Alex Shvartsman wrote:
>
> Just follow your nose:
>
> I would bet that most humans presented with the smell of fire roasted meat or
> raw meat would find the cooked variety will make their mouth water. No, I did
> not do double blind studies or read an experiment of this sort, just personal
> experience.

Dogs, wolves, raccoons, coyotes, bears, all love the small
and taste of cooked meat. At least, trappers use cooked meat
as a lure to bring predators into the trap. I am sure Alex
has got it here. Any predator that managed to learn to
control fire would begin cooking meat soon after, regardless
of whether it was more or less nutricious. If we left candy
bars lying around the forest, monkeys would eat them.

The next question is, have we been doing it long enough to
have adapted to it. And have we adapted AWAY from raw meat
and foods. My personal belief is yes, to both questions.
Look at the foods a chimpanzee eats. We can't eat much of
it, the fruits are too bitter, sour, or astringent. They
literally burn our mouths and stomachs. The other plants are
too tough for our weak jaws to chew or our short, simple
guts to digest. Chimps love to eat whole oranges, skin and
all. Try it sometime!

Meat remains perfectly digestible raw, because it is so
easily digestible. But have we eaten cooked meat so many
generations that we have adapted to this too? I think so.
Our stomach acid is weak compared to other predators. We
have less natural defense against parasites and microbes.
Our defenses are cultural, not just physical. Fire was
perhaps the first cultural defense against disease.

More recent cultural defenses include things like forks and
chop-sticks. Our fingers, even our modern day sanitised
fingers, are filthy with germs, especially fecal germs.
Dirty fingers are the main way parasite eggs are passed from
person to person, and also reingested. Use of silverware
helps to short circuit this natural process.

Individually we can go against any of these cultural
defenses and maybe not have much trouble. We can eat raw
foods, taking a small increased risk. But it certainly isn't
any more natural than eating cooked foods. More UNnatural I
guess, given that our species didn't even exist yet when
remote ancestors began cooking. It would be very tough for
us now to find enough edible raw foods in nature, except
meat.

I guess cooking raised the odds for certain diseases of old
age, cancer and whatnot, but raw eating raises the odds of
other troubles, trichinosis, tapeworms, roundworms, wire
worms, whip worms and things like that. Choose your poison!  ;--)