Things that Yoram knows: why cook?

Doron asks "Why do you cook meat? Logically, it seems that it is healthier to eat raw meat because nutritional values ​​are lost when cooked."

First of all, nutritional values ​​are not really lost when you cook (or roast, fry, etc.) meat. The meat is a source of proteins and fat and apart from losing some of the fat that drips out of the roast, not much is lost. The caloric value of chicken meat decreases by approximately 9% and beef loses only about 4% of its value during cooking. And yet: why even cook meat when all the other carnivores get by quite well with raw meat?

One accepted answer is that cooking kills bacteria and parasites in the meat. It is enough to read, for example, about the intestinal tapeworm (Taenia saginata) to lose your appetite for steaks: a dormant larva in the muscle of a cow that is eaten when it is pink (medium-rare or less) grows a worm about seven meters long made of detachable joints, each of which acts as an independent worm until it Excreted, decomposes and scatters thousands of eggs waiting in the field for a cow to mix them with the grass. Although repulsive, these worms are usually harmless: a worm found in a bloody steak may live for 20 years in the small intestine without us even knowing of its existence. Parasites and bacteria attack every animal and everyone seems to live just fine without an oven and stove.

Humans are omnivorous and differ from each other in their menu depending on what grows in their environment, culture and personal taste: from Indians who adhere to a completely vegetarian diet to Eskimos whose menu consists of almost 100% meat it is difficult to think of a common denominator for human food except that all humans cook. There is not a single tribe or nation in the world that does not use fire to process food. Even populations of hermits, nomads, warriors or sailors who separated from most of the luxuries of civilization took cooked or baked food with them. Only mythological figures like Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son who subsisted on carobs or John the Baptist who fed on grasshoppers and honey lived for a long time on raw food.

Malnutrition comes from an uncooked diet

The question, therefore, is whether it is even possible to live without cooking. No "Helsinki Committee" will approve an experiment in which humans will be fed for a long time with only raw food. Fortunately for the researchers, there are those who volunteered their bodies for this kind of abuse of their own free will. These people (raw foodist or raw vegans) limit themselves to a diet of food items that have not undergone any heat treatment. These are people who do not engage in physical work or strenuous sports activities and who have an abundance of unlimited food products. Despite all this convenience, a diet of raw food over a long period of time leads not only to extreme thinness (3 to 4 BMI units less than the average of mere vegetarians and vegans), but among women who subsist on such a diet, the menstrual cycle stops in half of them: a clear sign of malnutrition.

diet

So what's the problem with raw food? To understand this, you need a lot of calculations that yield surprising results. Cooking softens fibers and turns the starch present as hard grains into a porridge that can be discharged in our digestive system: this way you can get a lot of energy from a little food. An urban woman who lives a sedentary life and needs only 2000 calories a day will need 5 kilograms of fruits and vegetables a day to fulfill her needs in protein, carbohydrates and fats compared to 1.9 kg of food required for the same woman from regular food. If a vegan asked her to consume this amount from what nature offers (from the wild plants available to the gathering and hunting tribes), then the amount of fiber in such a diet is 10 times what is accepted in a western diet. The researcher who performed the calculation comments that there is no evidence that the human intestine is able to handle such an amount of fiber. Even if the excess fiber is not harmful, the acceleration of the intestinal activity that will result (in the vernacular: diarrhea) will reduce the efficiency of absorption so that an even greater amount of food will be required. It is clear that obtaining so much food in nature or agriculture will require additional energy expenditure on these 2000 calories so a plant-based diet without cooking simply cannot sustain humans.

But, Doron, what will happen if instead of plant food we switch to a diet that also includes raw meat? Maybe we can manage without cooking if we eat steaks straight from the Italian restaurant? When you calculate the required amount in this way, it will appear at first glance that this is possible and will only require eating an additional kg of food per day (2.9 kg). But a raw steak is simply the muscle of a cow and muscles are tough tissues. Chimpanzees tend to eat the soft parts of the body: blood, internal organs and brain. When they are required to deal with muscles they have to chew quite a lot. Godel, a pioneer in the study of chimpanzees in the wild, reports on an adult chimpanzee who devoted 9 whole hours to one meal of a baby baboon and even then his arms and legs remained intact. Another observation showed that after hunting a monkey weighing about 4 kg by a group of chimpanzees, it took 12 "chewing hours" together to swallow it. This means that the rate of absorption of calories from raw meat is no greater than 400 calories per hour: a portion of shawarma in a pita provides many more calories in a few minutes. The muscle is a bundle of fibers held together by a sticky protein called collagen. Cooking turns this collagen into gelatin (yes, the same substance that hardens the milky) and thus allows the muscle fibers to break down easily. Since our jaws and teeth are quite similar to those of a chimpanzee, it can be calculated that a raw eater would theoretically have to spend about 5 hours a day chewing meat: not exactly a daily routine that can be adhered to. The Inuit people in the far north: the only ones for whom raw meat is an important part of their menu (and even though the name Eskimo means "raw meat eater" they also cook) eat a lot of Blubber - a thick, high-fat insulation layer of marine mammals and not muscles. The raw meat for the Eskimos is not a preference but a constraint because it is the only source of vitamin C in the arctic environment. Game animals and even farm animals provide hard and fibrous meat that requires considerable jaw effort without cooking.

The conclusion of these calculations is far-reaching: the "natural" diet of man is a cooked diet, cooking is not only a social and cultural phenomenon but a basic biological characteristic of man. There is a heated debate among archaeologists about the time when man took control of fire, because the remains of a campfire bloom in the wind and do not leave remains that are easy to identify with certainty. The most recent date the first fire to 250,000 years ago, but there are those who advance the control of fire to about 2 million years, that is, to the first appearance of the "homo" species. From the moment our ancestors discovered cooking, we were expelled from the paradise of fruits eaten straight from the branch and the gates of the garden were locked behind us. Man began to take advantage of sources of life that were not available until then, such as roots and tubers, and the weaning age decreased when rich and soft food was found for children. An irreversible change took place in our biology: the brain grew and became a large consumer of energy, the jaws became smaller so that it is no longer possible to chew fibrous food quickly, the large intestine is smaller and can no longer handle a large amount of fiber and man has become dependent for his existence on food that is easy to digest and concentrated in nutritional values, that is, on cooked food .

The control of fire influenced our evolution

This transition to cooked food not only enabled our transformation from upright apes (Australopithecus) to man (gay) but also shaped this evolution. Fire control is perhaps the first example of "disruptive innovation", meaning a technology that provides great benefits at the price of giving up any alternative option. Collecting fuel in the East African Savannah and maintaining the fire requires a lot of energy and time. The investment is not worthwhile for one person or a very small group, control of fire therefore means a commitment to a relatively large, stable and coordinated group. When cooking is necessary, it is more difficult to be egoistic: the meat and the roots must be brought to the family or tribal campfire and agreed upon mechanisms of food distribution must be developed. The division of roles between the sexes became tougher when the task of tending the fire and cooking the food was added and this is perhaps one of the roots of the human family. The cooking pot is not only the eldest son of culture but to a large extent also the father of this culture.

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