Human nutrition

The domestication of plants and animals initiated major changes in human ecology. The creation of novel micro-environments by human interference led in some cases to closer contact with disease vectors, such as mosquitoes carrying malaria or rats carrying plague-infected fleas. Turning to the fossils the most interesting in relation to human evolution are the Australopithecinae recovered from early Pleistocene deposits in South and East Africa. Apart from the direct effects on nutrition, the change from food collecting to food production obviously involved a host of secondary changes in human ecology and these may have greatly altered the nature and magnitudes of evolutionary selective pressures to which human populations were exposed. J. Yudkin has raised the interesting question of the factors determining food choice and the possibility that man retains an innate predilection for certain kinds of food. Obviously human diets are immensely varied and the things which are regarded as fit to eat differ greatly from one culture to another.

Biology · Human nutrition · Food Science · Nutrition, Genetics, and Disease