>From: "John Erickson" <[log in to unmask]>
>Why do so many people throughout the world
>prefer their food cooked?
John, this is a very tough one to answer, something I have often
wondered myself. The Yellow Emperor asked his wise man something
like 5000 years ago if it was true that in the old days men lived to
be 100, but now they live to only about half that age? The answer
was that in the old days people did not stay up all night drinking
(or e-mailing). This is sort of a question along a similar vein as
yours.
The best guess I can come up with is that cooking sort of predigests
the food, making the calories obtained seem easier to get than with
raw foods. But this is wrong in that it appears that you can get by
on about half the caloric intake by eating a raw diet as eating a
cooked diet. Maybe it is that cooking unquestionably denatures the
food & transforms it into much more toxic compounds, & that all
poisons are to some degree stimulating & that this stimulation is
what drives the desire for cooked.
--Doug Schwartz
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