Yeah, this books makes the case against raw diets very well:

https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...

That's the thing with diets. There is a real well reasoned argument for and against most anything...

Does the book really present evidence that a raw diet is worse for human health than cooked food? From the table of content and introduction it seems to present a strong case that cooking affected human evolution. But that does not mean that it made humans healthier. For example, cooking could have made long-term health worse, but other benefits coming from increased food availability and shortening time to get it outweighed that.

It's not the main point of the book, but it does describe how it's very hard to live a healthy life on only raw food. I remember it pointing out that about half of women on such diets stop menstruating.

This is something our bodies do out of pretty desperate lack of nutrients, and it's of course devastating from an evolutionary standpoint.

The thesis of the book is that we've cooked food for so long that our digestive system is adapted to it. It even speculates that the shrunken digestive system made our bigger brains possible. All that is far from uncontroversial, but it's a well written and argued text.

You're the 4th or 5th person to recommend this book to me. Guess I have to read it now :)

Actually, I'm one of your previous in person recommenders (didn't notice the user name), so only 3rd or 4th :)

Still a really fascinating and well written book.

Cooking was probably man's greatest discovery, well before the wheel. Why negate all of that and join a culinary religion?

Remember the E. Coli epidemic in Hamburg a few years ago? It started from raw bean sprouts.

https://www.foodsafety.gov/keep/types/fruits/sprouts.html

>Remember the E. Coli epidemic in Hamburg a few years ago? It started from raw bean sprouts.

That's a hygiene problem not a culinary one.

I doubt that stir frying bean sprouts would be enough to sterilise them and surely no one cooks them any longer than that.

Used to eat a lot, mostly sprouted at home and we never took any special precautions, just normal domestic hygiene. Ate a lot of them raw too.

Of course I haven't tested either the internal temperature of a bean sprout during stir frying nor have I tried infecting one with E. Coli to see if the E. Coli is neutralised by stir frying. Perhaps someone with the necessary gear and expertise could try it.

Yup, cooking and increased animal protein/fat intake (aka eating more meat) are responsible for 2 most important evolutionary jumps in our history by increasing both availability of calories+protein and (in case of fire) reducing parasite load.

My opinion:

A little cooking is good for making things more digestible. Overcooking depletes nutrients.

I tend to like things like stir fry or similar high heat, short cook time approaches.

(No, I will not try to back this up with citations.)

Raw-diet adherents might not think in these terms, but I would suggest that many of the health benefits stem from the much poorer absorption of macronutrients from raw food. Which allows you to eat quite a lot (leaving you sated), but doesn't actually provide a lot of calories (though potentially lots of other nutrients, like folate, vitamins, minerals etc., though some are easier to extract from cooked food also) Or you could eat less cooked food...

Sorry, I threw in tubers after the fact, and didn't mean to imply that they should be eaten raw.

I used to date a girl who would snack on raw potatoes the way regular folks snack on apples.

juicing makes nutrients in vegetables more bio-available. Cooking destroys vitamins.