Reddit mentions of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

the thesis of Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham is that the use of fire to cook food was such a large fitness advantage for the human ancestors that did it that it spurred evolution of larger brains and more advanced societies.

the crux of the argument is that cooked food is sufficiently easier to digest and yields more of its calories before being eliminated that bodies that are adapted to eating cooked food can afford much more metabolically expensive organs (like big brains).

Wrangham's idea is not universally accepted, but even if his hypothesis is not correct in the broad evolutionary sense that he argues it is, he is definitely correct in his evidence that cooked foods yields more calories.

so to answer the original question: if you consider the most important nutrient of the food (the calories) than cooking is of significant benefit to this nutrient. if you consider only certain specific vitamins that can be destroyed by heating then it is not a benefit. in any case eating an entirely raw diet would be a huge step backwards in terms of nutrition.

>cooking food is pretty tame

Tame enough to inspire books and a BBC series. There's a growing body of evidence that cooking meat is what allowed us to advance from the level of advanced primate to what we are. Without cooking, we quite possibly would still be flinging shit around at each other.

It's because if you accept the thesis that it was in fact cooking that turned us from homo erectus to homo sapiens, you would understand that the first people to try a cashew did NOT in fact try to eat it raw, but in fact threw it into the cooking fire like all the other food they were eating (cooked).

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/B004HEXSV8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1313724365&sr=8-3