The following is an excerpt from Sam's 2011 thesis paper, "A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Wrangham’s Humans 'Need Cooked Food' To Survive Hypothesis." (Richard Wrangham is a bioanthropologist at Harvard University who claims that cooking "made us human.")

While Wrangham makes a strong case for humans’ anatomical adaptations to consuming cooked food, he concedes to the fact that not much is understood about humans’ metabolic adaptations to cooked food.¹ Although human ancestors, over the past two million years, and thus, humans, have made some clear adaptations to the consumption of cooked food, it is possible that, on the cellular level, there may be some disagreement. The Maillard reaction, a condensation of amino acids and reducing sugars, which is responsible for the browning of foods when cooked at a high temperature and for generating pleasant aromas and flavors from cooking, is also responsible for the generation of heterocyclic amines (carcinogenic molecules generated from the high temperature cooking, commonly associated with the browning of meat).² Wrangham only associates the formation of Maillard reaction products with cooking meat, but these cancer-causing products may be generated from a wide variety of cooked foods and result in the formation of such molecules as acrylamide (acrylamide, specifically, has been controversial, and while few studies have been done on its carcinogenic effects, one study suggests that only pancreatic cancer is positively correlated with acrylamide levels and that there is no direct association between acrylamide intake and most cancers) which is primarily found in cooked, high-starch foods.^3,4,5 Accumulation of these molecules and other Maillard reaction products in the body may lead to a number of physiological problems, including, most notably, pancreatic, colorectal, endometrial, and endometrial cancers.² Maillard reaction products have also been linked to other “diseases of aging” such as diabetes mellitus, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and amyloidosis.⁶ Thus, with some possible negative health consequences resulting from cooked food consumption, Wrangham was perplexed by humanity’s (as well as all other great apes’) preference for cooked food over raw food.² More studies on the possible carcinogenic effects of cooking need to be done in order to generate further conclusive evidence as to the negative long-term health consequences of cooking.

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1. Wrangham R, Conklin-Brittain NL. 2003. Cooking as a biological trait. Comp Biochem Physiol, A 136:35-46.

2. Carmody RN, Wrangham RW. 2009. The energetic significance of cooking. J Hum Evol 57:379-391.

3. Rosén J, Hellenäs K. 2002. Analysis of acrylamide in cooked foods by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Analyst 127:880-882.

4. Stadler RH, Blank I, Varga N, Robert F, Hau J, Guy PH, Robert M, Riediker S. Acrylamide from Maillard reaction products.

5. Pelucchi C, Galeone C, Levi F, Negri E, Franceschi S, Talamini R, Bosetti C, Giacosa A, Vecchia CL. 2006. Dietary acrylamide and human cancer. Int J Cancer 118:467-471.

6. Dyer DG, Dunn JA, Thorpe SR, Bailie KE, Lyons TJ, McCance DR, Baynes JW. 1996. Role of the Maillard reaction in diabetes mellitus and diseases of aging. J Clin Invest 9(2):69-77.