[AndrewKemendo]

“By means of some 90 models of Eskimo teeth, Dr. Adelbert Fernald, Curator of the Harvard Dental School Museum, has proved that eating a strictly meat diet is the ideal way in which to keep the human mouth in a healthy condition, and that it is due to the fact that civilized people do not eat enough meat that they as a rule have decayed teeth.” - Harvard Crimson (1929) [1]*

The neolithic flip completely upended the world of Homo-Sapiens such that majority of modern humans come from the bottlnecked group of 10-100k sapiens that left Africa, interbred with Neanderthal and developed the structural heirarchical systems that dominate the world now.

Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.

*Notable that the student newspaper from 1929 is better science reporting than any news outlet today

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1929/1/29/esquimo-teeth-p...

[hombre_fatal]

Someone's claim in a 1929 blog satisfies your epistemic standards?

Most ancient mummies also have atherosclerosis.

Fortunately we can run the test today to see what causes these things, not regress to story-telling about what might be true because we want to believe it.

"Coherent with our biology" is just going to cash out into yet more story-telling over evidence.

[AndrewKemendo]

No the in depth multi year longitudinal reference study on the inuit that was referenced meets my standards

[Daishiman]

> Almost no humans today eat, cohabitate, socialize, “work” or play in a way that is coherent with our biology.

We have adaptations for lactose tolerance that emerged in the fast few thousand years. Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.

We are, in fact, quite well adapted to the society that we've built, certainly much more so than peoples who had to spend a good chunk of their life just looking for food and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>Our extremely energy-intensive brains can only be fed because we pre-digest our meals through fire.

The exception being animal derived foods. ( eggs, meat, fish, milk etc.). These food can be raw, and will still reliably fuel the brain.

[adrian_b]

This is correct.

Heat treatment of animal food has benefits, like killing parasites, softening meat enough for weak human teeth, extracting proteins from bones through boiling, or denaturating harmful proteins, like those from egg whites, but it has little importance for digestibility.

In general, heat treatment is not useful for fatty substances and it is seldom useful for proteins. Heat treatment is important mainly for making starch digestible and for releasing various components of vegetable cells that would otherwise require much more chewing or much more fermentation time in the guts than possible for humans.

[Daishiman]

And yet we've been using fire to cook food for much longer than most of the recognizable homo sapiens features emerged, so no, we weren't eating raw food.