Interesting Theory: Why Fire Makes Us Human

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Originally Posted by Sannyasi

I don't see how someone could could starve to death while eating the recommended 2000 calories a day. This is very interesting if its true, but it seems to go against everything I have been taught about nutrition.

Yeah it surprised me too. From the article:

"Carmody explains that only a fraction of the calories in raw starch and protein are absorbed by the body directly via the small intestine. The remainder passes into the large bowel, where it is broken down by that organ’s ravenous population of microbes, which consume the lion’s share for themselves. Cooked food, by contrast, is mostly digested by the time it enters the colon; for the same amount of calories ingested, the body gets roughly 30 percent more energy from cooked oat, wheat or potato starch as compared to raw, and as much as 78 percent from the protein in an egg. In Carmody’s experiments, animals given cooked food gain more weight than animals fed the same amount of raw food. And once they’ve been fed on cooked food, mice, at least, seemed to prefer it."