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How Food Influenced Human Evolution

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Allen Shepard
How Food Influenced Human Evolution

Grilling is a way of cooking meats and vegetables with dry heat, usually over an open flame. Humans have been depending on grilling for thousands of years for sustenance in the face of tough weather. Cooks found that skewers made of wood had fat leached out by the heat, flavoring their food. Grilled food seems to taste better overall.

The advantages of cooking food are endless. Not only does it keep us from having to search through the forest for meat, but cooking also helps clean certain bugs out of wild meats and makes things safe for consumption. Cooking created a lot of nutrient-rich substances in the form of vitamin-A and vitamin-C due to all the nutrients released when burning food at high temperature in its natural habitat.

This is the main reason people love to barbecue. It means less cooking time, and of course, it makes everything taste better. Should you be alarmed by this information? Not at all. There are significant health benefits to eating food cooked with or over an open flame. The cooking process slowly breaks down proteins, fats, and carbohydrates into simpler forms that your body can break down more easily than eat without any, because you're getting fewer chemicals from high heat sources that are transformed when cooked.

Chimpanzees are arguably as smart (if not smarter) as humans when it comes to understanding some of the basics of communication, but they have one significant disadvantage: cooking. Chimps can't control fire. And for those reasons, they were doomed to eating raw meat, and there were a lot of diseases that come along with that. They are our closest relatives in terms of evolution—so much so that we share 96 percent of their DNA profile with them.

People's love for grilling is rooted in the primal instinct of cooking meat. In fact, it's what experts believe propelled humans to do what they did. This food preparation was significant because early humans began cooking with fire and mastering it so that they could have a steady supply of meat for nourishing themselves.

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Allen Shepard
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