Just to explain what I mean, why did mankind decide to cook their food. Monkeys, nor any other animal don’t do it, so why did humans decide to? Why is SLIGHTLY cooking it beneficial for us, while overcooking it isn’t?
In: Biology
Cooking weakens the bonds between some things, while overcooking breaks the bonds in the nutrients. It’s like toast in a way, bread is heated to cook more but not to become burnt
Adding heat breaks down fibres and tissues which makes it easier to digest.
It also makes the meat safer to eat, killing off pathogens etc.
Overcooking breaks down protein structures, along with other nutrients.
As for other animals: many of them love a cooked food, pet dogs pick cooked meat over raw often for example.
And wild animals opportunistically love cooked meats, eg after a fire the scavengers go mad for fresh kills. The problem is they lack the ability to make/control fire, which means they can’t go about cooking food by intent.
“Learning to control fire” was a significant moment in human history, but not because it gives warmth on a cold night. It’s because cooking meat starts to break down proteins, which in turn makes them easier to digest. once you’re digesting proteins, the organ that needs the most to develop (your brain) can ramp up.
Over cooking veg tends to result in leaching of the nutrients into whatever the cooking medium (e.g. water if you’re boiling it), as well as breaking down vitamins.
Cooking it makes it easier to digest, which means more nutrients while it passes through the digestive track, less stuff wasted
When you cook food you break down the molecules that the food is made of. This is also what the digestion system is doing with enzymes and acids. For example starch can not be absorbed into the blood stream by our intestines but we produce an enzyme that breaks down starch into sugar. However you can heat starch to make it break down into sugar. This is what you do when you boil potato, you can actually taste the difference in sweetness between a raw potato and a boiled potato, and you can even try chewing a raw potato for a while until it becomes sweet.
Overcooking however makes the molecules brake down too much. If you heat a potato a bit you convert the starch to sugar but if you heat it too much you convert the sugar into sot and charcoal. This have no nutritional value to us. So you need to find the happy medium between cooking it so much that you break down the starch into sugar and breaking down the sugar into less nutritional molecules. And of course you have different types of molecules like proteins and fat clusters. And you have membranes, both around cells and around organs, that will get broken down by heat giving access to the nutrition inside.
If you compare the human digestion system to that of other apes and indeed that of other animals our digestion system is quite simple. It even starts with our teeth being smaller because we do not have to spend a lot of time chewing food. We are one of the few animals with only one appendix for example and even our appendix is small compared to those in other animals. The ability to heat our food have changed how our digestion system have evolved.
I was on a grid-walk across a burn area once as a temporary laborer. We found a deer that had died in a brushfire, which was likely caused by lightning. It is not a stretch to imagine cave-people finding a similar animal and cutting the cooked meat off of it to carry. Then, noticing that the cooked meat does not spoil as fast as the raw meat, allowing it to last longer.
They likely also saw that there were no parasites in the cooked meat that had to be picked out, though of course, some parasite eggs are so small as to be unseen. Primitive minds make primitive conclusions.
>Monkeys, nor any other animal don’t do it, so why did humans decide to?
Because we can. Nutrients is a very broad word, but in general we’re talking about the building blocks that our bodies need. Most of these are trapped inside cells or other structures in the food we eat. So cooking food for the right amount of time helps to break down cell walls, and to some extent break down the nutrients into more easily absorbed components. But overcooking breaks the nutrients down even further to a point where they are unusable.
You pointed out that monkeys and other animals don’t cook their food, but you have to realize that wild primates spend 5 to 10 hours a day eating. Because their food isn’t cooked, it needs to be chewed much more thoroughly, and even then they absorb a lower percentage of the nutrients then they would from cooked food.
Cooking was probably the most important technological advancement in human history. It allowed humans to spend less time eating and more time doing all the other things that make us human.
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