiles from our ancestor history are quite different than they are today
- No processed foods
- Raw foods
- Mismatch between ancestral diet and modern diet
Human nutritional ecology = anthropology + nutritional science + Nutritional ecology
- Emergent as a field
- Spans a wide range of fields:
- Branches of anthropology
- Biology, ecology, nutritional behaviour, physiology, morphology and evolutionary biology
- Broader understanding of vulnerability to nutritional disease (social and physiological)
- Vulnerable to the inadequacies of nutrition
- Nutritional security - more then having all the right nutrients, about having a sustainable diet
that is sufficient to living a healthy life
- Human lineage extends back ~5-7 million years
What is different in diet, life history and ecology?
- Diversity of diet – we have a lot of diversity in our diet (most communities)
- Higher levels of meat consumption
- Timing of breast feeding and weaning
- Prolonged period of breast-feeding in humans (~2-3 years)
- Dependent on milk for only 6 months
- Prolonged period of parental dependency (for a primate)
- Adolescent growth spurt
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