Humans and DHA

[Guest guest]

An Interesting discussion. I have the PDF if anyone

wants a copy, as its not free access.

Jeff

Review Article

Has an aquatic diet been necessary for hominin brain

evolution and functional development?

H. Langdon*

British Journal of Nutrition (2006), 96, 7–17

A number of authors have argued that only an

aquatic-based diet can provide the necessary quantity

of DHA to support the human brain, and that a

switch to such a diet early in hominin evolution was

critical to human brain evolution. This paper

identifies the premises behind this hypothesis and

critiques them on the basis of clinical literature.

Both tissue levels and certain functions of the

developing infant brain are sensitive to extreme

variations in the supply of DHA in artificial feeding,

and it can be shown that levels in human milk reflect

maternal diet. However, both the

maternal and infant bodies have mechanisms to store

and buffer the supply of DHA, so that functional

deficits are generally resolved without

compensatory diets. There is no evidence that human

diets based on terrestrial food chains with

traditional nursing practices fail to provide adequate

levels of DHA or other n-3 fatty acids. Consequently,

the hypothesis that DHA has been a limiting resource

in human brain evolution must be considered to be unsupported.