Cooking predigests food. It gelatinizes starch, almost doubling its digestible energy. It denatures proteins, increasing the energy available from eating an egg or a steak by 40 per cent or so. It is like having an external extra stomach. Cooking therefore explains why we have small teeth, small stomachs and a gut that is only a little over half as big as in other apes, relative to our body weight. This small gut costs us less to run – 10 per cent less energy is burned by people just keeping the alimentary canal alive, compared with other apes. So the cooking fire not only provides us with
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