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Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human?
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We evolved with food that was cooked. First by following the paths of wild fires where root vegetables and nuts were cooked by natural processes and then, with the control of fire, did it intentionally. The burned food offered nutrients that were easier for our bodies to process.
This book explains it in lay terms way better than I can, and I think I remember seeing a TED Talk by Daniel Dennett that talks about it as well.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465020410/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_kaU2Fb3VZV5ZF
> Cooking "denatures" the protein to make it more bioavaible but this seems totally counter-intuitive to all other foods where cooking reduces benefits.
This is just patently false.
There is tons of research showing that cooking increases our digestive system's capacity to extract nutrients from food, and Catching Fire actually takes it so far as to argue that eating cooked food allowed our ancestors to evolve larger brains by reducing the amount of energy required by our digestive tracts.
We've evolved to eat cooked food - including meat. Catching fire
There's a great book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham that's primarily about the hypothesis that it was our ability to cook food that drove our evolutionary development as early humans, not our hunting ability to eat additional meat. In addition to providing a compelling case for this, he also brings together a bunch of disparate studies to almost accidentally prove a side case: that calories in, calories out is only part of the equation. An important one, but not the only one.
One examples I remember clearly from the book were a standard experimental/control set of rats. They were given food which had the same calorie count, but one of them was hard pellets, and the other one was a "puffed" version of the food; think cold rice versus unsugared rice krispies. Both sets of rats finished all of the food, but the puffed food rats gained weight while the unpuffed did not.
Similarly, a dietary experiment that wanted to look at the effects of eating a raw food diet vs. a regular diet was attempted. The experimental and control groups were served the same food, including olive oil, spices, etc. but the control group's food was cooked, while the experimental group's food was unprepared. It was meant to take place over the course of a few months if memory serves (I haven't read the book in years), but had to be cut short after a matter of a few weeks as the raw food group lost more weight than was considered safe.
Our way of measuring the number of calories in food is grossly inadequate. And from the studies that have been performed, which unfortunately are few and far between as most food research is done by the companies that make the food, even when we measure the calories int he food, we're often not actually measuring how easily our body processes and stores those calories.
Calories in, calories out is a good place to start. But saying that's all there is to it is like answering the question "how do birds fly," with "by flapping their wings." It's accurate, but also insufficient, as it ignores their lighter bone structure, aerodynamic qualities, etc. And expecting someone to lose weight just by watching calories without also changing the types of food they eat is often about as useful as expecting someone to fly by strapping on ersatz wings and flapping their arms.
When I say easier to digest, that includes getting more nutrients out of the meat you eat.
You can check this great bookout if you’re interested in learning more.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0465020410/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apan_glt_i_QNHYDFCTQ8CM3GDYG3YJ?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
> Isn't it strange that we are the ones who are lucky enough to be in the world of technology?
Technology is 2 million years old: https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/
Just to add that humans have been controlling fire and cooking food well before we were even human. Humans evolved about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Evidence for the control of fire and cooked food predates this by about 150,000 years. The best evidence dates around 350,000 years ago but some sites are much older (700,000+ years). Physiological evidence dates back about 1.2 million years ago. So humans didn't discover fire, in all likelihood it was Homo erectus. We will never know the exact circumstances of this discovery, but we do know that H. erectus was very likely the first hominin to use and control fire, however intermittent it might have been.
Yes! So many people get this confused. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire. I had to read it for an evolutionary biology class and it was wonderful, if I remember correctly.
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