MUDGE’S Musings
This is a story from several weeks ago, “banked” in Windows Live Writer’s Drafts section waiting for an appropriate day.
This is that day, starting hours later than usual because MUDGE‘s pesky personal life keeps intruding into blogging time. The nerve!
As mentioned before, this writer is what a politically correct person might call “pleasingly plump,” or perhaps “horizontally challenged.” As you might have figured out by now, faithful reader, MUDGE does not have a politically correct bone in his body (as if he or anyone else could see any bones inside all the blubber), so he just calls himself fat.
It’s a lifelong problem, and has predictably led to the usual middle aged complications.
Having tried countless diets; having lost countless pounds, we fight this battle every frigging day.
Maybe there’s a magic bullet after all…
Published: September 10, 2007
Could people one day evolve to eat rich food while remaining perfectly slim and svelte?
This may not be so wild a fantasy. It is becoming clear that the human genome does respond to changes in diet, even though it takes many generations to do so.
Researchers studying the enzyme that converts starch to simple sugars like glucose have found that people living in countries with a high-starch diet produce considerably more of the enzyme than people who eat a low-starch diet.
The reason is an evolutionary one. People in high-starch countries have many extra copies of the amylase gene which makes the starch-converting enzyme, a group led by George H. Perry of Arizona State University and Nathaniel J. Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported yesterday in the journal Nature Genetics.
The production of the extra copies seems to have been favored by natural selection, according to a genetic test, the authors say. If so, the selective pressure could have occurred when people first started to grow cereals like wheat and barley at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, or even much earlier.
… if not for MUDGE himself, perhaps for his great grandchildren, anyway.
[Per L-HC’s reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]
Study Finds Evidence of Genetic Response to Diet – New York Times
Sorry to burden some of you with the concept of evolution, also considered in this space previously.
That’s not just a theory, guys, that’s the law!
It’s it for now. Thanks,
–MUDGE
Posted by mudge 
Left-handed Complement 