Cooking: our evolutionary short-cut?

According to Michael Wall, people who avoid cooked foods are fighting against evolution:

Raw-food devotees take note: Your diet is not in any way natural. Humans are as adapted to cooking our food as cows are to eating grass, or ticks are to sucking blood.

"Cooking is a human universal," said Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting here Friday. While cooking kills parasites and other pathogens, Wrangham believes this health benefit is not its primary contribution.

"The fundamental importance of cooking is that it provides increased sources of energy," he said.

And that boost may be what facilitated the leap in size between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens. But, cooking may also have helped some modern humans into an obesity epidemic.

Wrangham cited data showing that cooking increases the body's ability to digest starches (as found, for example, in bread, potatoes and bananas). Only about 50 percent of raw starches are digested, compared to 90 percent of cooked ones. The trend, and the numbers, are similar for protein: from 50 to 65 percent digestibility raw to better than 90 percent cooked.

The reason: Heat breaks down starch and protein molecules, making it easier for digestive enzymes to attack them.

Wrangham has a new book coming out later this year, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, where he discusses how cooking may actually have been the big differentiator between humans and our now-extinct near relatives Homo Erectus.