NUTRITION AND EVOLUTION

Do we eat in accordance with our genetic heritage and physiology?
Have our biological characteristics changed so much since we existed on Earth?
What about our diet style?
Is it possible to find out why many diseases, obesity, and metabolic diseases that are related to our diet are being realeased every day?

* * *

Let's look back to history.

* 3,000,000 years ago - The humankind emerge on Earth.

* 800,000 years ago - There is evidence that people have acquired the ability to make and control levels of fire . Thus, they start having the chance to cook their food and digest it more easily.

* 70,000 years ago - Today, the human subspecies that reign on earth appear . People live in small hunter-gatherer communities in nature. They have a proper diet lifestyle. The period since then is actually a very short time for the anatomy and physiology of the digestive system to change. We don`t recognise any significant evolutionary transformation in mankind in these terms from that time til today.

* 10,000 years ago - Agriculture is discovered and wheat becomes tameable. The agricultural revolution and the abundance of cereal products lead to a major change in the diet style. Population is getting increased, locally settled life is started and villages are being formed.

* 5,000 years ago - Irrigated farming is being developed along the length of large rivers. As food becomes more abundant, cities are being formed. However, abundance and scarcity still depend on natural events and conditions.

* 500 years ago - With the discovery of the new world (the continent of America), the old world people soon include many foods like corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts, cocoa that they have never eaten before.

* In the last 100 years - With the help of technology, traditional agriculture is gradually being abandoned while industrial agriculture is being developed. While the local seeds that are formed under natural conditions are followed up by extinction, the production capacity of the products which biological-genetic structures are intervened and selected by humans increases exponentially. While biodiversity decreases, products obtained by mass production and supplemented by chemical additives for long-term durability become easily traded and distributed throughout the world.

* In the last 50 years - Nowadays, the products of the nutritive industry have become consumable in all kinds of food and beverage, in every region, in every society, in any climate, in any season. When the spread of processed foods and fast food consumption is added to these, we come to a fact that shows us how the societies` inhabitants have dramatically changed their traditional nutritive culture and habits that had been developed in accordance with the natural conditions for thousands of years. In this period, the rate of obesity in the world is more than doubled, the rate of diabetes is increased more than 10 times.

* Over the past 10 years - due to excessive and unbalanced nutrition, the rate of deaths from diseases caused by obesity exceeded the rate of those who died of starvation for the first time in history.

* As a result, we see that there is a stunning change in our diet, which our digestive system cannot easily keep up with. It is obvious that there is a big discrepancy between our physiological characteristics that we have brought along genetically over the past generations and the foods we consume these days.

* * *

Today's modern man's diet is often over-calorie, fiber-poor, refined or pre-cooked. This leads to extremely easy absorption of nutrients from the upper parts of the digestive tract. There is not much food left in the lower intestine to be absorbed. Therefore, hormone response to food is reduced in those parts. Thus, strong pancreatic stimulant and insulin secretory effects are being weakened and decreased. It is noteworthy that diabetic and obese people also have decreased production of these hormones, which have a strong blood glucose regulating potential