De Vany's site is intersting.

De Vany:
>Cooking also degrades many of the toxins, antibiotics and hormones that infect
>animal sources of food.

It may also "upgrade" them instead--who knows? That whole issue is,
infortunately, pretty nebulous from what I can see.

>(Our small stomachs evolved along with our ability
>to use fire and other techniques to predigest food.

Stomachs don't leave fossils though, so how does one confirm such a statement?

>Fire may have been essential to the evolution of a large brain as it released expensive
>metabolic tissue in the stomach for our metabolically very expensive brain tissue.)

If cooking allowed more animal foods to be eaten (which is true for me
personally I find) and this is without detriment, then such a hypothesis
makes some sense. But I suspect that the increase in fat and protein intake
due to evolving hunting techniques (regardless of cooking) would be
sufficient to act synergistically (sp?) with brain size evolution.

I love the paleo-diet arguments, and have found conservative cooking not to
make much difference at all (so far at least) except as making animal foods
easier to eat. But every argument they come up with for _why_ cooking
doesn't matter falls short of rigor IMO. I'd love to understand a solid
reason why cooking is an improvement in general. There must be some
denaturing of proteins and fats happening over fire, no?

As usual, I'm more confused than enlightened ;)

Cheers,
Kirt