Raw food

Several months ago, I read a fascinating book by Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. In one of those mysterious little coincidences the universe occasionally throws at us, the very next book I read was Cooked, by Michael Pollan, who cites Wrangham's research extensively in his first chapter.

Safe in the knowledge that this blog is far too obscure for Professor Wrangham to ever read it and suffer horror or outrage at the way I'm about to mangle his thesis, I'll do my best to summarize the key point of interest from a weight loss perspective.

gazpacho is raw

Wrangham makes a compelling case that the practice of eating cooked food was the key adaptation that enabled the evolution of homo sapiens.  Calories from cooked food are more efficiently absorbed and utilized by the body, thereby freeing energy for the development of the brain. In a nutshell. Wrangham notes that even modern humans, who benefit from technology such as blenders that eliminate the work of chewing, have difficulty consuming enough calories on a raw food diet to maintain their weight.

Hmmm. So, if a person wants to lose weight, eating more raw foods might be the way to go? Professor Wrangham doesn't say so (not his area of concern), but other researchers have made that recommendation.

Anyone contemplating a raw foods diet should research it diligently, and by that I mean gathering more information than the introduction chapter of a celebrity's raw foods cookbook. Many physicians and nutritionists praise the diet for its emphasize on vegetables but caution that adherents are likely to miss important nutrients.

Eliminating a food group -- or an entire category of food (cooked) -- when it isn't warranted by a medical or ethical concern is usually unsustainable and, in some cases, may cause adverse health effects. But simply increasing the proportion of raw foods in your diet could be very effective for weight loss without risking nutritional deficiencies.