Should You Eat Like An Ape?
by Tom Furman
Among dietary topics presented in our overwhelming world of media and especially Social Media, is that humans should eat like apes. I have NO idea where this comes from. The so called facts presented, from what I gather, are this:
“Apes do not get cancer.”
“Humans and apes are nearly the same.”
“Apes are vegans.”
“Apes are healthier from a wild diet.”
Let me break each point down, individually.
- Apes don’t get cancer. Apes do not get cancer. This is correct. That has little to do with diet and entirely to do with genetics.
“According to one study, the difference is due to something called DNA methylation, which involves the chemical modification of DNA. Basically, methylation modifies some DNA positions in the genome, and can also signal cells to switch specific genes to the “off” position.
Evidently, humans and chimps have different patterns of DNA methylation. So even though we may share many of the same genes, the ways our cells switch these common genes on and off differs.
And because at least some of these genes are linked to diseases including cancer, variations in the way DNA methylation happens among humans and chimps may help explain why chimps seem to avoid diseases common in humans.”
[ https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/humans-chimps-cancer/ ]
2. Humans and apes are nearly the same. Actually the differences are huge. The “99% of DNA figure has been repeated often, however,…
“In 2012 Drs Jeffrey Tomkins and Jerry Bergman reviewed the published studies comparing human and chimp DNA. When all the DNA is taken into account and not just pre-selected parts, they found,…
“it is safe to conclude that human-chimp genome similarity is not more than ~87% identical, and possibly not higher than 81%.”
In other words, the differences are huge, possibly greater than 19%. Indeed, Dr Tomkins made his own thorough comparison and found the difference to be ~30%. Also, the Y-chromosomes, found only in males, are radically different, contrary to evolutionists’ expectations.”
[ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/316/5833/1836 ]
3. Apes are vegans. The idea is that apes live on vegetables and fruits and you should too. First, they eat meat. Chimpanzees have hunted red colobus monkeys and dropped their population by 89%. Bonobos actually hunt and eat antelopes as well as monkeys.
“Between 1995 and 2014, Watts and Mitani observed 556 hunts, 356 of which targeted red colobus. These hunts were very successful: 912 colobus were killed, an average of 3 per hunt.
It has been clear for several years that the red colobus population has declined as a result. A 2011 study found that the population fell by 89% between 1975 and 2007. In the late 1990s the chimps were killing up to half the red colobus population every year.”
[ http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-chimps-nearly-wiped-out-monkeys ]
The second problem with the ape/vegan issue is the digestive machinery. Apes as you know have big guts. Those guts have a purpose. More effective at digesting large amounts of plants. Here is a comparison of the GI tract,…
The size of the colon is larger and longer to digest the plants more effectively.
4. Apes are healthier from a natural diet. Captive apes outlive wild ones, period. Medical care and protection from danger prolong all species. However humans outlive apes. There may be a good reason for that,..
“Chimpanzees and great apes are genetically similar to humans, yet they rarely live for more than 50 years. Although the average human lifespan has doubled in the last 200 years — due largely to decreased infant mortality related to advances in diet, environment and medicine — even without these improvements, people living in high mortality hunter-forager lifestyles still have twice the life expectancy at birth as wild chimpanzees do. These key differences in lifespan may be due to genes that humans evolved to adjust better to meat-rich diets, biologist Caleb Finch at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles suggested.”
[ https://www.livescience.com/9769-humans-outlive-apes.html ]
5. Apes eat their babies. Despite our need to pretend apes are human, they engage in cannibalism and filial cannibalism. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18454-hippy-apes-caught-cannibalising-their-young/
From the simple pieces of research provided, the science supports that humans should not be adopting an ape diet. Leave that to Charlton Heston on the Planet of the Apes.
