Reddit reviews Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Here's a book that poses the same question and offers an answer:
http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Wrangham submits that because cooking makes nutrients more bioavailable, our ancestors' jaws and GI tracts shrank and our brains grew, leading to the physiology of modern humans.

I think those points fall under Richard Wrangham's big idea. He released a book on it. http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Read Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham. Basically, women have traditionally cooked for close family only. Men are the ones who would cook for the entire community. So cooking at home is "women's work" but cooking professionally is men's.

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Great read.

Pop-culture summary: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2011/12/08/why-calorie-counts-are-wrong-cooked-food-provides-a-lot-more-energy/

Actually, we have. This biological anthropologist makes the case that humans have evolved to specifically to eat cooked food, which thus reduces the gut size needed to process raw food, thus allowing more mass expenditure to go to the brain. A very interesting read. He also talks about the origin of the sexual division of labor to cooking.

Thus the "vestigial organ" we've lost is the more extensive intestinal gut system of our primate ancestors.

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334189058&sr=8-1

Cooked food is absolutely easier to digest. As for the intestinal tract, my understanding is that it has shrunk since the invention of cooking, but you'd get a better answer from an evolutionary biologist. Richard Wrangham has an excellent book on the topic.

"low-fat low-carb foods"? There pretty much is only carbs and fat. You could eat whey protein powders, but your body maxes out at about 40% protein, otherwise you'll just get rabbit starvation.

If cooking your fruits and vegetables works, then do that. Check out "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human", for some interesting evidence on how cooking can greatly increase the nutrient absorption of certain foods. For example, eating a raw banana you only absorb about 50% of the nutrients, cook that banana and you'll absorb about 99%.

If you have autoimmune issues, I'd also try elimination diets to see if certain foods are causing the problem. These may not be the same foods as are triggering your oral allergies, other foods can irritate the intestinal lining, creating a leaky gut, which will allow a lot of crap into the bloodstream which can in turn overwork the immune system. Also reduce your glycemic load, which puts tremendous stress on the immune system. There are lots of foods which people can be sensitive to, but doing a 30-day grain-free challenge is usually the best place to start, as it's far and away the most likely culprit.

For healthy eating, try coconuts: coconut oil, coconut butter, coconut milk, shredded coconut. It's all great stuff - can be used as a snack, and a very healthy source of energy.

Catching Fire is a much more in-depth discussion of the topic by Richard Wrangham, who is mentioned in the article.

fungus_amungus gives a good overview why it works below.

I think so. Every other animal is ambivalent to it or terrified of it.

Also, you might want to check out "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human". I haven't actually read it yet, but it's on my list :)

you expend a lot of energy to break down food in your digestive system, ex: chewing, your gut rumbling around. Additionally, the food is only in the digestive tract for a finite amount of time, and the rate of nutritional uptake would be faster for a pre-blended steak than an unblended one. The same mass of peanut butter vs raw peanuts would give you different net energy gains.

I learned a lot of this from the book, Catching Fire: http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

If you're really interested in this topic, it's an entire book. Surprisingly light read, really interesting, but possibly some flawed arguments in it (over plays the effect cooking fires had on our evolution).

A prominent hypothesis has to do with 3 factors: Lice, Fire, and Smell.

Hair around the armpits, neck, and crotch are very prone to use sweat to amplify hormones and other smell signals. Armpits are noticeably close to the nose, allowing people to sniff out familiar armpits in a crowd.

Lice, and other hair parasites might have been affected by fire and senses of beauty. Obviously, when you have less hair, notable lice are more out in the open. But when you add in the abundance of provided warmth (such as the discovery of fire), the hair is no longer needed in the mid-regions, and sickness-purity-detection would be more revealed.

Regarding your question, I think you can determine the difference between top-of-your-head-hair, which grows in a spiral pattern (visable in the crown of the head approaching a circular point), or a twisted set of pubes, versus non-axial which grows on your arms, legs, back.


Please let me know which of these ideas have been discredited.

Sources:

1-Catching Fire

2, this one helps to disprove usage of clothing as hair-reduction

I assume you are referring to Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham ?

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out.

I remeber seeing a book reviewed in New Scientist about the history of cooking, I think this is it. Haven't read it myself but it looks interesting if you want to find some answers about the origin of cooking food and how it intertwines with human history.

It's a bad idea. It will make you sick. And you will probably throw up whatever good food is in your stomach while you try to eat shit.

Drinking Urine like via Bear Grylls is bad enough for you.

Sure dogs eat shit all the time, but their systems are used to eating more foul things.

Humans have evolved to eat generally cooked foods free of pathogens. We've been cooking food longer than we've been Humans.

As a simple search provides a description of a not-new book:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/invention-of-cooking-drove-evolution-of-the-human-species-new-book-argues/

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Here's a pretty good book on a pretty solid hypothesis.

May everyone who mentioned cooking score an upvote...

Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Cooking our food allows the human body to be able to take in and use the highest amount of energy as opposed to raw foods. In fact most animals are healthier on a cooked food diet because they in turn have a greater return on the energy received. The extra energy and resources have provided for increased brain growth and this builds up over time (evolutionary time).

It is also foolish to say you can narrow it down to one aspect, but this is pretty big.

So is Fire.

Although some of his research is being questioned by other anthropologists, Richard Wrangham has a whole book devoted to this, and is a very interesting read.

It's not a fact when there's not evidence for it. Meat didn't make us stronger or less lethargic, it's certainly an excellent energy source but it's not necessary. Cooking was the prerequisite to a meat-centric diet, and again, it's not even necessary. There is literally no evidence for that and it directly contradicts what we can observe even in the modern day landscape of the animal kingdom.

I'll link a more accessible form of text: https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465013627

Happy reading.