Word: ately
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...hunting and gathering took enormous physical work. Chasing wild animals with spears and clubs was a marathon undertaking--and then you had to hack up the catch and lug it miles back to camp. Climbing trees to find nuts and fruit was hard work too. In essence, early humans ate what amounted to the best of the high-protein Atkins diet and the low-fat Ornish diet, and worked out almost nonstop. To get a sense of their endurance, cardiovascular fitness, musculature and body fat, say evolutionary anthropologists, look at a modern marathon runner...
...many of the essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals they had thrived on. Average life span increased, thanks to the greater abundance of food, but average height diminished. Skeletons also began to show a jump in calcium deficiency, anemia, bad teeth and bacterial infections. Most meat that people ate came from domesticated animals, which have more fat than wild game. Livestock also supplied early pastoralists with milk products, which are full of artery-clogging butterfat. But obesity still wasn't a problem, because even with animals to help, physical exertion was built into just about everyone's life...
...routines we have built around food are complex, it's because we have been working on them for so long. Well before we were very social creatures, we were decidedly hungry creatures, and we ate anything we could lay our hands on. Insects, worms and up to 20 kinds of game were nothing to a hunter-gatherer. As our tastes became more refined, the number of items on our menus shrank, mostly because we did a better job of intuiting what we needed. Cultures that developed a taste for rice and beans didn't know a lick about combining incomplete...
...when we ate became formalized too. When food was scarce, it had to be guarded, so families huddled close to eat what they had caught or picked. Somewhere in there may lie the origins of the dinner table. When food was abundant enough to share, it was passed around mostly at celebrations--harvest festivals, when the foods of autumn were eaten; Easter feasts, when the spring lamb recalled both Jesus' sacrifice and the story of Passover. "The foods became the anchor to which the rituals connected," says Brenton. "You don't see the same foods at a wedding...
...overweight kid.'" Sometimes kids want to talk about a weight problem, but it's best to listen for their cues, says psychiatrist Denise Wilfley of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. Books can also open up conversations. For ages 9 to 12, Dalton suggests Paula Danziger's The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, Judy Blume's Blubber or Jelly Belly by Robert Kimmel Smith...