Flashback Friday: Does Cooking Make Us Human

**I am going back through my old posts and finding some that I still love. I wanted to re-share them, especially for those of you that haven’t been reading my blog for very long. This post is from last September (2009), a few weeks after I stopped eating raw. I was only raw for a few weeks, but I found that it didn’t work for me. I have edited this post slightly so it is not exactly the way it appeared last year. Without further ado…**

Does Cooking Make Us Human?

In the summer of 2009, raw food was abuzz in blogland. I gave it a try to help my digestion, but that way of eating didn’t work for me. Now that it’s fall there is less and less talk about raw food, and more and more posts about oatmeal, baked squash, and delicious apples. It’s propitious that Bobby alerted me to this article: Did Cooking Give Humans An Evolutionary Edge? – a transcript of an NPR talk from Science Friday. It has to do with the differences between humans and other primates (like this gorilla that lives in the San Francisco zoo)…

To summarize:

• It’s an interview with Dr. Richard Wrangham, a primatologist (someone who studies primates = humans, apes, monkeys, and prosimians) who wrote Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
• Dr. Wrangham proposes that cooking has actually been a key aspect of evolution and our bodies have changed over the years due to the fact that we can cook our food. It’s given us a huge evolutionary advantage because we have more time to use our brains instead of foraging and chewing all day long.
• Interesting factoid: apes show either a preference for cooked food over raw food, or they are neutral… they never prefer raw to cooked food.
• Humans have a weird digestive system compared to other primates. Our digestive system is 2/3rds the size of an ape’s (if you adjust for the size of the ape versus the size of the human) and we have small teeth and small mouths – not ideal for lots of chewing.
• We’ve adapted to a “high quality” diet. (High quality meaning mostly cooked and easy to digest… not talking about the processed crap that most people live on.) Cooking is what increased the “quality” of our diet.
• We don’t have to eat large amounts of food and we don’t have to retain and ferment food for many many hours to digest it.
• The changes to our digestive system happened about 1.8 million years ago.
• Cooking our food increases the proportion of nutrients and energy that we’re able to digest. While a cooked carrot may technically have the same number of calories as a raw one, we are able to access more of the calories from the cooked one. Another example – when you cook an egg and eat it, you can digest about 94% of the protein. A raw egg? You digest about 60%. That’s a big difference.
• Why does cooking make things easier to digest? For protein, the process is called denaturation. The protein cells are kind of like a big ball of yarn; cooking unwinds the yarn. Besides cooking, acid can also denature something. Our stomach acid can do some of this, but cooking makes it that much easier for our bodies to digest protein (going from 60% digestion with just stomach acid to 94% digestion with cooking in the egg example above). A similar process happens with starch – chains of sugars open up during cooking so that they are more readily available to absorb.
• Humans are one of the only species that typically does not thrive on a raw diet… about half of women following a raw diet stop menstruating and most people lose weight (but this isn’t always a but thing). This is due to an energy shortage.
• Now this doesn’t mean that a raw diet can’t be beneficial – a lot of people are eating way too much so a raw diet can help them maintain their weight and feel better. A lot of the benefits that come from a raw diet are due to cutting out processed foods and chemicals. Many people have undiagnosed food allergies (gluten, wheat, dairy, etc…) and since those foods aren’t common in a high raw diet, people will feel better since they’re not eating them anymore.
• Again, eating more raw food is not necessarily bad or unhealthy! But if you live in a place where food is scarce, you should *not* follow a raw diet… if you live in the US or another developed country, incorporating more raw foods into your diet is actually a fabulous idea.
• Many people think that following a raw food diet is the most “natural” way to live… not true. We’ve actually evolved away from eating raw food. And one of the major reasons that we’ve been able to advance so far in terms of knowledge and technology is due to the fact that we are NOT like other primates – we don’t have to eat all day to get enough food, so we have time to use our huge brains.

Ever Heard of Biocultural Evolution?

In anthropology there is the idea of biocultural evolution, which basically says that our culture (using tools, cooking food, etc…) has a large influence on our evolution. The invention of tools allowed us to evolve away from huge teeth. The cultural idea of wearing clothes might be the reason that we aren’t covered in hair. And maybe cooking is responsible for changing our digestive system, our mouths, and our teeth.

What does it mean for me and you?

What works best for me is a fairly natural diet (no processed foods) with a little bit of raw food. I’d call it somewhat macrobiotic, except for the fact that I also eat dairy and meat… in moderation. I eat fruit raw (obviously) and I do snack on raw veggies sometimes. I love salad (obviously, again) but I don’t eat salad every day unless it’s the summer. I love my oatmeal, oat bran, baked and steamed squash, and many other cooked foods, especially in the cooler months.

What works for you? What do you think of the ideas that this guy is proposing?