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> Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology. We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that
by Daishiman 2y ago
> Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.
We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that emerged in the fast few thousand years. Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.
We are, in fact, quite well adapted to the society that we've built, certainly much more so than peoples who had to spend a good chunk of their life just looking for food and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago>Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire. The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.
- adrian_b 2y agoThis is correct. Heat treatment of animal food has benefits, like killing parasites, softening meat enough for weak human teeth, extracting proteins from bones through boiling, or denaturating harmful proteins, like those from egg whites, but it has little importance for digestibility. In general, heat treatment is not useful for fatty substances and it is seldom useful for proteins. Heat treatment is important mainly for making starch digestible and for releasing various components of vegetable cells that would otherwise require much more chewing or much more fermentation time in the guts than possible for humans.
- Daishiman 2y agoAnd yet we've been using fire to cook food for much longer than most of the recognizable homo sapiens features emerged, so no, we weren't eating raw food.