Brontosaurus burgers for everyone
I was reading the ‘In numbers’ section in Discoveries which said “Eating meat three or more times a week increases risk of various illnesses”. Our ancestors did eat meat and very little veggies/fruits/grains. So, are the risks due to processed meats/foods? Or is it due to lack of exercise, modern lifestyles, less physical jobs, etc, etc?
I found this science soundbite very unscientific and not useful.
Jan Voelker, Gahanna, Ohio
The illnesses in question were heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes, diverticular disease, colon polyps, gastro-oesophageal reflux disease, gastritis, duodenitis, and gallbladder disease, and the study comes from an analysis of the health records of nearly 500,000 British people who provided data for an average period of eight years – a pretty robust study.
The meat in question is all meats – red meat, processed meat, poultry, etc, with
different meat products raising the risk in different ways. Of course, other factors such as exercise, lifestyle, smoking, alcohol consumption and genetics affect mortality rates, but that wasn’t the focus of the study.
The increased incidence of heart disease was likely due to the saturated fatty acids found in red and processed meats, while many of the other conditions were more common in individuals with higher BMIs.
Also, early humans didn’t “eat meat and very little veggies/fruits/grains”, they were omnivorous and likely ate a diet consisting mostly of plants that was supplemented with meat when they were able to get it.
Jason Goodyer, commissioning editor
It’s a small world
I was reading Dr Stuart Clark’s article about Psyche asteroid. Why does the science community seem to refer to the ‘beginning’ of the Solar System as a past event? What if the beginning is still unfolding right now? If so, what if we viewed Psyche and the rest of the asteroid belt not as leftovers, but as building materials that have yet to be used? Is it possible for Psyche to be a planet’s core that has yet to merge with the rest of the planet it belongs to, rather than a core that was forcefully removed?
Teja Drayton
It’s a nice idea but unfortunately the physics does not support the situation. Once large planets have formed, their forces of gravity dominate the situation. In this case, Jupiter’s gravity corrals the asteroid belt, making their coalescence virtually impossible. Even if all the asteroids could come together, their combined mass would total just 3 per cent of the mass of the Moon. That’s a very small world!
Dr Stuart Clark, astronomer and astrophysicist
“GENERAL RELATIVITY AND QUANTUM THEORY ARE BASICALLY THE SAME THEORY! I NEVER EXPECTED TO DISCOVER SUCH A LOVELY RESULT”
STEPHEN WOLFRAM, P52