From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue May 13 2003 - 10:33:36 MDT
Mike Lorrey wrote:
> --- gts <gts_2000@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> If I cannot in principle eat something raw then I think I should not
>> eat it in the first place. My ancestors did not cook foods until
>> fairly recently on the evolutionary time-scale. I inherited their
>> genes.
>
> I have to contest this. Cooking of foods dates back several
> tens of thousands of years. Dating of camp ash carbon is the
> primary means of establishing the historical provenance of
> anthropological fossils for the paleolithic period. Ten or
> twenty thousand years is plenty of time for evolution to adjust a
> digestive system.
Actually cooking almost certainly dates back further than 10-20 thousand
years, but in any case cooking is still recent relative to the ~4 million
year history of hominids.
If moderns were fully adapted to cooked foods then we would be fully adapted
to Advanced Glycation End-products (AGE's) and heterocyclic amines (HCA's),
both of which are produced when cooking meat at high temperature. The former
are implicated in many diseases and the latter are thought by some
researchers to be carcinogenic.
Life Extension Magazine ran an article this month about the dangers of AGE's
from cooked meats. See the thread called "eating glycotoxins" started a
couple of days ago by Brian.
Probably the bad effects of these compounds don't show up until late in
life, such that early consumers of cooked foods did not suffer the bad
effects due to their shorter life-expectancies. However long-lived moderns
like us are now faced with the consequences of eating these substances from
cooked foods to which we are not well adapted.
-gts
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