Exciting day! Another diet-related talk at ASU’s Center for Evolution & Medicine. This was a nice break from the horror that is the last 2 weeks of the semester..
It’s taking me awhile to “digest” all the information (hehe), but I found the seminar fascinating and wanted to summarize some main points. Lots of open questions remain, but John Pepper of National Cancer Institute really shows how examination of any health problem needs to focus not only on proximate causes, but the ultimate or evolutionary causes.
So.. Pepper asks- why is mammal meat bad for humans, specifically?
Meet Dr. Pepper!
In humans, red meat (he refers to it just as mammal meat) is linked to inflammatory diseases (cardiovascular, alzheimer’s, arthritis). What’s the mechanism behind this?
The inflammation from mammal meat has to do with our antibodies attacking something coming from other species.. When we eat mammal meat, we in fact incorporate something non-human from the diet- sialic acid.
Both human and other mammals have sialic acid in their tissues, actually, but humans have a unique mutation that replaces the form found in other mammals (ancestral form- Neu5Gc) with a different one- uniquely human (Neu5Ac).
So.. if we eat meat we get the new aquired ancestral sialic acid, it becomes part of our cells, and the small structural differences in the two get recognized by the immune system.. which responds with a defense- inflammation!
Chimpanzees are humans’ closest evolutionary relatives, sharing a common ancestor 6–7 million years ago..
WHY does human sialic acid differ uniquely? The “Malaria hypothesis” (see Martin&Rayner, 2005) proposes that in Africa, early humans escaped from the ancestral pathogen they shared with chimpanzees. They managed to do so by replacing the pathogen’s binding target (ancestral sialic acid Neu5Gc) with novel Neu5Ac. With time, a population of that old evaded pathogen evolved to infect humans again by recognizing the new Neu5Ac..leading to the origin of malaria.
The longer an animal has been domesticated, the more humans share parasites and diseases with them
If the Malaria Hypothesis explains why the initial change in humans happened.. why has it remained the same to this day? I mean, it’s been some several million years now- has this mutation been advantageous this whole time? It’s an important question because this sialic acid mutation poses a COST on our health: this trait causes chronic inflammation in people who eat mammal-derived foods + it also now causes vulnerability to malaria.
The hypothesis for why the human sialic acid modification is still around is that it
provides benefits- specifically, protection from parasites and pathogens via increased inflammation. This is relevant because of what humans have been doing for the last ~15,000 years. Animal domestication!
Humans are more vulnerable to shared pathogens from other mammals (than from non-mammals). So being around cattle, for example, carries a risk of catching pathogens from which that cattle suffers. Such animal pathogens impose a strong selective pressures on humans.. Pepper suggests that the uniquely human sialic acid (Neu5Ac) allows our diet to adapt us to the issue of animal pathogens by adjusting our inflammatory tone (how much inflammation we are experiencing): “those human populations that are exposed to domesticated food-mammals and their pathogens are also eating mammal-derived foods that are pro-inflammatory (both meat and dairy).”
Inflammation is a great example of a trade-off. It both has benefits (protection from parasites & infections) and costs (chronic disease, metabolic expense of mounting an immune response). The optimal balance for this trade-off would depend on how strong of a pathogen pressure you’re experiencing.
This increases inflammatory PROTECTION only where it’s most needed (like around animals). So this auto-immune inflammation from mammal foods in the diet not only increases likelihood of chronic disease, but protects against shared mammalian pathogens.
….. …… ……
It got me thinking about human culture and our ability to modify our environment in all sorts of ways- an example of “maladaptation” to modern times! Living in cities, not exposed to higher pathogen load from being around domesticated animals..yet having access to all the mammal meat we can buy = all put you in a situation where the good old sialic acid mutation might do more harm than good. Should people go vegan? Should they simply cut down on red meat? There was no discussion on the effect size of mammal meat eating and chronic disease, so I wouldn’t necessarily jump onto any lifestyle changes based on this talk. Yet the process of understanding this health concern through the lens of evolutionary medicine is quite fascinating!
P.S. I’m not an expert on this topic. If you have something to correct or add, please comment 🙂
Very cool use of evolutionary medicine principles in this case & a glimpse into why it’s important to use them if we want to understand disease.
Exciting day! Another diet-related talk at ASU’s Center for Evolution & Medicine. This was a nice break from the horror that is the last 2 weeks of the semester..
Mariya V. PhD 