IQ and Nutrition Again
In my big Flynn Effect post I linked in passing to a study documenting IQ gains in rural Kenyan children which were attributed to improvements in nutrition (Daley et al. [2003]). What I did not know is that the same research group published a couple of other papers that same year that more closely followed micro-level experimental methods (as opposed to using macro-level observations) in the November issue of The Journal of Nutrition, which has a few other papers on the same subject (the especially relevant papers there are Neumann et al and Whaley et al). The take-home message is that meat makes a difference, not so much in terms of calories (though that does matter) but in terms of offering more micronutrients in more bioavailable forms.
An important thing that's not really all that well known is that the agricultural revolution was actually a big step down for human health-more food was produced at the price of worse nutrition spread among more people (and then there were the downstream effects of more people living in smaller areas, a boon to infectious agents). All this adds up to some major depressive effects on cognitive ability, and much of the stunningly low IQ in underdeveloped countries is due to them currently being stuck in that shitty nutrition trap.
An important thing that's not really all that well known is that the agricultural revolution was actually a big step down for human health-more food was produced at the price of worse nutrition spread among more people (and then there were the downstream effects of more people living in smaller areas, a boon to infectious agents). All this adds up to some major depressive effects on cognitive ability, and much of the stunningly low IQ in underdeveloped countries is due to them currently being stuck in that shitty nutrition trap.