2011/9/26 <[email protected]>: > > Von: Terry Blanton <[email protected]> > >> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 4:38 AM, Jouni Valkonen <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> > But on the other >> > hand, how many really knows why do we even cook food instead of eating >> raw >> > food? Tastes better? >> >> Evolutionary, My dear Watson. Cooking food kills parasites and >> bacteria, a survival trait. >> > Not only that. Cooking cracks those cell membranes that the human digestion > system cannot crack. > It makes food digestible that otherwise is not digestible. >
This is more close to the correct answer. Cooking also denatures proteins and especially it gelatinizates the starch, I quote wikipaedia: «Starch becomes soluble in water when heated. The granules swell and burst, the semi-crystalline structure is lost and the smaller amylose molecules start leaching out of the granule, forming a network that holds water and increasing the mixture's viscosity. This process is called starch gelatinization. During cooking the starch becomes a paste and increases further in viscosity. During cooling or prolonged storage of the paste, the semi-crystalline structure partially recovers and the starch paste thickens, expelling water. This is mainly caused by the retrogradation of the amylose. This process is responsible for the hardening of bread or staling, and for the water layer on top of a starch gel (syneresis).» http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starch This increases the digestibility of of food by a lot. This is because the energetic cost of digestion will be reduced greatly, because we can come along with smaller gut and shorter chewing time, but also we can get much more energy from the food because we will get much higher digestion rates. It is not that humans are adapted for cooked food, but even a cat prefers her mouse rather cooked than raw, because it is more easy to digest. This is also why it is impossible to get fat by eating raw and unprocessed food, because the usable energy content of raw food is so low. As humans have been cooked food some few million years, they have become depended on cooked and processed food. Of course there is very tiny tiny gain that it kills some of the potential pathogens, but cooking process introduces quite a lot of poisonous and carcinogenous compounds, so we cannot be that sure are the pathogens more or less harmful than the poisonous compounds introduced by cooking. But what is important, both of them are irrelevant compared to easy digestibility of cooked food. –Jouni
