When humans were no longer apes, upright walking left behind "aftereffects"!

What are the main differences between humans and animals? When faced with this question, I believe many people have different ideas, such as the use of tools, such as changes in intelligence, but if you think about it carefully, you will find that these characteristics do not seem to be unique to humans.

Some people must have thought of walking upright. Yes, that's right. But is walking upright beneficial and harmless to humans? Not entirely. Let's talk about it today.

01. When did humans stop being apes?

Let’s first talk about why changes in tool use and intelligence are not unique to humans?

1. Using tools. Not only humans can use tools, but gorillas can too. What's even more surprising is that the white-headed capuchin monkeys living in Colombia and other places even use stones as tools to crack open foods such as nuts. It can be said that they have entered the so-called "Paleolithic Age" of humans.

2. What about changes in intelligence? Not really, because our brain capacity is actually a continuous process of change, and has been slowly increasing from ancient apes to the present day. It is difficult to determine at what point the brain capacity of an ape-man can be identified as that of a human.

3. Walking upright. In fact, this is the core evidence that truly determines that humans are no longer apes. Walking upright is a sign of the emergence of humans and an important feature that distinguishes us from other primates. For example, when we determine the ancestor of humans, we can trace it back to a fossil called Lucy, who lived 3 million years ago. The core basis for this judgment is that Lucy's pelvis and leg bones show that she can walk upright, so she is judged to be one of the earliest humans.

Then some people say, while walking upright provides convenience for people, does it have any adverse effects on humans?

02. The pros and cons of walking upright

Walking upright is a key step in determining the development of humans, and it is very likely that humans were forced to acquire this ability in the first place. Due to drastic climate change, the environment in Africa has also changed, with the typical feature being the continuous reduction of forests and their replacement by grasslands. In this case, human ancestors had to come down from the trees. Faced with an environment different from the forest, the grasslands are full of dangers, and the dense grass will also block the view. In this case, standing upright is the best way to survive and avoid being attacked by the enemy. This is a typical case of natural selection, and those who were able to stand upright eventually survived and became our ancestors.

The advantages of walking upright are also constantly manifested. As humans stand upright, on the one hand, they can reduce the frequency of being injured by wild animals due to better vision, and their survival rate is improved; on the other hand, walking upright greatly liberates our hands, allowing them to do more things, which has led to the emergence of human creativity, allowing us to hold weapons and make tools, and ultimately creating our human civilization. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to praise walking upright.

But like most choices, walking upright is also a double-edged sword. While it has brought great advantages to humans, it has also brought us some sequelae. The most direct one is that the bones below our heads must change accordingly.

Many of our diseases today are related to these changes. For example, the most typical one is fertility. The intuitive change brought about by upright walking is that the human pelvis has also changed, and this change ultimately determines the size of the fetus that women choose when giving birth. In this case, the head of a normal baby that can survive independently has already exceeded the size limit, so most fetuses are forced to be born before they can survive independently, so our human fetuses are, to some extent, premature babies.

This is just one aspect. For all humans, in order to ensure the straightness of the torso, our spine has to bear greater pressure. Coupled with a large head, the lower part of our spine bears too much weight, which is the source of our back pain. In addition, walking upright will gradually transfer the pressure of the whole body to our knees, ankles and feet. This huge weight and constant wear and tear during movement also lead to the common joint pain problem among humans.

What is more serious is that with the development of the economy and society, most countries have experienced overnutrition, and the direct manifestation of this situation is overweight or even obesity, which puts tremendous pressure on the joints.

The figure below is a schematic diagram of the pressure injury model. It can be seen that when the load-bearing capacity increases, such as being overweight, or the impact of strenuous exercise will put tremendous pressure on the cartilage, making it more likely to be damaged.

How to maintain joints and avoid various problems? After many biomedical researchers explored, they put forward an important conclusion: calcium supplementation.

03. How to supplement calcium?

When it comes to calcium supplementation, I believe many people are familiar with it. After so many years of introduction of calcium supplementation, I believe that calcium supplementation to alleviate bone problems has been deeply rooted in people's minds.

In fact, calcium supplementation can be said to be a great innovation in the history of human dietary supplements (another great innovation is vitamins). Under normal human dietary balance, the body is not actually lacking in calcium, but for those with unbalanced diets or those with reduced absorption capacity, especially the elderly, calcium may be lacking. Calcium itself is a vital component for the human body, responsible for various physiological activities of the body, such as maintaining the biopotential on both sides of the cell membrane, maintaining normal nerve conduction function, maintaining normal muscle contraction and relaxation function, nerve-muscle conduction function, and the effects of some hormones, etc. Once calcium is deficient, it is easy to cause fatal problems. Therefore, at this time, in order to compensate for the calcium needed by the normal tissues of the human body, the human body will decompose calcium ions from calcium-rich tissues-bone to supplement. In the long run, the calcium in the bones is constantly decomposed, which eventually leads to the bones becoming very fragile, which is the common disease of the elderly, osteoporosis.

