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Physiology & Medicine / Do Humans Need To Eat So Many Different Kinds Of Food?
« on: 11/01/2017 21:43:13 »
Doesn't the range of foods eaten by modern humans seem extravagantly wide? I mean, this morning I ate a breakfast which consisted of the following things:
- a chicken egg
- a rasher of bacon
- a dollop of baked beans
- two slices of toasted bread
- some butter (on the toast)
- a bowl of cooked porridge oats
- some sugar (on the porridge)
- a glass of apple-juice.
Now while I was preparing and cooking all this stuff in the kitchen this morning, I saw, outside on the window-ledge, a pigeon which regularly roosts there overnight, and was now waking up and getting ready to fly off, to find its breakfast.
The pigeon's breakfast, I suppose, would be some bits of grain, in the form of grass-seeds, or discarded bread-related fragments which it would find in the street, and peck up.
That seems very monotonous and lacking in nutritional variety. Yet it evidently sustains the pigeon, because it's always back roosting each night. Manifestly in robust health, with handsome plumage, and proudly bowing and cooing at the lady-pigeons.
So I wonder whether my complicated breakfast was really necessary. Why can't I emulate the pigeon, and just eat grain?
- a chicken egg
- a rasher of bacon
- a dollop of baked beans
- two slices of toasted bread
- some butter (on the toast)
- a bowl of cooked porridge oats
- some sugar (on the porridge)
- a glass of apple-juice.
Now while I was preparing and cooking all this stuff in the kitchen this morning, I saw, outside on the window-ledge, a pigeon which regularly roosts there overnight, and was now waking up and getting ready to fly off, to find its breakfast.
The pigeon's breakfast, I suppose, would be some bits of grain, in the form of grass-seeds, or discarded bread-related fragments which it would find in the street, and peck up.
That seems very monotonous and lacking in nutritional variety. Yet it evidently sustains the pigeon, because it's always back roosting each night. Manifestly in robust health, with handsome plumage, and proudly bowing and cooing at the lady-pigeons.
So I wonder whether my complicated breakfast was really necessary. Why can't I emulate the pigeon, and just eat grain?