Machines that eat for us

[ProteusOne]

I'm currently reading Gary Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories, recommended to me by Nancy.

Despite its unassuming title, it has turned out to be a great, almost academic read. And I am enjoying it and learning (and relearning) much.

One thing I noticed in the Prologue was the following:

...these "diseases of civilization" were rare to nonexistent among isolate populations that lived traditional lifestyles and ate traditional diets, and that these diseases appeared in these populations only after they were exposed to Western foods - in particular, sugar, flour, white rice, and maybe beer. These are known technically as refined carbohydrates, which are those carbohydrate-containing foods - usually sugars and starches - that have been machine-processed to make them more easily digestible.

"Machine-processed to make them more digestible."

This is what caught my eye, and we've expounded on this idea before. If you think about it, any tool that lets you eat a particular food, any food, en masse, is really doing the first step of the digestion process for you. And really, is this a good thing?

I mean, using a rock to break open a seed or nut one at a time is one thing; using machinery to process these raw foodstuffs so that we can eat gobs of it in one sitting is quite another. Too much of any of it CANNOT be a good thing. And I'm not just talking about the ordinary villans - grains, etc.

Thoughts?

[Nancy LC]

Good observation! I really like that. It is sort of like we've turned over part of the digestion process to machines.

[kallyn]

Cooking makes things more digestible, too, but I don't see cooking as a bad thing.

Not sure where I stand on the machine thing.

[ProteusOne]

Does anyone know of any evidence of this? I suppose it ties into the whole nutrition availability thing as well.

I tend toward eating raw veggies, nuts, and fruit, but I'd like to know more about it. I mean if things are much more nutritious for us when they're processed, then why not just juice and puree everything?

[kallyn]

Do you mean evidence of cooking making food more digestible, or evidence that cooking isn't bad?

Here's a paper about cooking being linked to human evolution:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15190799 "Cooking as a Biological Trait"

http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/gfc.2005.5.1.29 "The Cooking Ape," an interview with anthropologist Richard Wrangham (big name in this field)

..and "The Cooking Ape" mentions cooking providing more calories than raw eating for expensive organs like the brain, which reminds me of this paper: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0100-84551997000100023&script=sci_arttext "The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis"

Raw vegans do juice and puree almost everything, or they'd never get enough calories to sustain themselves.

[kallyn]

Oh, and I wanted to add I think that cooking is an adaptation that we made that directly led to our big brains and to being the species we are today. Your body only has a certain amount of energy it can produce without running too hot to sustain enzyme activity/life, and both brains and digestive systems are very metabolically expensive organs. You can't have a big gut and a big brain. Cooking food and therefore concentrating it and somewhat predigesting it let our digestive systems get smaller so our brains could get bigger. It also started adapting food to us instead of natural selection taking forever and a day to adapt us to the food, allowing us to take advantage of a much wider range of food than any other creature.

Anyway, just my $0.02.

[mike_d]

I was eating at a friends house and I pointed out the wheat bread got its brown color from molasses-- not whole grains and the ingredient list was as long as a page in a paperback book. He remarked "really?" then I started on an explanation of HFCS.

They were gobbling pepperoni pizza later in the day, I had some pizza topping and explained to them the crust is what causes the heartburn and acid indigestion. I really think its due not only to the processed flours but this "dough conditioner."

[Legeon]

Pots, pans, trenches dug and filled with coals, pickling barrels, etc are all like external stomachs. Birds swallow stones to make up for the teeth they don't have, we make tools and cook. It seems pretty vital to me as our bodies are now, the good or bad part depends on your point of view.

[Nancy LC]

Well, I think the point he was making that we strip all parts of the food away and make stuff like corn flakes are made of. In Omnivore's dilemma he describes how corn is process. It truly is half digested by the time you eat it.

[PlaneCrazy]

Mass production, by itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Just because it's done by hand, doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing. I do woodworking as a hobby and only use hand tools, that (definitely) does not mean my furniture is better than someone with a fully-powered shop. It all depends on what you put into the process and how you process it.

The way we've processed some foods, like making white flour, white rice, white sugar, strips away any amount of value in that food, and there wasn't a lot to begin with. Some foods we have to process to make edible. Corn has little nutritional value to humans without processing of some kind. Some, we process to allow us to get more value more easily, like cooking meat. We also age meat before we eat it, as that makes the flavor better and helps tenderize it.

My point is that those foods that require less processing and retain more nutritional value after processing seem, if you can make any generalizations, to be better for us. It all comes down to garbage in, garbage out, or good in and bad process equals garbage out.

