Living longer thanks to meat
Eating meat has given humans a longer lifespan than our monkey cousins.
Chimpanzees and great apes don't live much past 50, while many of us are still going strong at 90-plus.
As we're gentically very similar - why do we have the legs on our hairy relations?
The difference, explains USC Davis School of Gerontology Professor Caleb Finch, is humans evolved genes that enabled them to better adjust to levels of infection and inflammation and to the high cholesterol levels of their meat-rich diets.
The professor has identified a "meat-adaptive gene" only found in people that has increased the human lifespan.
There is a downside, so vegetarians can feel better.
Finch says these evolutionary genetic advantages, caused by slight differences in DNA sequencing and improvements in diet, also make humans uniquely susceptible to diseases of aging such as cancer, heart disease and dementia when compared to other primates.
Weird Science Factoid: Bluebirds cannot see the colour blue. Now that's what I call irony.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
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