Add paragraph text herIn a school setting, there's the leader, the teacher who's guiding the students through this train of thought and so they're sort of given the permission, they're sort of by default in the pupils position, they're learning it's a digestive yeah, it's a didactic dynamic. So there's one person, who's teaching and one person who's learning, but when it's in a interpersonal conversation, two strangers on the street or two friends and about in a debate, there's more of a level playing field and so when you're reading a book, it's a personal transformative Process, you're you're: you have the safety and anonymity of privacy in your own mind, to transcend concepts and integrate them and evolve as a human ideologically, and that can you know, take place over the stretch of time or it can be an instant change. And so that's why I authored the book is because I realized that even coming into a conversation - and I don't say this ostentatiously - I just say it matter-of-factly observational ii, when you come into a debate - and you know a thousand times more than the person you're debating, They still walk away feeling like they won, and it's this it's this quirky sort of psychological phenomena.
I guess you know each person leaves the conversation like. Ah, I showed the other person I won and I wanted to do away with that dynamic and offer the world something which is safe for them to learn safe for them to engage with the content and contemplate it. Because when you're reading you're slowing down - and this is this - is about teaching the collective to slow down, what I'm petitioning imploring humanity to do is to say look just because we have been doing something one way for a long time or just because we can do Something doesn't mean we should. That applies medically anatomically and ethically so, just because I can eat a Twinkie doesn't mean I should and, and it's going back to just because our ancestors ate meat for calories. Okay, that was an evolution at a time when, again, the brain was starting to become more complex, so they needed mental energy, not just physical energy of to migrate, but they needed mental energy, because now they were thinking they were negotiating language was developing overall, they needed More energy - and it was a quicker way to get to get it - they never took more than they needed that.
That'S a very, very important thing. Nature never takes more than it needs, and so they were able to do that, and I want to also say that yes, meat-eating ancestors, it was a very. It was only a couple of it's actually there's no hard facts, but the only hard facts that are known is that most of the time humanoids were not eating meat.
They were eating plant-based diets, seeds and fruits and roots so meat emerged in into a I mean: animals eat animals. You know it's it's part of the food chain. When humans started to eat animals, it was because they need it, like you said before those calories.
During that time of development - and you were talking earlier about a child - an infant's development - so there's different foods - that, in terms of the nutrition and the calories that we need to eat when we're developing at certain times of our lives, it's not this and, of course Everybody has a different metabolism, I mean, which is what runs our whole regulatory system on earth. It'S so complex. I'D like to address that real, quick, Harvard biologist, Richard Wrangham, has done fabulous research on this, and his conclusion is that there's a misconception that meat was the predominant factor in neuro development in humans. Even the Smithsonian has weighed in pretty heavily on this base.
The preponderance of anthropological evidence that we have that meat wasn't what did it again? Meat provided calories, but if you think about how cholesterol actually clogs clogs the arteries based on the work of dr Caldwell Esselstyn who's done some of the longest and largest running the largest and longest-running studies on atherosclerosis and Alzheimer's out there and heart disease he's actually been Able to reverse heart disease through administering plant-based diets to his patients. There'S this old wisdom. Lee said that Alzheimer's was purely genetic, that if it ran in your family, it was Russian roulette and you really couldn't do much to avoid it.
We understand now that that old wisdom was actually wrong and that Alzheimer's is a cardiovascular disease, so cholesterol can actually clog blood flow to the brain. What happens if you clog blood flow to the brain? It starts to effectively wither and die. That'S why, when you see the cat scans of also patients with Alzheimer's, they have dark spots in the brain. Well, this is so this plays into this idea. The reason I brought that up is this idea that meat was good for our brains.
If anything is actually bad because it inhibits blood flow to the brain, so that's the first thing. The second thing is that social orientation and socialization, as well as like the hunting that went along with it, so the act of hunting played a larger role in brain development because it required a couple of things: it required interpersonal collaboration or cooperation, so that socialization skill Is effective at you know, let's say, stimulating parts of the brain that you can't achieve in an insular way. The second thing is that we know that there's a correlation with IQ and the deferral of gratification, so how intelligent you are is largely correlated with how you can defer the instant gratification for some sort of long-term goal.
So if you're trapping fish or small game, if you're, if you're, if you fast forward a little bit and you look at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, you have this capacity emerge in mankind for the deferral of gratification through some of these methods of controlling our Environment to serve us, so we've created tools, we've created systems and we've charted the seasons. We'Ve understood, you know, we've dissected, what's going on in nature, we've looked at it and we've said how is this that? Why is this, that we have to rotate crops?
So all of these different dynamics, all of these different challenges. You know, of course, moving away from the equator has also played a tremendous role in bolstering our intelligence, because you're not living in a mono climactic world, where you can walk up to a mango tree any day of the year and get a mango. So when you're living in an environment where there's seasonal shifts and winter and you have if you eat your seed crop, guess what you're not going to live to see spring. So you have to be able to practice, temperance and patience and sacrifice. And those virtues were really what I think bolstered the brain more than eating.