And I do agree to a certain degree with your point, mass processing does allow us to eat much greater degree of garbage than we use to when we were reducing to gathering little seeds from wild plants to thicken a stew (like the first uses of wild barley). That was tedious and time-consuming, so we didn't do too much of it. When it comes to us already hulled, bleached and ground in five-pound bags, it's a whole different story.

Plane

[jono]

Does cooking meat make it more digestible? I started eating raw organic grass fed beef yesterday... its very tasty and seems to digest easily.

They were gobbling pepperoni pizza later in the day, I had some pizza topping and explained to them the crust is what causes the heartburn and acid indigestion. I really think its due not only to the processed flours but this "dough conditioner."

Mike, I think the heartburn is caused not by the carbs, but the combination of cheese/meat with carbs. High-protein foods require an acidic stomach to digest, while carbs require alkaline dependent enzymes. Combine the two and the stomach pH is intermediate and not optimal for either food... the result is fermentation of the sugars leading to gas and heartburn.

Heartburn results when the stomach gas forces open the esophageal sphincter and allows stomach contents to pass through. I used to have really bad heartburn, but when I started eating carbs and high-protein foods separately the heartburn completely went away.

[Nancy LC]

Dough conditioners are nothing mysterious for home cooks. It's adding in oil and gluten or perhaps extra egg to make the dough stretchier, or softer. Not healthy from the paleo perspective but not some horrible concoction dreamed up by Dr. No.

[TheCaveman]

Here's a paper about cooking being linked to human evolution:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15190799 "Cooking as a Biological Trait"

http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/gfc.2005.5.1.29 "The Cooking Ape," an interview with anthropologist Richard Wrangham (big name in this field)

..and "The Cooking Ape" mentions cooking providing more calories than raw eating for expensive organs like the brain, which reminds me of this paper: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0100-84551997000100023&script=sci_arttext "The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis"

You'll see that Wrangham doesn't have any evidence to support his hypothesis, and unfortunately so. All of the biological changes he mentions can all be easily explained by other things that we DO have evidence for, so I'm not sure why he thinks we need a cooking hypothesis.

It is said that the strength of a scientific theory is measured by how many things the theory explains, mitigated by how many things the theory presumes. Wrangham has to presume that use of fire meant cooking, as there is no evidence that cooking self-evidently followed controlled use of fire.

I can't figure out why he bothers to pose this hypothesis. Hrm, he continually claims that raw meat is hard to eat. Now, I don't know his dietary habits, but I'm guessing that I've eaten FAR more raw meat than he has. I'll bet a buck that he's NEVER eaten raw meat. Raw meat is not hard to eat. Cooked meat may be easier to eat, but I can put down a couple pounds of raw meat a day, and I've never really thought of raw meat as hard to chew.

When asked about his reasons for posing a cooking hypothesis, he responded very generally, about scientific inquiry and the spirit of academic research. It might have been the right answer, but it didn't answer our question of what questions a cooking hypothesis was meant to answer.

Wrangham is a big name in this field, if only because it is a very small field. He seems to have abandoned his work in this area, anyhow.

This said, I am a Wrangham fan! I think he's wasting our time with the cooking nonsense. But. He wrote a book called Demonic Males, one of my favorites. I definitely liked him better when he was projecting chimp behavior onto humans. Despite the name, no woman I know has ever liked this book. He got nailed to the wall after publishing that book, and probably got just as nailed with the cooking ape idea. Poor guy, he can't seem to break out of primatology (a dying field) for the life of him.

Anyhow, I read a book in high school called Overshoot by William Catton. If there is a non-diet book for those paleos with an apocalyptic leaning, THIS IS IT. If you have even a small suspicion that civilization's time is coming to an end, Overshoot is a must-read.

Besides being deeply depressed for a month after reading it, I remember that Catton called humans a "prosthetic species". That we can make tools for ourselves that help us to get more energy. From the rock that busts open the nut, to the computer that runs stochastic analysis on geologic data to find more natural gas to turn into fertilizer to put on cornfields.

Catton noted that our prosthesis extends even to other people, like slaves doing our work for us. Anyway, "prosthetic species"; more energy.

[kallyn]

Wrangham is a big name in this field, if only because it is a very small field.

It is small, which is a shame. If the timing works out I'm actually hoping to get into a PhD program studying this kind of stuff. We need to get more people interested in pursuing evolutionary nutrition in a rigourous academic setting or we'll all just sit around BSing on messageboards for the rest of our lives!


Anyhow, I read a book in high school called Overshoot by William Catton. If there is a non-diet book for those paleos with an apocalyptic leaning, THIS IS IT. If you have even a small suspicion that civilization's time is coming to an end, Overshoot is a must-read.

Ugh, I get depressed enough reading about peak oil. I probably won't be able to help myself reading this now that you've mentioned it, though.