Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

One of the most common 'anti-nutrients'/organic compounds that alternative health/ancestral diet followers seem to talk about is phytic acid. The structure of phytic acid contains an inositol group (similar to B-vitamin structures) and 6 phosphate groups. Phytic acid exists in plant foods, particularly high in nuts, seeds, whole grains and legumes. Phytic acid is a particularly important reservoir of phosphorous and other mineral cations for a plant - plants contain the enzyme phytase, which can hydrolyze the bonds between phytic acid and its bound minerals (phytic acid:mineral complexes are known as phytates). Humans do not produce phytase, though some bacteria in the human small intestine may have phytase activity, allowing for the release of a small fraction of the bound mineral. The human GI tract's pH, also, does not facilitate the liberation of minerals from their phytate complexes. Phytic acid most commonly binds to non-heme iron, zinc, and calcium (1). From an evo...

If you haven't heard the comments made by David Attenborough regarding humans having stopped evolving, see this ( http://tinyurl.com/khdapmd ). This post only seeks to further support comments made by prominent evolutionary biologists and anthropologists who have already pointed out the flaws in Attenborough's thinking ( http://tinyurl.com/msy24eh ).  As I've pointed out on this blog before, there's a gap in the understanding of human evolution - a lot of people think that only selection is acting as a force of evolution. Attenborough's comments state that humans have stopped selective forces, with the advent of medicine and birth control, etc etc. This is why I wrote the second blog topic on understanding evolutionary and what we can infer about health - there are more forces of evolution than just selection. Evolution is, simply, the change in allele frequencies over time. Alleles are constantly under the effects of genetic drift, with an allele having the p...