If you are reading this, you are human.
It appears that cooking played a very large part in our evolution due to enhanced nutrient availability and subsequent anatomical changes.
I have had multiple Raw Vegan chefs get agitated with me that I would not use their services for events I was hosting.
Sorry. I’m not sorry. Eat a mixture of raw and cooked foods and don’t be weird about it. (If you have digestive symptoms probably stick to mostly cooked vegetables).
“Ancestral humans underwent marked increases in body size and brain volume coupled with reductions in tooth and gut size beginning approximately 2 million years ago. These biological features indicate the consumption of an easier-to-digest diet with increased caloric density, and have been argued to reflect a heavier reliance on animal foods and improved methods of food processing, including cooking.
Cooking enhances nutrient digestibility and reduces diet-induced thermogenesis, thereby substantially increasing the energy gained from important hominin foods like meat and tubers.
Evidence that present-day humans cannot extract sufficient energy from uncooked wild diets, whether or not they include meat, has led to the suggestion that hunter-gatherers are biologically committed to these benefits of cooking, including the provision of sufficient energy to fuel an exceptionally large brain.”
-Carmody et al. 2016
For more on this topic check out the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Carmody RN, Dannemann M, Briggs AW, et al. Genetic Evidence of Human Adaptation to a Cooked Diet. Genome Biol Evol. 2016;8(4):1091-1103.
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