I do not have any expertise specifically in fermented food and brain health however I always found it super interesting that pretty much every culture (both independent of one another and sharing with cultures close by) came up with their own unique sets of fermented foods. Unfortunately most of these are now forgotten (mainly with the advent of refrigeration and mass farming).
Everyone knows about standard types of yogurt and pickles and whatnot - there is a whole world of legume ferments (mainly beans) that use much more 'advanced' types of microorganisms. Examples would be things like Natto from Japan mentioned in the article (using Bacillus Subtilis). Unlike the simple yeasts that break down milk sugars in yogurt and produce various organic acids (like acetic acid for example) the bacteria in Natto can consume the resistant starch in beans and produce short chain fatty acids like Butyrate (very beneficial for health) AND can break down the complete protein in soybeans into their constituent amino acids. I believe Natto originally came about because cooked and cooled soybeans were then wrapped in rice leaves for transport and Bacillus Subtilis happens to naturally live on those leaves.
It is also really unfortunate that in the west we miss out on tons of fungi based foods (not talking about anything psychedelic here) as many mushrooms contain tons of prebiotic fiber like substances that feed the probiotics already found in our gut.
> It is also really unfortunate that in the west we miss out on tons of fungi based foods (not talking about anything psychedelic here) as many mushrooms contain tons of prebiotic fiber like substances that feed the probiotics already found in our gut.
You're right that we get far fewer varieties of fermented foods. It's notable how certain cultures go very far in some directions, like how many types of lentils/legumes are used commonly in India, and how many types of chilis are used in single dishes in Mexico. Japan's in that direction for fermentation, perhaps.
French cuisine deeply relies on mushrooms for umami and richness. There's a rich mushroom culture in France - a bunch of varietals are used.
I think we're going to eventually come to a point where we consider fermentation a sort of "food group". Many cultures had cheese, yogurt, kimchi pretty much every day - the probiotic benefits are great.
At the very least, being able to eat a variety of (fermented) foods in winter must have reduced the monotonous dreariness of the season - and helped improve nutrition, too.
Eh, maybe their rowdy teens, but being bored enough to eat something that may actively harm you is a luxury that I don't think a lot of early hominids had. Living off the land with primitive tools is a lot of work even when it's going well.
That depends on where you live, and doesn't include many (any?) of the places in Africa where humans were evolving in the relevant time period for starting to eat fermented food.
And I bet there was plenty of work to do anyway, even in winter in places where it is cold and dark, enough that hunger is still a more likely motivator than boredom. I'd be interested to see hard facts on this, though.
> It is also really unfortunate that in the west we miss out on tons of fungi based foods
Speaking of what I know, there are plenty of fungi-based dishes in Europe. Mushrooms are a staple of many traditional recipes. Mushrooms that can't be conveniently farmed are rare in cities, but they are certainly not rare "in the west".
Hunting probably helped a lot. The ability for a tribe to eat large animals is something that likely helped humans benefit from the different tradeoff of brain size/guts size.
I am not convinced that fermented food helped as much as meat.
Keep in mind that Harvard dietary research is notoriously anti-meat, due to having a large number of Seventh-Day Adventist on board.
It makes absolutely no chronological sense to assume fermented foods to have been in our diet before meat, and has been theorized already that our brain size was only possible thanks to eating highly caloric fat and protein from animals. Imagine how much time we'd have wasted just feeding on grass and roots just to have enough energy to maintain our massive brain.
Though it's hard to say in evolution whether the chicken or the egg came first, it's pretty simple: scavenge meat left from predators, enormous amount of caloric surplus, which concurrently enables expanded brain and a lot of "free time" not spent thinking about food, time that could be spent creating tools to make feeding even easier. The rest is history.
This is also the reason human babies are so helpless: our brains are so large and energy-intensive that it takes years after birth for it to finally develop.
> Imagine how much time we'd have wasted just feeding on grass and roots just to have enough energy to maintain our massive brain.
Roots in particular are pretty energy dense have a pretty high roi, I think you have this backwards.
Hunting often comes up short, and isn’t big game every time a group goes out.
The “anti-meat” framing is reflective of more of a personal bias that has already come to conclusions. Realistically a number of things were likely happening concurrently. Fermentation is a spontaneous process, and would have happened to any number of scavenged/foraged foods.
Nonsense. Meat has twice the caloric density of root vegetables (potato etc.) and a complete spectrum of amino acids and vitamins. Fats, which were a big part of our diet, have 5 times as much caloric density than meat.
Let alone the fact that most roots are toxic or contain anti nutrients, as seeds do.
