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Original Research Communication |
1 From the Department of Medicine and the General Clinical Research Center, University of California, San Francisco.
Background: Natural selection has had < 1% of hominid evolutionary time to eliminate the inevitable maladaptations consequent to the profound transformation of the human diet resulting from the inventions of agriculture and animal husbandry.
Objective: The objective was to estimate the net systemic load of acid (net endogenous acid production; NEAP) from retrojected ancestral preagricultural diets and to compare it with that of contemporary diets, which are characterized by an imbalance of nutrient precursors of hydrogen and bicarbonate ions that induces a lifelong, low-grade, pathogenically significant systemic metabolic acidosis.
Design: Using established computational methods, we computed NEAP for a large number of retrojected ancestral preagricultural diets and compared them with computed and measured values for typical American diets.
Results: The mean (± SD) NEAP for 159 retrojected preagricultural diets was -88 ± 82 mEq/d; 87% were net base-producing. The computational model predicted NEAP for the average American diet (as recorded in the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) as 48 mEq/d, within a few percentage points of published measured values for free-living Americans; the model, therefore, was not biased toward generating negative NEAP values. The historical shift from negative to positive NEAP was accounted for by the displacement of high-bicarbonate-yielding plant foods in the ancestral diet by cereal grains and energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods in the contemporary dietneither of which are net base-producing.
Conclusions: The findings suggest that diet-induced metabolic acidosis and its sequelae in humans eating contemporary diets reflect a mismatch between the nutrient composition of the diet and genetically determined nutritional requirements for optimal systemic acid-base status. Am J Clin Nutr 2002;76:16.
Key Words: WORDSNutrition evolution acid base dietary net acid load protein cereal grains energy-dense nutrient-poor foods
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