Therefore, for people who are calcium deficient, it is very necessary to supplement calcium from outside the body, which can effectively alleviate calcium deficiency and avoid bone calcium loss.

However, as research continues to advance, people have become somewhat alert to the risks of blindly supplementing calcium. The body's absorption of calcium is largely indiscriminate, which results in many tissues and organs absorbing excess calcium even though they don't actually need it, leading to a number of problems. For example, with large amounts of calcium supplementation, vascular calcification, cartilage calcification, and corneal calcification all occur, and some people even develop bone hyperplasia, bone spurs, and some visceral stones, such as gallstones, kidney stones, and bladder stones.

In 2017, a study published in the top medical journal JAMA overturned the myth of calcium supplementation. They studied more than 50,000 elderly people over the age of 50 and found that regular calcium supplementation does not benefit the elderly, and excessive calcium supplementation can have some disadvantages, such as increasing the probability of fractures. Therefore, although calcium supplementation is good, it should not be excessive.

04. More than just calcium

Simply supplementing calcium has been proven to have some problems. The important factor is that the maintenance of the human skeletal system does not rely solely on calcium, but includes multiple components working together to maintain it. Therefore, calcium should not be supplemented simply, but various supplements should be combined to play a role. In response to this, many nutritional supplements have been developed to relieve sports injuries and promote human bone health. The most common supplements include glucosamine, UC2 and vitamin K. Let's introduce them one by one.

1. Glucosamine, short for glucosamine, is a basic component of cartilage and plays a key role in the formation of articular cartilage. Exogenous intake of glucosamine can stimulate the synthesis of proteoglycans in chondrocytes to replenish the loss of cartilage itself, thereby repairing cartilage. On the other hand, it can also inhibit inflammation in the body, reduce cartilage damage, and relieve pain caused by joint wear.

(The therapeutic effect of glucosamine on joint damage)

In view of this, there are currently many brands that focus on glucosamine.

2. UC-11 is the abbreviation of type II non-denatured collagen. UC-II is also an essential component of human articular cartilage.

The study found that feeding UC-II to arthritis mouse models can significantly improve the symptoms of the model animals, alleviate their joint disease symptoms and shorten the course of the disease. Further experimental verification in humans also confirmed this point, that is, UC-II can significantly improve joint pain and improve the health of patients.

Therefore, UC-II has been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis since the 1990s. The effect of UC-II is even better than that of glucosamine. For example, Crowley et al studied the effect of using 40 mg UC-II alone and 1500 mg glucosamine hydrochloride + 1200 mg chondroitin sulfate on patients with moderate osteoarthritis. The results showed that UC-II can better relieve the pain of patients.

Because UC-II plays an important role in improving bone and joint pain, many companies are currently focusing on UC-II supplements.

3. Vitamin K is another unique dietary supplement. It is a vitamin related to blood coagulation. Danish chemist Henrik Damm and American chemist Edward Adelbert Doisy won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the chemical properties of vitamin K. It is mainly used to solve the problem of calcium supplementation. Calcium must be combined with a protein called osteocalcin to become bone calcium needed by the human body. However, the initial osteocalcin secreted by normal osteoblasts lacks biological activity and must rely on an additional substance to be activated. This substance is vitamin K. Therefore, moderate supplementation of vitamin K can promote more meaningful absorption of calcium.

In addition to the above substances, there are many substances such as vitamin D, chondroitin, hyaluronic acid, etc. which have been proven to improve joint conditions, so they are also common sports dietary supplements.

This is also the mainstream supplement currently developed to improve the health of various joints. However, since the core ingredients are similar, the more the better.

In general, various dietary supplements can effectively protect joints. However, this protective effect can only alleviate the joint damage caused by upright walking to the greatest extent, but it cannot cure joint problems. If humans are asked to give up upright walking, I think this is basically impossible, and we can only go on this road.

But I think that in the future, with the deepening of our understanding of human physiology and the maturity of various new technologies such as 3D printing technology, perhaps we can no longer worry about bone problems to some extent. After all, bones are relatively the easiest to replace and should be the first problem to be solved.