The subject of body weight can get to be important as one ages. Some of my friends are finding their weight keeps falling while others don't like to be as heavy as they are. I am reading "Catching Fire" by Richard Wrangham. It is about the place of cooking in human evolution. The usual criticism of focusing on cooking is that food contains a given amount of energy and cooking doesn't change that. But more and more, researchers and scientists are focusing not on how much energy is in an apple but instead on the question of how much energy the digestive system extracts from eating an apple.
I am not very far along in the book but it is clear that a diet of only raw food gives the eater fewer calories into the body than one of cooked food. The author is a professor of anthropology at Harvard. He has tried doing what chimps do: eat monkeys raw that the chimps have caught and killed. He reports that eating raw meat is hard to do. Personally, I am not interested in eating or even having a single bite of raw meat. I know that steak tartare is popular in some places at times but I am not interested.
"Catching Fire" is about the effect on human diet, nutrition and eventually on human development and evolution from cooking. The evidence cited so far in the book makes it clear that in just about any circumstance, cooking food causes more of its nutritional value to be transferred into the human body. Modern experiments eating raw food steadily show weight loss, even to the point that women get so thin that they stop menstruating. So, weight loss? Eat raw. But, not meat, ok?
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