BIG BRAIN FOOD?

If you can read this, it may well be because our earliest ancestors added honey in their diets. Forget the merits of fish as “Brain Food”, protohumans may have sought out honey

We know that Bonobo Chimpanzees, our nearest relatives by DNA, forage for honey. They prefer to raid the local stingless bees for preference, but in terms when food is hard to find, they’ll have a go at the sting enabled variety if necessary. We can assume that the knowledge of honey isn’t new and that it was shared with our pre-human ancestors.

The theory goes that since growing a big brain like ours is very inordinately expensive in metabolic terms, so knowledge of honey could have been one of the preferred foods that made our evolution possible as a species.

Alyssa Crittenden, a behavioral ecologist and nutritional anthropologist at the University of Nevada has observed that honey is incredibly energy dense by weight, it’s about 80 to 95 percent sugar, and a good source of the glucose too. Glucose is the the fuel that really powers mental processes and obviously needed to nurture brain development.

She draws on the dietary importance of honey for indigenous people around the world as evidence. It is of course conjecture, but it is a compelling suggestion.