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Comment by lambdaba | Hacker News Reader

That nutritional availability may apply to plant matter (and not in all cases), but certainly not to meat, which likely was the major part of the diet.

On the contrary, cooking destroys enzymes and evaporates water-soluble vitamins.

Bacteria are also very useful for digestion and all meat is aged even today (obviously).

My take is that it was simply a chance discovery of enhanced taste.

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> meat, which likely was the major part of the diet

Countless evidence proves that meat always constituted a small fraction of human diet from the paleolithic.

Starch has always been the main staple food.

What is that evidence?

I just doesn't make sense to me, humans always were the most effective hunters and meat is much more nutritious than starch.

Starch was the staple after agriculture but the real staple was fruit and possibly small animals. Just look at chimps. Practically all cultures when they have the chance, prefer fruit. But even to this day a lot of people cannot afford them as a big component of their diet

But fruit as we know it isn't anything like most fruit available for our ancestors, most of them anyway. Much lower calorie and harder to access those calories.

But our past as successful hunters definitely has evidence, my favorite is our domestication of wolves.

> but certainly not to meat

Here is a study showing that cooked meat provides significantly more energy than raw meat.

https://www.pnas.org/content/108/48/19199

Mice study... But I'll give it a more thorough read anyway. Thanks.

I still am not convinced from my own experience, replying to another user I mentioned that when eating raw meat there is noticeably less residue, which would indicate more is assimilated.

What is the effect of heat on protein? Does it aid in making it easier to digest or does it have a negative impact on protein content and availability?

Well, I certainly don't see how burning the protein would make it more suitable for assimilation, I think it's a myth that's just been repeated without any evidence, if there is any I'm interested in hearing it, intuitively it doesn't make sense.

Fermentation & aging by bacteria on the other hand does breakdown meat and eases digestion, and it's a tradition all cultures have kept in some form, as evidenced by numerous dishes still consumed today.

"Burning" may not be the right word. Denaturing (i.e., the proteins losing their quaternary structure) may be what increases bio-availability

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