We often pride ourselves on being the species that cooked its way to civilization. Fire transformed us, they say; cooking made us human. But what if the moment we lit the first fire under our food, we unknowingly ignited a long-term crisis for our bodies and our health? What if that was the beginning of our diet problems and metabolic disorders? This is not some romanticized narrative about the wonders of cooking, but a hard look at how our culinary evolution may have set us on a path to cravings and metabolic dysfunctions that haunt us to this day.
Think about it: before we started cooking, our diets were raw, whole, and unprocessed. We ate what nature provided in its purest form — fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and occasionally, raw animal flesh. Our ancestors' bodies were in tune with nature; they consumed foods in their natural state, with fibers intact, nutrients undisturbed, and enzymes alive. There was no obesity, no diabetes, no heart disease, no metabolic syndrome. Food wasn’t a constant source of confusion or controversy; it was simple, straightforward, and life-sustaining.
Then we discovered fire. We discovered cooking. And with that, everything changed. The human diet started to shift away from raw, whole foods to something more refined, more palatable, and, let’s be honest, more addictive. Cooking broke down the complex structures in our foods, making them softer, easier to chew, easier to digest, but also easier to overeat. Cooking made food more appealing, yes, but it also made us crave the altered taste and texture, leading us to want more, consume more, and eat far beyond our natural needs. And this was the beginning of a love affair with altered food — a love affair that has spiraled out of control into the world of processed foods we live in today.
Cooking wasn’t just a method of survival; it became a cultural phenomenon, a way to bond, to celebrate, to soothe our emotions. Food cooked over a fire became central to our gatherings, our rituals, our very way of life. We began to see food not just as fuel, but as comfort, pleasure, even entertainment. This shift, subtle at first, created a pathway to the processed foods we now consume in excess. From cooking meat and vegetables, we gradually moved to baking bread, fermenting grains, curing meats, and eventually, producing the ultra-processed foods that line our supermarket shelves today.
But there’s something else that happened when we began to cook: we began to lose touch with our bodies' natural hunger and satiety signals. In the raw food state, our bodies could regulate themselves; hunger was driven by a true need for nutrients, and fullness was a natural response to the physical bulk and density of raw foods. When we cook, however, we break down the fibers and release the sugars. Our bodies don’t have to work as hard to digest; they don’t have to burn as many calories in the process. We consume more energy than we expend, and the excess starts to accumulate. Our bodies, once efficient machines finely tuned to our raw diet, are now thrown into confusion, struggling to adapt to this new way of eating.
And that confusion has paved the way for the metabolic disorders we see today. When we cook, we make foods more palatable, yes, but we also strip them of some of their natural benefits. We destroy enzymes that aid digestion; we reduce nutrient levels; we alter the structure of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in ways that our bodies do not always recognize or know how to process properly. And then, because cooked food became the norm, we sought more and more ways to make it easier, faster, more convenient. Enter processed foods.
Processed foods are, in many ways, just the next logical step in our journey from cooking. They are the ultimate convenience: pre-cooked, pre-packaged, engineered to be hyper-palatable, designed to hit all the right notes on our taste buds — salt, sugar, fat — in a way that raw food never could. But in doing so, they also hijack our brains, making us crave more of the very things that are destroying us from the inside out. We crave processed foods not because we need them, but because they have been engineered to make us want them, to make us feel we cannot live without them.
This is the true legacy of cooking: a species addicted to taste and texture, a species that has lost its way when it comes to understanding what food is for. We have swapped nutrient density for calorie density, we have traded real food for food-like substances, and we are paying the price. Our bodies are rebelling in the form of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and countless other metabolic disorders. Our cravings, born from that first taste of cooked food, have evolved into a full-blown addiction to processed foods.
What’s more, we’re constantly bombarded with conflicting messages about what to eat and what not to eat. One day it’s low-fat, the next it’s low-carb. We swing from one diet trend to another, desperately seeking a solution to our metabolic woes, when perhaps the answer lies not in what we eat, but in how we prepare it. Maybe we need to look back to the time before we discovered fire, before we started cooking, and reimagine our diets in a way that is closer to nature.
There is a growing movement of people who believe that the key to health lies in returning to a raw, whole foods diet. They argue that our bodies are designed to thrive on foods in their natural state and that cooking, especially the way we do it now, with high heat, added oils, and sugars, is at the root of our problems. They suggest that by returning to a raw diet, we can reset our bodies, reduce cravings, and restore our metabolic health.
Of course, not everyone agrees. There are those who point out that cooking helped us survive, that it made foods safer by killing harmful bacteria and parasites, that it allowed us to extract more energy from certain foods, that it enabled us to thrive in environments where raw food alone would not have sufficed. They argue that cooking is a cultural cornerstone, a human necessity, not the villain in our dietary drama.
But here’s the thing: just because cooking was necessary at one point in our history doesn’t mean it still is. We no longer live in a world where food is scarce, where survival depends on our ability to cook whatever we can find. We live in a world of abundance, but that abundance is killing us. It’s time to ask ourselves hard questions: Are we still cooking for survival, or are we cooking out of habit, out of addiction to tastes and textures that have been engineered to make us overeat? Is our love of cooked and processed foods worth the metabolic disorders, the diseases, the suffering they bring?
Maybe it’s time to stop glorifying our love of cooking and start questioning it. Maybe it’s time to recognize that the first step toward our diet problems and metabolic disorders was not in the invention of processed foods, but in that first spark, that first fire, that first cooked meal. Maybe it’s time to rethink everything we thought we knew about food, to challenge the very foundations of our culinary culture, and to ask ourselves if we are willing to make a radical change for the sake of our health.
What if the solution is simpler than we think? What if it’s not about finding the perfect diet, the perfect combination of macros and micros, but about going back to basics, back to raw, whole foods, back to the way we were before cooking became a part of our lives? What if that’s where we’ll find true health, true balance, true freedom from cravings and metabolic chaos?
It’s a provocative thought, but maybe that’s exactly what we need. Maybe it’s time to face the reality that our metabolic disorders didn’t start with processed food; they started with cooked food. And maybe it’s time to consider that the only way forward is to return to the past, to eat the way our bodies were designed to eat, to stop cooking our food, and in doing so, to start healing ourselves.
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