Potatoes provide a complete spectrum of amino acids as well. In fact every plant does, the only issue comes when one plant provides the sole source of calories in the diet.
>Let alone the fact that most roots are toxic or contain anti nutrients, as seeds do.
Nonsense meme not grounded in any actual hard data. Anyone observing hunter gatherer populations notes that significant quantities of root vegetables are consumed, outside of populations living in abnormally harsh conditions (e.g. the arctic)
When I was there in November, they talked about it more as a "reinvention". I think it will move away from fine dining and toward D2C products with pop-ups, but it won't completely go away El Bulli-style.
Noma has gone through multiple "Versions", and with every major version change they publish a book. So, we can at least hope for a cool book in 2025.
My pet theory is that our advances in brain capacity improved our ability to obtain, plan, prepare and preserve food, paving the way to further brain development. It's a positive feedback loop.
So purposeful fermentation might have played a role, just like fire, and hunting, and gathering techniques, and farming. It probably wasn't a revolutionary and sudden change, but gradual developments.
That's easy: brains so smart that it eliminates all natural enemies causing an exponential population explosion. But not smart enough to overcome the challenges such an explosion must overcome
It's easy because it's exactly where we are now. Strip mining natural resources, runaway climate- and ecological change. And no way to solve it.
Fertility and intelligence is only half of the picture. (an important piece, though) What about intelligence and life expectancy of the individual and of children? Also, what about other types of intelligence? IQ, EQ, etc? While very complicated, a multigenerational sampling with more information is really required. There is so much more to this picture, than a negative fertility correlation.
There is only one intelligence, only one factor that can reliably predict future life outcome. It's what we meant by IQ. All the other BS is just a politically correct invention to avoid inconvenient facts. If high IQ individuals are becoming more and more rare as generations pass, the world of the future will not be a very pleasant, nor at least functional, place to live. Internet, sewage, rockets... these are not things created by "high EQ individuals".
First, let's say you have two brains, one has IQ 160, the other has IQ 60. They are the same volume, neither suffers any brain damage. What is the IQ 60 brain doing?
Honestly, it seems like the Flynn effect has been a disaster upon the human race, when you look a bit better into history. People did live happier lives. All the supposed horrors seem to be a myth. There was more peace, love, honesty and goodness. Maybe they did know better.
I truly hope we will. But the more I learn about it, the more I get convinced "we" (human civilization) won't make it through.
It doesn't seem like "a hump" but more like a fundamental law of nature: exponential growth will collapse. And do so violently and with chaos.
I'm not talking about "the next 25 years" but more hundreds of years. Though even the timeline makes me anxious lately. I might see parts of civilization collapse due to exponential growth hitting a roof.
The neighbor thing doesn't seem like a large threat any longer, especially with WMDs (otherwise Russia would be sweating having China as its neighbor in Siberia, but it doesn't seem like a large threat due to Russia being able to defend its territory)
It's important to remember that there's not a "make brain smarter" slider that evolution is slowly sliding to the right.
Our genes code for proteins which are expressed in different quantities and have different effects on multiple parts of our biology and growth that lead to operational differences in our brains that lead to patterns that might be considered "smarter" in some circumstances and is beneficial in some environments.
Take, for example, something near and dear to many of us on HN, hyperfocus.
Is being prone to hyperfocus on subjects that interest us making us "smarter"? Is it "beneficial"?
Well, sometimes, in some ways, in some environments. If you can hyperfocus on something that has economic value in a safe environment, you can make a lot of money and be very successful. If the things you want to hyperfocus on aren't particularly useful or you end up neglecting your actual job or relationships because of it, or if you're a caveman who was supposed to be keeping an eye out for lions and not counting how many leaves are on different kinds of plants, you'll be less successful.
We're probably already at a point where we can't just make them larger - human births are horrifically dangerous compared to other animals, likely because the heads are so big.
Greater neuron density is probably still possible though. Just need to evolve to normalize the greater nutrient requirements.
Brains take a lot of energy, having a brain bigger than life demands can be a liability and less fit than a dumber, but more energy efficient, variant.
The invention of effective, as in ~100% effective, means of contraception marks the beginning of the Idiocracy era, the Idiocracene. Up until 60 or so years ago, even if you could foresee the risks of an unwanted pregnancy, most likely than not you would eventually end up having a child or two during your lifetime. Not anymore. You can see it clearly when you compare the average IQ of a given country's population and the demographics tendency over time. This graph could be swapped with average children per woman and it would look basically the same:
The future belongs to the individuals, on any species, that are best adapted towards reproducing. Human beings are just another animal subjected to natural selection pressures. It seems that, usually, if you have too high of an IQ you simply refuse to have kids.
