Does foods of your origin have better effect than “new” food?

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What i am trying to ask is that if foods for example rice as main carbohydrates that have been eaten for 1000 of years in your generations is more effective for your body than if a person moved to a different country/culture that have spaghetti for example as their main carbohydrates.

Long story short do humans benefits more from eating the diet/types of food that their ancestors also ate.

Sorry if this question makes you confused.

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well it depends on what you mean by ‘benefit.’ Eating traditional foods can make you feel more connected with your ancestry, or can be a way of celebrating your culture. Certainly, that has some intangible benefit.

But as far as nutrition is concerned, the answer is probably not. Animals take far longer than 1000 years to adapt, so it isn’t like people in Asia will have evolved to utilize rice more efficiently than pasta. However, that being said, there are some adaptations in people that are regionally distributed – the gene for adult lactose tolerance, for example, is more common in the west than in the east, and dairy products are a lot more common in western cuisine than eastern. But it’s probably not a matter of people evolving to better utilize the food that was available, but rather, the cuisine changing over time to better fit what people found to be digestible.

There’s also the gut microbiome to be considered – people living in different regions can have different mixes of microbes living in their gut. Some of these might make it more or less easy to digest some foods, and people might get mildly ill when they come into contact with microbes that they’re not used to (for example while traveling.) However, how big or small of an effect this could be is hard to say. It probably isn’t on the level of altering how many calories you get from food, though.

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