AHS16 - Ancestral Health Symposium 2016

Infancy is a crucial time for brain growth, and this species-critical, rapid brain growth continues well past weaning. Therefore, the diet onto which evolving humans weaned their infants must have been highly selected to favour brain growth. Reviewing evidence from anthropology, reproductive biology, and infant physiology, we find a high-fat animal-based diet to be the most plausible weaning diet of our ancestors. Recent evidence from randomised controlled trials confirms that weaning onto animal foods best supports the intense brain growth of human infants even today.