Cooking and the Brain
There is a theory that cooking food actually made humans smarter.
That’s the thought according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham. I remember reading that years ago when I visited the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. I found this extremely interesting and have always wanted to learn more about our brain development over the millenia.
At some point in our history, Homo Erectus learned to cook when someone discovered fire, although we don’t really know when that was. It could have been 300,000 to 400,000 years ago - while scientists think campfires were made nearly a million years ago.
What is clear is that a shift was beginning when that happened. Not only were we going from a raw food diet to a cooked food diet, but we were making cultural improvements as well.
It was a slow shift. But it seems that cooking caused the human brain to double in size over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. (Similarly sized primates - gorillas, chimps and other apes, all of which continued to subsist on a diet of raw food - did not). The reason for this is that larger brains require more calories to fuel them. A raw food diet does not provide enough calories to sustain brain growth like that.
Foraging for our food required a lot of time. Sometimes 9-10 hours per day. We had to graze a lot because we were always hungry. And we were spending a lot of time chewing. Raw stuff requires a lot of breaking down of cellulose and fibrous materials. If you’ve ever eaten a salad, you know what I mean! The chewing is endless.
When someone decided to put a steak and some veggies on the barbeque, we obviously liked it well enough to do it again and again. Aside from improving the taste, cooking alters the meat itself. It breaks up the long chains of protein and makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. Muscle and skin are made up of protein and collagen and those are very hard to digest. But heating them solves that problem. Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits, such as killing pathogens on food. Even veggies, when cooked, are made easier to digest because their tough starch granules are broken down.
In the end, you get more energy out of cooked food. The reason this is important is that we can only extract about 40-60% of the nutrients we need from raw food. But when food is cooked, we can extract nearly 100%. And the brain needs a lot of calories to function. To critically think, to plan, to develop language. When we started cooking our food, we were taking in the calories we needed to grow bigger brains.
And spending less time foraging for food allowed us more time for socializing and to be engaged in pursuits that required thought, planning and language. Therefore, cooking our food made for better taste, better nutrition and higher caloric intake, which led to bigger brains, as well as a radical improvement in our development.
If our brains literally changed because of our diet, I can’t help but be reminded of the power of food. What we eat has a serious impact on our body. We should take care to treat it the best way we can.
