COO

I watched Horizon on BBC2 tonight.
It was about food and cooking.

A couple of the experiments stood out.
Firstly a human could not eat enough raw food to be able to extract sufficient day to day energy.
Secondly if mice were given cooked yams to the same weight as raw, they could trundle the exercise wheel far further and put on weight.

This tends to suggest, logically to me, that cooking is a pre digestion activity.

So the act of cooking, along with processing, makes the food more digestible, taste better and make many toxins safe.
As we throw so much food away it could also explain the dramatic rise in the urban fox population.

To calculate the amount of calories in food, it is burnt and the energy released is measured.
Cooking food does not add calories to food.

So could it be that it is not the amount of calories contained in a sample of food that is the problem.
But the quantity of energy derived by the body from food, that causes you to get fat??

Also as we have been cooking food for such a long time it may well explain why our gut is too short to be vegetarian and too long to be carnivore?

Les