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Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham was an excellent book on the role of cooked food in human evolution. It was a quick, entertaining read and I learned several interesting facts as well as pondered his unique hypotheses.

The main hypothesis is that cooking food began in earnest nearly 2 million years ago and was the origin of Homo Erectus. Over the next million years, eating cooked food and sleeping on the ground by the fire resulted in smaller guts, smaller jaws/teeth, no hair, larger brains, good running, bad climbing, language, social customs.

Below are a smattering of facts and hypotheses.

- "A strict raw food diet cannot guarantee and adequate energy supply"
- Evo Diet volunteers lost almost a pound a day on 2300 cal/day
- In Giessen raw food study, 50% of women stopped menstruating
- Our digestive systems and jaws/teeth are tiny compared to great apes
- All sorts of other animals spontaneously flourish (gain weight) with cooked food.
- Maillard reactions occur when cooking food (browning) and also in the body. Some byproducts may be toxic but humans have adapted to higher levels.
- Alexis St. Martin was shot in 1822 and, though healed, the inner workings of his stomach were visible from the outside..
- Oka's rat study showed soft pellets (same nutrition) made rats fatter than hard pellets
- Homo Erectus had longer legs and bad climbing. Control of fire and cooking probably allowed longer walking for hunts (less time eating) and sleeping safely on ground.
- Size of brain and size of digestive system are correlated throughout primates and some other animals (expensive tissue hypothesis)
- Chimpanzees spend nearly 6 hours in the process of chewing! With rest cycles, this accounts for almost 10 hours of eating. Cooking literally freed us to do other things.

BucketHead wrote: - In Giessen raw food study, 50% of women stopped menstruating

That explains POD and several others.

Thanks for the recommendation, Bux. This sounds like a seriously interesting book.

If you have yet to read this book, here is another teaser. This book has staying power. Powerful hypothesis.

But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

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