Cooked food gave us the most neurons in our brain - what's an argument against this? - Forum

Kelsey November 28, 2013 at 10:25am

I agree about the being healthy = growth and development but I think caloric sufficiency is a big contributing factor as well! :)

Fruit of Life November 28, 2013 at 10:06am

Unfortunately I am not educated enough on the topic to know for sure but I will share my thoughts. Ok what she is saying might be true. But how can cooking make us human? Didn't the human have to come first in order to discover the cooking? So in other words we must have evolved into humans first off of something which of course the only thing that would have been around before we came up with cooking is raw food. Also keep in mind the flaw in logic she is comparing how much time another primate would have to eat eating their diet to get the amount of calories needed for a human brain but the gorilla for example has A LOT more greens in their diet so of course it would take a tremendous amount of time eating to eat that much calories. She seems to be ignoring the fact that while yes we are primates we are still a different species and each species has a specific diet. While our diets can be similar to other primates I don't think they are identical. There is slight variations in the diets amongst all the different species of primates, so logically that would mean the human diet would be a different variation as well. So I think the difference with the human diet is it is a lot less greens and a lot more fruit, possibly exclusively fruit. So in my opinion it is fruit that created the human brain. I mean she said it would have taken over 9 hours of eating to eat 2000 calories, well I eat over 4000 calories a day of fruit and I don't spend 9 hours eating. Probably about three. Sometimes more. And to my understanding stimulating the brain is responsible for creating neurons. Contrary to popular belief humans still can actually still grow their brain even after reaching full adulthood by stimulating it, without increasing their daily caloric intake. So in other words someone eating 3000 calories who doesn't stimulate their brain won't grow neurons just by eating 3000 but another person eating 3000 calories who stimulates their brain will actually create more neurons in their brain then the other individual. Again I could be way wrong here but I do know for a fact that science has discovered we can regrow brain cells and it was once thought that was impossible.

TetrisKing November 28, 2013 at 9:33am

I hear this a lot.

I think most of these studies fail to recognise other environmental variables that were present at the time. Once fire was invented and humans began hunting and cooking, many things changed, let alone diet.

We were now predatory and had to use brain capacity to hunt and search for food. We never had to think about food before, it was all around us. But moving into climates with less available fruit forced us to take on another stress that we previously didn't worry about.

Increased social awareness, speech development, walking upright. These all require developments in brain function and increased neuro-capacity. We could have been eating anything to fuel these developments, it just happened to include cooked food.

I think it is silly to point out one factor and attribute it to brain development, but this is just me.

Kelsey November 28, 2013 at 8:52am

I'm not sure exactly but I know it takes lots of energy to grow brains bigger so actually cooking food (especially being able to eat starches) may have led to bigger brains in humans. That's not really a big argument against eating lots of fruit though :)

Matthias November 28, 2013 at 8:39am

I would recommend the book "left in the dark" to this topic (you can download it for free). It basicly say that our fruit diet in the tropical rainforest powered our brain developement and cooking changed the way our brain works.

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