Actually it's a very poor, hopelessly inadequate comparison. For while modern technology may well have  lowered  the chance of pedestrians dying in a car-crash, modern technology has actually made foods far more deadly to modern humans  by adding trans-fats, preservatives/chemicals, adding pollutants via barbecuing meats, increasing the harm done to foods by vastly increasing the average temperature of cooking by the introduction of frying/grilling etc. technology etc. etc.

 

Re cooking/geneticists:-   unfortunately, you're wrong re this point. If you look at beyondveg.com's site they show a timeline clearly indicating that it took millions of years for major shifts in dietary patterns among ancient hominids(wild animals of other species are no different):-

 

http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview1c.shtml

 

 

(beyondveg.com is a rabidly anti-raw site, so you can't claim bias for that site).

Re comment :- "If you eat something you're only partially adapted to, but it doesn't kill  
you outright, you'll live to reproduce.  No adaptation necessary.  Your  
genes don't care if you live life to the fullest, they only care that you  
replicate."

 

Ironically, I previously used the above argument to counter a common illogical  point made by several cooked-food-advocates in the past. One claim they love to make is that if cooking is harmful, why are we all still alive, as if it were harmful we should all be dead, long ago, from natural selection - ergo, cooking must be beneficial to humans. 

I pointed out the obvious, that they had made a completely false conclusion - that, as long as most humans survived to the point where at least some of them could pass on their genes, a harmful diet wouldn't affect their survival, genewise, as long as most of the harm done to them occurred after the age of 20 or so. Given that many harmful practices(such as smoking or eating cooked-food) usually affect people, to a particular extent, as they reach the age of 40 or above, well after the age of procreation, that makes it clear that partial adaptation isn't even required just as long as the harm of cooked-foods isn't immediately fatal.

 

 

 

Another point to consider, is that hunter-gatherers in the past would routinely eat large parts of their animal foods raw, particularly the organs.  Therefore, to some extent, they would have been protected, in Palaeo times, from the harmful effects of the cooked foods they were eating. Plus, Palaeo cavemen didn't go in for fried meats etc. , so the cooked-food they ate was generally only lightly boiled(in water - cooking in water, incidentally, reduces , to some extent, the amounts of heat-created toxins that inevitably occur during the process of cooking).

 

As regards the silly claims made by Wrangham etc. re the so-called benefits of coooking, mostly all they do is rehash the usual absurd hysteria re bacteria and parasites. Then they claim that cooking somehow improves the digestibility of foods. Yes, if one is thinking of highly unnatural non-Palaeo foods like grains, rice, legumes etc., but digestibility of meats is reduced by cooking. Unfortunately, the very process of cooking also introduces heat-created toxins in sizeable amounts so that the benefit is easily cancelled out by the disadvantage, and that's not even taking into account the negative effects from  the general unhealthiness of such non-Palaeo foods, whether raw or cooked.

 

The other Wrangham claim re cooked-food and brain-size has already been frequently debunked in the various threads I showed plus by numerous anthropologists as they favour the meat-DHA theory re increased brain-size given the much greater amount of data supporting it.

 

The only other one I can think of from the pro-cooked-camp is the notion that cooked-food was somehow needed for warmth, so was first invented in more northerly climes. This absurd theory is easily discounted as Arctic tribes like the Inuit and the Nenets routinely eat large amounts of raw animal food in their diet.

 

I personally like one of the rawist theories which points out how opiates exist not only in dairy and grains, but in all cooked-foods, and that these opioids/opiates are highly addictive causing cravings for those harmful foods. That would certainly be a better explanation for humans turning to cooked food diets, than any of the above theories. After all, initally, there was no real reason for humans to turn away from raw foods, as wild animals do quite well on their natural, raw foods and have done so for millions of years.

 

Geoff



 
> Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 10:25:30 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: 1. "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> On Fri, 15 May 2009 04:58:43 -0500, Geoffrey Purcell 
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Since, clearly, cooked foods do harm humans(with greater
> > harm done as the cooking temperature increases), it is quite safe to 
> > state that humans are not fully adapted to cooked foods, and that cooked 
> > foods are not natural.
> 
> Replace "cooking" with any modern technology and you can make the same 
> argument. For example:
> 
> Since, clearly, automobiles do harm humans (with greater harm done as the 
> speed of the crash increases), it is quite safe to state that humans are 
> not fully adapted to automobiles, and that automobiles are not natural.
> 
> Obviously, the benefits of rapid movement and vastly increased 
> load-bearing capacity with much less effort have outweighed the risks of 
> dying in a car crash. Maybe cooking is the same way -- the benefits 
> outweigh the risks.
> 
> > Besides, geneticists have claimed that it takes c.1 million years for 
> > wild animals to adapt to quite different(raw) foods(our hominid 
> > ancestors also took millions of years to change from fruit to meat etc.) 
> > Since cooked foods are so radically different from raw foods, it's quite 
> > likely that it's impossible to fully adapt to them, ever.
> 
> I doubt that. Evolution can, and does, happen much more rapidly. The 
> biggest problem human adaptation has is that people don't die anymore. If 
> you get sick, you take drugs, get surgery, whatever -- and you keep 
> going. You don't eat a bad piece of meat and die (at least not usually). 
> If you eat something you're only partially adapted to, but it doesn't kill 
> you outright, you'll live to reproduce. No adaptation necessary. Your 
> genes don't care if you live life to the fullest, they only care that you 
> replicate.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Robert Kesterson
> [log in to unmask]

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