Saborosos, sadios e digestivos: o discurso médico presente no consumo de frutos, conservas e compotas na América portuguesa do século XVI / Delicious, healthy, and good for digestion: medical discourse present in the consumption of fruit, preserves, and compotes in sixteenth-century Portuguese America

Resumo Um dos maiores desafios enfrentados pelos colonizadores europeus, na América portuguesa quinhentista, foi a adaptação ao novo ambiente, sobretudo, aos obstáculos nutricionais. Prover-se das calorias exigidas diariamente pelo corpo humano pode ter sido uma das tarefas mais extenuantes da dinâmica colonial. A alimentação era feita de acordo com a disponibilidade dos gêneros alimentícios ali existentes. Nesse contexto, os frutos nativos assumiram um papel importante na dieta alimentar daqueles homens, principalmente quando consumidos em forma de compotas e conservas. Temos, como objetivo, destacar a importância dos doces coloniais, bem como identificar de que maneira o seu consumo ocorria, sinalizando a relação dessa atividade com o discurso médico difundido na Europa do século XVI.

Abstract One of the major challenges the European colonizers faced in sixteenth-century Portuguese America was adaptation to their new environment, especially nutritional obstacles. Obtaining the human body's daily calorie requirements may have been one of the more strenuous tasks in colonial dynamics. Their diets were composed of what was available; in this context, native fruits took on an important role, especially when consumed in the form of compotes and preserves. Our goal is to highlight the importance of colonial sweets, identify how they were consumed, and show the relationship between this activity and the medical discourse which was present in sixteenth-century Europe.

Predicting extinction risk of Brazilian Atlantic forest angiosperms.

Understanding how plant life history affects species vulnerability to anthropogenic disturbances and environmental change is a major ecological challenge. We examined how vegetation type, growth form, and geographic range size relate to extinction risk throughout the Brazilian Atlantic Forest domain. We used a database containing species-level information of 6,929 angiosperms within 112 families and a molecular-based working phylogeny. We used decision trees, standard regression, and phylogenetic regression to explore the relationships between species attributes and extinction risk. We found a significant phylogenetic signal in extinction risk. Vegetation type, growth form, and geographic range size were related to species extinction risk, but the effect of growth form was not evident after phylogeny was controlled for. Species restricted to either rocky outcrops or scrub vegetation on sandy coastal plains exhibited the highest extinction risk among vegetation types, a finding that supports the hypothesis that species adapted to resource-limited environments are more vulnerable to extinction. Among growth forms, epiphytes were associated with the highest extinction risk in non-phylogenetic regression models, followed by trees, whereas shrubs and climbers were associated with lower extinction risk. However, the higher extinction risk of epiphytes was not significant after correcting for phylogenetic relatedness. Our findings provide new indicators of extinction risk and insights into the mechanisms governing plant vulnerability to extinction in a highly diverse flora where human disturbances are both frequent and widespread.