Melvin Konner | |
---|---|
Born | August 30, 1946 |
Alma mater | Brooklyn College (BA) Harvard University (PhD, MD) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Anthropology, behavioral biology |
Institutions | Harvard University Emory University |
Thesis | Infants of a foraging people (1973) |
Website | www |
Melvin Joel Konner (born August 30, 1946) is an American anthropologist who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. [1]
Raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, Konner has stated that he lost his faith at age 17. [2] He studied at Brooklyn College, CUNY (1966), where he met Marjorie Shostak, whom he later married and with whom he had three children. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1973 and a M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1985. [3] [4]
From 1985 [5] on, he contributed substantially to developing the concept of a Paleolithic diet and its impact on health, publishing along with Stanley Boyd Eaton, [6] [7] and later also with his wife Marjorie Shostak [8] and with Loren Cordain. [9]
In nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food.
The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic, also called the Old Stone Age, is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost the entire period of human prehistoric technology. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins, c. 3.3 million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene, c. 11,650 cal BP.
Biological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is a social science discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective. This subfield of anthropology systematically studies human beings from a biological perspective.
The Paleolithic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, or Stone Age diet is a modern fad diet consisting of foods thought by its proponents to mirror those eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era.
The Mediterranean diet is a concept first invented in 1975 by the American biologist Ancel Keys and chemist Margaret Keys. The diet took inspiration from the supposed eating habits and traditional food typical of Crete, much of the rest of Greece, and southern Italy, and formulated in the early 1960s. It is distinct from Mediterranean cuisine, which covers the actual cuisines of the Mediterranean countries, and from the Atlantic diet of northwestern Spain and Portugal. While inspired by a specific time and place, the "Mediterranean diet" was later refined based on the results of multiple scientific studies.
The glycemic load (GL) of food is a number that estimates how much the food will raise a person's blood glucose level after it is eaten. One unit of glycemic load approximates the effect of eating one gram of glucose. Glycemic load accounts for how much carbohydrate is in the food and how much each gram of carbohydrate in the food raises blood glucose levels. Glycemic load is based on the glycemic index (GI), and is calculated by multiplying the weight of available carbohydrate in the food (in grams) by the food's glycemic index, and then dividing by 100.
Evolutionary medicine or Darwinian medicine is the application of modern evolutionary theory to understanding health and disease. Modern biomedical research and practice have focused on the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying health and disease, while evolutionary medicine focuses on the question of why evolution has shaped these mechanisms in ways that may leave us susceptible to disease. The evolutionary approach has driven important advances in the understanding of cancer, autoimmune disease, and anatomy. Medical schools have been slower to integrate evolutionary approaches because of limitations on what can be added to existing medical curricula. The International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health coordinates efforts to develop the field. It owns the Oxford University Press journal Evolution, Medicine and Public Health and The Evolution and Medicine Review.
The relationship between alcohol consumption and body weight is the subject of inconclusive studies. Findings of these studies range from increase in body weight to a small decrease among women who begin consuming alcohol. Some of these studies are conducted with numerous subjects; one involved nearly 8,000 and another 140,000 subjects.
Protein poisoning is an acute form of malnutrition caused by a diet deficient in fat and carbohydrates, where almost all bioavailable calories come from the protein in lean meat. The concept is discussed in the context of paleoanthropological investigations into the diet of ancient humans, especially during the Last Glacial Maximum and at high latitude regions.
Marjorie Shostak was an American anthropologist. Though she never received a formal degree in anthropology, she conducted extensive fieldwork among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari desert in south-western Africa and was widely known for her descriptions of the lives of women in this hunter-gatherer society.
A saltern is an area or installation for making salt. Salterns include modern salt-making works (saltworks), as well as hypersaline waters that usually contain high concentrations of halophilic microorganisms, primarily haloarchaea but also other halophiles including algae and bacteria.
Nutrient density identifies the amount of beneficial nutrients in a food product in proportion to e.g. energy content, weight or amount of perceived detrimental nutrients. Terms such as nutrient rich and micronutrient dense refer to similar properties. Several different national and international standards have been developed and are in use.
The Western pattern diet is a modern dietary pattern that is generally characterized by high intakes of pre-packaged foods, refined grains, red meat, processed meat, high-sugar drinks, candy and sweets, fried foods, industrially produced animal products, butter and other high-fat dairy products, eggs, potatoes, corn, and low intakes of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, pasture-raised animal products, fish, nuts, and seeds.
Dietary Reference Values (DRV) is the name of the nutritional requirements systems used by the United Kingdom Department of Health and the European Union's European Food Safety Authority.
Michael F. Holick is an American adult endocrinologist, specializing in vitamin D, such as the identification of both calcidiol, the major circulating form of vitamin D, and calcitriol, the active form of vitamin D. His work has been the basis for diagnostic tests and therapies for vitamin D-related diseases. He is a professor of medicine at the Boston University Medical Center and editor-in-chief of the journal Clinical Laboratory.
Premastication, pre-chewing, or kiss feeding is the act of chewing food for the purpose of physically breaking it down in order to feed another that is incapable of masticating the food by themselves. This is often done by the mother or relatives of a baby to produce baby food capable of being consumed by the child during the weaning process. The chewed food in the form of a bolus is transferred from the mouth of one individual to another, either directly mouth-to-mouth, via utensils, hands, or is further cooked or processed prior to feeding.
Staffan Lindeberg (1950–2016) was an associate professor of family medicine at the Department of Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden. He was a practicing GP at St Lars Primary Health Care Center, Lund, Sweden. Lindeberg researched the paleolithic diet.
Loren Cordain is an American scientist who specializes in the fields of nutrition and exercise physiology. He is notable as an advocate of the Paleolithic diet.
George J. Armelagos was an American anthropologist, and Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Armelagos significantly impacted the field of physical anthropology and biological anthropology. His work has provided invaluable contributions to the theoretical and methodological understanding human disease, diet and human variation within an evolutionary context. Relevant topics include epidemiology, paleopathology, paleodemography, bioarchaeology, evolutionary medicine, and the social interpretations of race, among others.
S. Boyd Eaton is a radiologist and one of the originators of the concept of Paleolithic nutrition. In 1985, he and Melvin Konner published a paper, Paleolithic Nutrition, in The New England Journal of Medicine which attracted some attention from other researchers.
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