Research
Micronutrients & recovery
High copy number variation (CNV) of the salivary amylase gene (AMY1) in humans is an evolutionary adaptation to a starch-rich diet, particularly following the widespread adoption of cooking.
Humans have genetically adapted to digest starch efficiently, especially when cooked. This suggests that starch is a natural part of the human diet, and individuals may have varying capacities to digest it based on their genetics.
ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
We propose that after cooking became widespread, starch digestion became the rate-limiting step in starch utilization, and the coevolution of cooking and copy number variation (CNV) in the AMY1 (and possibly AMY2) gene(s) increased availability of preformed dietary glucose...
Why this rating
Based on genetic correlation studies and comparative genomics, but direct causal proof in early hominins is inferred.
Source
The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution
Karen Hardy et al. · The Quarterly Review of Biology · 2015
DOI 10.1086/682587
narrative_reviewCited 227×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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