genejockey 

Regarding whether humans only had 2000 years experience with sucrose, that's a little hard to square with the presence of an enzyme in your saliva that cleaves it into glucose and fructose before it's even anywhere close to being absorbed.

I've cut down on sugar, not because it was evil or bad for me or 'empty calories' or addictive or toxic, but rather because it's way too easy to exceed the number of calories I want to consume in a day if I eat things with sugar in them. And let's not forget, a lot of things with sugar in them also have a lot of fat in them - ice cream, chocolate, donuts, etc. So, avoiding sugar also avoids fat, which is, as someone pointed out, EVEN MORE caloric. So I don't buy them, because I'll only eat them if I have them readily available. And I WILL eat them if they are available.

Carbonfiberboy 

When my wife and I go backpacking, we take a full pound of butter - 5000 calories in only a pound. We also take a lot of stuff with sugar in it, and a lot of that stuff has both sugar and fat in it! By design! Yeah! We don't do that crap where one opens the foil pack ant pours the whatever into hot water. No, we don't do that. We live like royals on the trail except that we have to do our own cooking. Oh well. We'd rather cook our own.

Who wants that nasty sugar anyway?

Iride01 

I think too many people only think of sugar as the white granular stuff in a bowl that is sweet. They refuse to believe that daily foraging from the dawn of man brought back plenty of sugars and other carbohydrate laden foods.

Hunting game was actually a high expenditure of energy. So it likely took a lot of carbs to fuel the gathering of needed protein.

OldTryGuy

All this about sugar so something to read for all those wiser than I, which equates to all >>>

https://www.pcf.org/c/prostate-cancers-sweet-tooth/

btw, I'm a Gleason 10

Carbonfiberboy 

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-...art-20044714#:
I habitually disregard statements on the internet by people who profit from those statements. Nutritional research is crawling with folks like this. I think that this is because nutritional research is so expensive and there's no money to be made doing it in an impartial manner.

Carbonfiberboy 

It's worth noting that the honey hunters in the first video have evolved to be immune to bee toxins. This would be a very old evolutionary development. Thus those who were the most successful honey hunters had a greater rate of reproduction, either because they were more favored by females or because they and their females were more likely to survive or both, and this immunity slowly evolved.

genejockey 

Citation required. That's not how actual immunity generally works.

Or evolution, now you mention it.

Carbonfiberboy 

Did you not watch the video? AFAIK evolution works by passing along novel genes which make that individual's descendants more competitive. You disagree?

genejockey 

Yes, and there were no claims in it that they've 'evolved an immunity to beestings'. Beekeepers often DEVELOP (not evolve) tolerance to beestings, by being stung multiple times, and I'd note that the narrator says the lead hunter didn't get stung at all on this particular hunt.

Also, a 'a very old evolutionary development' would be that you can speak, and walk upright. Since the tribe only moved to the area in the Middle Ages, an evolutionary adaptation would be very new. But again, there's no claim in the film of any such inherited immunity. Indeed, they go to a great deal of effort to AVOID being stung.

That's the laymen's understanding, yes. Basically the genetics of a population can shift if carriers of a particular mutation have more descendants than others. Novel genes isn't what does it. It's a minute change in an existing gene, or that gene turned off or turned on, or turned up or turned down, or turned off or on at a different time.

But again, since beekeepers often develop the same tolerance, there's no need to posit some novel trait. If they're around bees all the time, as seems likely, they're probably stung multiple times growing up and develop tolerance. One thing that MIGHT happen would be that any alleles that would make one prone to anaphylaxis from beestings would tend to disappear over generations.

Carbonfiberboy 

Agree.

Carbonfiberboy 

Although I think this honey eating business has been going on a lot longer than since the Middle Ages . . .

genejockey 

See also