Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Pseudoscience-is-malarkey on 01/04/2023 10:06:28
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For all the other carnivores and omnivores, this is not an issue. We have acids and enzymes to digest and kill bacteria in food, but it's weak. Our bodies weren't always that way.
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In the days when we ate raw food, anyone who was born with a genetic mutation that left them unable to produce the enzymes to digest it would die, and if they die, they don't pass on those mutant genes to another generation. Simple natural selection means that that type of mutant gene dies out and doesn't proliferate.
Then one day along comes cooking and those mutants survive, and if they survive they get passed on to the next generation. Eventually they will spread through the population because there's no longer any natural selection to weed them out, and we all end up being dependent on cooking to pre-digest our food. Eat an uncooked diet and in the end you will die. (https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/man-just-another-animal)
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Eat an uncooked diet and in the end you will die.
You also die if you eat a cooked diet.
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My great-grandfather said of porridge: "If you eat that for a hundred years, you will live a long time". Or maybe it was pickled herring.
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My great-grandfather said of porridge: "If you eat that for a hundred years, you will live a long time". Or maybe it was pickled herring.
My great-great-great grandfather, who died in 1874, said "microwave ovens will be invented some day."
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Humans have a much smaller gut than our nearest relatives, because the food is pre-cooked to break open the cells, and vegetables are often mashed and grains ground to make the nutrition more available.
There have been experiments seeing how much nutrition humans can extract from raw meat; The answer is: not much
- Cutting it up finely helps
- And mincing helps a lot
- But cooking extracts the most nutrients
Even in the last 1,000 years (ie a shorter timeframe than significant genetic changes), there has been a change in the structure of the human jaw - bread is now made of fine-ground flour, so much less chewing is needed, and jaws need less strong muscles, and the osteoblasts have to work less...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteoblast
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The main problem is the human brain.
the human brain accounts for between 44% and 87% of resting metabolic rate (RMR) during infancy, childhood, and adolescence
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1323099111
Fruit is an easily-digested source of energy, but is rarely available all year round.
It has been suggested that humans could not reach their current brain size without cooking. This hypothesis was popularised here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human