If high IQ jobs offered in-building day care as a perk this trend would completely reverse.
Convert the parking garage in the basement into a day care and you'll have phd-level employees for life. Changing jobs for even double the pay would be completely unaffordable.
The negative correlation between education and family size is a function of the cost of raising children in a city. If the cost is reduced then the correlation becomes nuetral or even positive. There is no such correlation in a rural setting. This is a bottleneck in the talent pipeline.
Consider this paper (from Indonesia) in which concluded that the relationship can change over time, as a function of policy:
I do not think just adding a daycare will make having children suddenly make sense to many people - at least not enough to warrant such a blanket statement about it. Aside from simply not wanting any, there are so many reasons to not have children aside from daycare, plenty of them not negatable by policies or financial incentives.
To be fair that last part was probably always true. The future belongs to the next generation, and not everyone values having kids. Probably why most major faiths encourage having kids. The people who were too smart to have kids died out along with their ideas. It's like survival of the fittest, but with ideas. I have a theory that long in our past we've went through periods of secularization like our current modern age. It's just a phase that dies out when the people who believe it do.
Even so, high IQ was a trait that was transmitted through the eons, ergo high IQ individuals in the past used to still have children. I don't think your theory reflects the differences between the past and today's contraception technology tools.
Think of a high IQ man in the late 1700. He can see that having children incurs enormous costs, both financially, emotionally, in terms of time, freedom etc. He can choose to never marry, and just keep being a womanizer. He may have LOTS of unrecognized offspring, that are very hard to be attributed to him, and so pass his genes along. He just want to have sex, reproducing is not at all in his mind. Sex is good and he likes it, so he does it. That's the trick nature plays in order to make 1700 man to pass his genes.
Now in the 21st century, basically no high IQ man would go around having unprotected sex, since the costs associated nowadays are still enormous, probably even more so than 300 years ago, and today those costs are easily enforceable through the judicial system. So 21st century high IQ man, on average, will have a LOT less children than he used to have in the past. Sex is still good, and he will have a lot of it. But now nature's trick stopped working. The sex drive per se is not effective anymore when coupled with a high capacity brain that wants to avoid the costs of having to care for another human beings. So, this trait, high IQ, will be selected out of the gene pool over time.
In the case of high IQ women it's the same story. In the past, with a lot less effective and readily available contraceptive methods, smart women were probably a lot more at risk of having unexpected pregnancies. Nowadays, unexpected pregnancies are basically an IQ test for women.
If your model were accurate it would imply high IQ and psychopathy would co-select wouldn't it? I know psychopaths tend to think they're smarter than anyone with ethics but doesn't the opposite correlation tend to hold?
If I'm not mistaken, a high percentage of psycopaths have high IQs. It's one of the classic profile traits used to represent the stereotipical psycho.
edit: I searched a little bit on this and it seems that it was just a myth propagated by movies and a few very famous cases, i.e. Ted Bundy. But anyway, I do not see how you can make an argument from I wrote on the original post implying a correlation between psycopathy and high IQ. Is it the avoiding of having children, since it's an effective burden on the prospective father? It's just a fact, sexual drive was enough to make a man reproduce in the past. Not anymore. Natural selection wins again, the rules of the game changed, so you're out.
It's the combination of many sexual partners and abandoning one's offspring - the latter is taboo almost everywhere and they're both characteristic behavior of psychopaths.
Eh, it's a worrying scenario but I think it would be taken care of by intertribal competition. The people of Idiocracy would be easy pickings for a group of raiders that prized intelligence highly.
Really, the only two countries that are combining a knowledge economy with an expanding population are Israel and India, both of which essentially have a tech-worker economy subsidizing and intermarrying with a bronze-age economy. That seems like the likely actual solve, a few ivory tower cities surrounded by amish country. Every now and then an Amish tests into the cities or a city-zen absconds to a simpler life, but the net flow is generally intellectual country types moving into the tech hubs.
Probably true. I have always also wondered if the use of natural vessels contributed to our knowledge of fermentation - early humans made extensive use of Gourds and animal products to make vessels for holding food and water. Definitely possible that natural yeasts and bacteria could have came with these natural vessels (or early humans could have even found ways to add them in a way that meshed well with the interior wall).
You dont even need to take it that far. Leave anything with sugars out for a few days and you'll get fermentation. I'd bet that humans developed intentional alcohol production before language. Leave foraged fruit in a depression in a rock and you'll have wine in a few weeks.
