# Does cooking change the effective calorie content of food? By how much? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 21, 2010, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-cooking-change-the-effective-calorie-content-of-food-by-how-much/564921 "2010-12-21T04:32:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![SCSimmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e495f1/32.png) [@SCSimmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCSimmons)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2010, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-cooking-change-the-effective-calorie-content-of-food-by-how-much/564921/21 "2010-12-22T22:58:03Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Richard Wrangham’s book, Catching Fire goes into some of this in a fair amount of detail. Here I will simply say that it is quite difficult for a human to get enough nutrition from raw food to even survive. Probably fruit is the principal exception. This suggests that we’ve been cooking for a long time and have lost adaptations to living on raw. IANAEB\*, but it seems really unlikely to me that mankind has been cooking food long enough for that to have evolutionary consequences. Looking at the geographical spread in the human fossil history, and the ranges and feeding behaviors of our nearest relatives, a simpler explanation is that our ancestors lived in areas where food that we could digest was plentiful. (Besides fruit–which the broken gene for vitamin C production suggests must have been a big part of our diet historically–insects, eggs, and certain types of meat and fish are clearly nutritionally valuable _sans_ cooking.) Our learning to harness fire was undoubtedly an early step in the process of expanding our range out of the tropical and subtropical zones into areas where edible raw food is less common. As well as in the process of eating less insects. \*I Am Not An Evolutionary Biologist [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-cooking-change-the-effective-calorie-content-of-food-by-how-much/564921.md?page=1)