# Does hot/cold food have any effect on our stomachs **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 13, 2019, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-hot-cold-food-have-any-effect-on-our-stomachs/844790 "2019-12-13T03:40:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2019, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-hot-cold-food-have-any-effect-on-our-stomachs/844790/22 "2019-12-16T15:31:55Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > The short and simplified version is that humans evolved from tree-dwelling creatures who used to come down from the trees to scavenge nearby large kills left by bigger predators Hey do you have a source for this? I did not think it was widely accepted in the scientific community. And frankly, the hypothesis doesn’t make much sense to me. There aren’t any tree-dwelling (non bird) scavengers anywhere in the world now, in fact no land animal survives by scavenging. Lots of creatures will obviously take what they can get, but the only animals that get anywhere near a majority of food from scavenging are flying insects and buzzards (and similar birds), which can efficiently cover large distances to the widely-spaced corpses. Hyenas have strong jaws which let them recover some usable food from a kill that other predators have finished with, but that’s not the majority of hyena food intake. ---
**Author:** ![mmmiiikkkeee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/edb3f5/32.png) [@mmmiiikkkeee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mmmiiikkkeee)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2019, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-hot-cold-food-have-any-effect-on-our-stomachs/844790/23 "2019-12-17T22:03:10Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > There is no animal species in the world that eats food that is deliberately heated or cooled (the reason being of course that they have no method to cook or refrigerate.) It used to be that humans didn’t eat heated or cooled food either. I don’t think either of these statements are true (although including the word “deliberately” in the first might make it technically true). Scavenging species have been following humans and our ancestors around for thousands of years eating our heated and cool scraps with no ill temperature-based effects. I can look out my window right now and see ravens eating frozen fast food from the dumpster, and I used to feed gulls hot French fries as a kid. Not to mention all the non-human made cooked or frozen food resulting from fires and winter. Also I believe our ancestors were using fire before we split off as humans, and if so then we (humans) _have_ been eating heated food all along. > [@Velocity](#): > > So since eating cooked food is technically “unnatural,” does having hot or cold food enter the digestive tract have any effect on the system (i.e., affect the esophageal lining or stomach lining?) Obviously, we’ve been eating hot/cold food for millennia, but since it’s unnatural, is it bad? I think your meaning of “unnatural” here is simply to categorize something that humans uniquely do. But of course humans are animals too, and shouldn’t be thought of as separate from the natural world… most of what we do is the same as any other animal. We just have a few behavioural quirks that make us a little different. Differences (as noted already) don’t mean “bad”. Whether I chew up a piece of ham at 40C or my dog chews up a frozen piece of the same ham from the garbage in the garage the mashed up meat-goo will reach about the same body temperature within a few seconds. I can’t see there being any effect. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-hot-cold-food-have-any-effect-on-our-stomachs/844790.md?page=1)