For some of us, food is one of our favorite things, a little hint of pleasure in a difficult
and painful world…
But, c'mon, what's better?
Hot food or cold food?!
The debate rages on and on, hot or cold.
And this being viewer question Monday, VinylSnapz wanted to know "How come hot food tastes better
than cold or warm food?
Is it an evolutionary thing?"
Well Vinyl, yes, yes it is.
Some people are all like, "I can't cook, lol," but cooking is what allowed us to evolve these
huge brains which we enjoy today!
Yay, hot food!
Before the mastering of fire, ancient hominids ate cold food; they had no other choice!
Cold, uncooked food requires a lot more energy to digest.
Think about it this way: gorillas chew all day just break down food for digestion; pandas
eat for up to 16 hours a day; cows have four stomachs and have to regurgitate their cud
for chewing and swallow it again… yikes.
And, yes, these are all herbivores, but I'll get to that in a sec.
Plants are especially difficult to break down.
So, why don't we eat like gorillas?
Because we learned to break down food outside of our bodies.
We made it easier on ourselves.
Damn we're lazy, lazy like a fox!
Actually, foxes are carnivores…
so… anyway…
you get it.
We're smart and lazy.
In all the animal kingdom, humans are the best at off-loading our biological responsibilities.
We create tools to do things our fingers can't, we wear clothes to keep us warm, we craft,
build, invent and think our way around problems, but our first big breakthrough?
Cooking.
Two MILLION years ago, we were eating cold food all day errday, just like our primate
cousins, and then we got some fire and put the two together.
Homo Erectus started using fire to stay warm, ward off predators, forge weapons, allow for
more REM sleep and cook some tasty morsels.
Fire is an exothermic chemical reaction; it produces heat while chemically altering the
wood.
When that heat is applied to foods like grains or meats, it chemically alters the food, too
-- and in many cases, it does so to our benefit!
Rather than eating being all about chewing and the juices in our stomachs, cooking gave
us more bang for our bite, so to speak.
Two million evolutionary years later, we can no longer eat entirely raw or cold food as
our primate or carnivore cousins do, we don't have the guts!
LITERALLY.
See, carnivores can eat a large quantity of raw meat because they have stronger stomach
acids, and have a shorter intestinal tract.
All this evolved to harbor less bacteria, and reduce food-borne bacteria infection,
we don't have those evolutionary traits.
According to Rachel Carmody, Evolutionary Biologist at Harvard, fire gave us a biological
advantage because hot food has essentially been pre-digested!
When we heat something, we increase the number of calories available in the food, occasionally
at the expense of some of the nutrients.
By the time cooked food gets to the small intestine, we're sucking energy out of it
left and right.
This isn't just meats, it's also grains!
According to Carmody's studies, we get 30 percent more energy from cooked oats, wheat,
or potato than raw, and 78 percent more protein from eggs.
Other studies, too, found digestibility improvements: 10 percent in chickpeas and 90 in legumes
and starches.
Once we invented cooking, we didn't have to forage for food constantly, nor did we have
to sit around chewing all the time.
Because of that, we were able to evolve smaller guts and larger brains, then we began to solve
problems, explore the planet, build the internet, and deliver this video to you!
We've talked about this on DNews before!
When anthropologists and scientists flossed the teeth of neanderthals back in 2011, they
found cooked grains!
We've been at this for a while.
A study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B recently found chimps had learned to "cook"
food, though they'd actually, learned to prefer hot food given to them by researchers.
Though the point remains, even chimps know hot food is easier to eat!
So yes, VinylSnapz, we evolved to eat hot food.
So much so, that in one study of raw-food dieters, quote "half the women were malnourished"
and their bodies shut down menstruation, likely to prevent lost nutrients.
Cold or raw food takes SO much more energy for the modern human to digest!
That doesn't mean it's bad for you, though.
Hot food has more excited molecules which give off smells, and add flavors.
Scientists think taste evolved to keep us eating the things that were GOOD for us and
avoid poisons and rotten food, which taste bad.
Food packed with energy like meats, fish, nuts, berries, starches, and so on, taste
good, thus, we want to eat more.
When cooked, the molecules in the food are more excited, and volatile -- i.e. they fly
off into the air, and we smell them.
That makes food better too, and is probably why we like it served hot.
It's easier to digest, and it's more pleasing to the senses!
What do you prefer?
Hot or cold food?
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