It may be, as the principle still applies. It'd interesting to contemplate that the "pivotal" mutation may have been something as subtle as a taste preference that lead to the consumption of the "spoiled" food caches, and the resulting surplus of energy. Of course, for that to be the case we'd have been caching food because of some previous mutation, and back and back we go...
the fermentation idea sounds interesting, and i can buy it to some degree, there's never one magic switch when it comes to evolution, there's always multitudes.
> The problem with this theory is that the earliest evidence places the use of fire at approximately 1.5 million years ago — significantly later than the development of the hominid brain.
but this, isn't really a problem. evidence != truth, its always pushed back upon new findings, and its sensible to assume we will never know the true date, but we will definitely know it was earlier than our best evidence.
nonetheless, that million year difference is a whammy. that's a lot of time for divergence and development of just a single organ.
One thing I rarely see noted in these discussions is that no other animal treats or processes their food like humans, even without fire or fermentation. We effectively pre-chew our meals with our hands, breaking everything into a nice bite-sized pieces, with mashing or grinding of what would otherwise be too hard to eat. We will sort through thousands of tiny berries carefully, to make sure we don't eat something unpleasant. We will go hungry even when edible food is around, because we know it will be even more ripe later.
> We effectively pre-chew our meals with our hands, breaking everything into a nice bite-sized pieces, with mashing or grinding of what would otherwise be too hard to eat
Crows use cars to break open nuts they would otherwise not be able to eat; eagles drop turtles to break their shell.
> We will sort through thousands of tiny berries carefully, to make sure we don't eat something unpleasant
When orkas kill sharks, they only eat the liver of the shark and leave the rest alone. Wild civets also choose only the best coffee berries, which is part of why we make coffee from their poop.
> We will go hungry even when edible food is around, because we know it will be even more ripe later.
I don't think we go hungry, we just look for better food elsewhere until that edible food is fully ripened.
“High meat” is a thing for some, due to the effect that consuming the massive amount of B vitamins generated can have. In particular fermented liver comes to mind.
There is no real effect from B vitamins unless there's a deficiency. And the niacin form of b3 can have some negative side effects in high doses. But mostly excess B vitamins are just excreted in urine without doing anything at all.
That already happened, they use the euphemism "high meat" for it.
But, it really is almost impossible to draw a clear line around fermentation that doesn't include something someone considers rot. "Controlled spoilage" is definitely a useful way to think about fermentation and it is still spoilage.
Well, rotting increases the accessible carbs, which sounds antithetical to the neo-paleo diet. Hopefully we're safe from the new "unpreserved meat" fad.
Right. The entire steak ages and changes, not just the exterior. Even so, some places, like Flannery Beef, will blend some of the ends into their "adventurous" burger blend.
Fermentation is generally considered anaerobic (without oxygen) breakdown of food. I assume rotting usually involves oxygen. (Maybe someone can nitpick that definition).
Not always true - there is also aerobic fermentation. You are right in that many ferments require anaerobic conditions however it really just depends on the desired result and bacteria involved.
Kombucha, for example, requires oxygen and is mostly an aerobic fermentation. In order to carbonate, however, it goes through a short anaerobic step at the end (which also causes it to switch from producing organic acids to producing alcohol). This is usually done during the bottling process since the bottle is sealed.
That's the microbiological definition that a scientist would use. In food it is less well defined and usually just means something close to "intentional use of microorganisms in food production". Yeast does both aerobic and anaerobic metabolism but both are considered fermentation by bakers & brewers. Acetobacter is aerobic and vinegar making is considered fermentation. Koji is even farther out and usually still considered fermentation by fermenters.
Everyone knows about standard types of yogurt and pickles and whatnot - there is a whole world of legume ferments (mainly beans) that use much more 'advanced' types of microorganisms. Examples would be things like Natto from Japan mentioned in the article (using Bacillus Subtilis). Unlike the simple yeasts that break down milk sugars in yogurt and produce various organic acids (like acetic acid for example) the bacteria in Natto can consume the resistant starch in beans and produce short chain fatty acids like Butyrate (very beneficial for health) AND can break down the complete protein in soybeans into their constituent amino acids. I believe Natto originally came about because cooked and cooled soybeans were then wrapped in rice leaves for transport and Bacillus Subtilis happens to naturally live on those leaves.
It is also really unfortunate that in the west we miss out on tons of fungi based foods (not talking about anything psychedelic here) as many mushrooms contain tons of prebiotic fiber like substances that feed the probiotics already found in our gut.