In the 1990s, 513 people in Germany ate only raw food for years, in a country full of supermarkets. A third of the women under 45 stopped menstruating.
Every other animal on Earth eats its food raw. You can’t. This is the trade your body made, and why there is no way back.
Chimpanzees live on raw vegetation and spend half the day chewing. Early humans started processing food with tools and heat, and the body adapted. It was not free: we traded away the ability to digest huge amounts of raw fibre for the dense calories of cooked meals. The gut shrank. The brain grew. That trade is why your digestive system is no longer built for a raw diet.
In this video:
– The Giessen Raw Food Study (1999): 513 long-term raw foodists, weight loss and lost fertility
– The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis (Aiello & Wheeler, 1995): a smaller gut paid for a bigger brain
– Harvard, 2016 (Zink & Lieberman): slicing and pounding food cut the work of chewing
– Harvard, 2011 (Carmody): mice on cooked food gained more weight from the same calories
– Red kidney beans, cassava and how heat removes poison
– Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa: ash and burnt bone around one million years old
– Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel: cooked fish from 780,000 years ago
0:00 The trade your body made
0:27 The raw food experiment
1:46 Every other animal eats raw
2:17 A day in the life of a chimpanzee
3:29 The expensive brain
4:29 Why your face got smaller
5:08 The mouse experiment
6:02 Fire removes poison
6:51 Fire changed the night
7:39 The free afternoon
8:06 No way back
8:36 When did it start?
10:34 The lever is still being pulled
11:20 The fire that never went out
What part of our evolutionary history surprised you most? And what do you think came first: the fire, or the smaller gut?
#humanevolution #evolution #cooking
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