Humans: The Cooking Ape, a lecture by Richard Wrangham

My left ear enjoyed this. Very nice talk.

Here is what I think might just add a really interesting dimension to the question of cooking and human evolution. In 2004, Hansel Stedman MD at U of Penn discovered a mutated gene in all humans (called MYH16) that really weakens that big jaw muscle that goes from the top of the cranium to the mandible. This is thought to allow the cranium to balloon into the comparative eggshell skull we all have. Now cooking would be a cultural adaptation that would significantly mitigate the cost of this mutation in terms of processing the diet, especially the meat increase that really helps support the energy cost of the growing brain. Look at "MYH16" in Wikipedia. I first learned of this mutation and the related ideas in a PBS Nova--either "what Darwin Never Knew" or "Becoming Human" I'll try to find this source, which features Stedman explaining his discovery.

My left ear also enjoyed this.

I'd really like to know how this lecture ends!

Very good lecture with insights I had never considered. What about processed meats such as bologna and salami?

We evolved in a volcanic rift valley. Seasonal wildfires must have exposed us to scavenged roast meat very early. Eurica! Prometheus gets it!

23:28 when you talk about calories in the food cooked vs raw you have to consider that the measuring process is essentially complete combustion so of course there is not going to be significant differences. The difference to a human is how many calories are available to that human after "human," not thermal digestion. Hands down, more human available energy after cooking.

BTW, I found Dr. Wrangham's insights really edifying, especially looking at the relative inefficiency of digesting this or that cooked or raw, and also the energy cost of the digestion itself. Wonder if Dr. Wrangham is aware of Steadman's work about how paleolithic cooking might have meshed with the cranium-releasing mutation in my previous post about MYH16.

please increase the volume.

I was thinking about how we learned to eat cooked food. Lighting fire on the plains of Africa , animals caught, cooked, as scavengers when we returned ,we ate the cooked animals, , liked cooked food, more energy and less time hunting for food. feeling of fullness.

Really quite ridiculous when you think of how far we have come with the tremendous quantum leaps of technological and asthetic innovations of chair production.

Yolk and albumin should be evaluated separately.

Small, blunt teeth are adapted well to eating cooked meat and fat? The cooking "predigests" difficult to digest foods such as meat.

The Cooked food increases the glucose spike in a human. This increases insulin levels. The higher your insulin levels the greater your storage of fat. Insulin plays a significant part in fat storage. The truth is that calories have nothing at all to with deriving energy from food. Calories are heat, which cannot be eaten, cannot be burnt and are mass less. It's all about mass. Mass in mass out. Mass in the form of carbs, protein, and fats. When one loses body fat where does it go? Its oxidized to co2 and water. MASS out. We also release ketones, sweat, urine, poop, tears. Etc. Its mass not calories. If one takes a 1 liter of weighed water on a set of scales then boils it. After which its left to cool down at room temp..say 20 degrees celcius. You will find that the weight remains the same. However its lost 80kcal. This proves that calories have nothing to with weight. Hormones like leptin, grehlin and cortisol, insulin play a big role in body composition. Calories have never ever been the problem. Its mass.

There's kind of a contradiction here. On the one hand, he says the main purpose of cooking is to soften the food and that the softer the food, the easier the digestion and hence the more calories harvested. Yet a raw foods diet is comprised mainly of soft, ripe fruits and vegetables and most of the time the staple is bananas (very soft). And he implies raw foodists don't get enough calories, even though their food is quite soft. So the softness of the food may actually be the deciding factor of how many calories are absorbed from what we eat, not whether the food is actually cooked or not.

in order to eat meat what ! ? 1:00:55

If one could die during the tediously long introduction the transition from life to death would be imperceptible.

Cooking vegetables most important.. it help consume lot of fibers and that lead to diversity of microbiome .. it is microbiome made human a intelligent animal.. meat is good protein but eat mammal meat very dangerous for human .. it lead to iron overload , inflammation..

Starts at 4:00.

of course its difficult to resist the smell of a pizza. because its a hyperstimulus. and that, via strange inversion of reasoning, is because our brain evolved to prefer high energy foods. and also because pizza is god's greatest gift to humanity.