Exercise 3. Which is the best summary of the text? Why?

Can you suggest your own variant of the summary?

1. Scientific interest in the evolution of human nutritional requirements has a long history. Some scientists argued that the prevalence in modern societies of many chronic diseases—obesity, hypertension, coronary heart disease and diabetes, among them—is the consequence of a mismatch between modern dietary patterns and the type of diet that our species evolved to eat as prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Since then, however, understanding of the evolution of human nutritional needs has advanced considerably—thanks to new comparative analyses of traditionally living human populations and other primates—and a more nuanced picture has emerged. We now know that humans have evolved not to subsist on a single, Paleolithic diet but to be flexible eaters, an insight that has important implications for the current debate over what people today should eat in order to be healthy. The challenge our modern societies now face is balancing the calories we consume with the calories we burn.
2. Contemporary human populations the world over have diets richer in calories and nutrients than those of our cousins, the great apes. Differences in the settings in which humans and apes evolved may help explain the variation in costs of movement. Chimps, gorillas and orangutans evolved in and continue to occupy dense forests where only a mile or so of trekking over the course of the day is all that is needed to find enough to eat. Much of early hominid evolution, on the other hand, took place in more open woodland and grassland, where sustenance is harder to come by. Thus, for far-ranging foragers, cost-effective walking saves many calories in maintenance energy needs—calories that can instead go toward reproduction. Selection for energetically efficient locomotion is therefore likely to be more intense among far-ranging animals because they have the most to gain.

Exercise 4. You are going to interview your fellow-students. Make up 15 questions about the key facts discussed in the article.

Exercise 5. Fruits and vegetables in our diet.

Discuss the following questions:

1. What is the role of fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet?

2. Should we cook vegetables or eat them raw? Why?

3. Which cooking techniques allow to preserve healthy substances found in fruits and vegetables and which, on the contrary, can produce negative effects on one’s health?

Exercise 6. Read the article below to check some of your answers in Exercise 5.

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