Why food needs to be cooked?

Cooking food properly will help ensure that harmful bacteria are eliminated. Eating foods that aren't properly cooked could cause food poisoning.

Why food needs to be cooked?

Cooking food properly will help ensure that harmful bacteria are eliminated. Eating foods that aren't properly cooked could cause food poisoning. Cooking is the process of producing safe, edible food by preparing and combining ingredients and (in most cases) applying heat. Cooking is a means of processing food, without which many foods would not be fit for human consumption.

How we cook our food is as important as the way we prepare and store it. Improper cooking is a common cause of food poisoning. Cross-contamination from raw food to cooked food, such as that caused by hands, cutting boards, or utensils, can also cause food poisoning. Most foods, especially meat, poultry, fish and eggs, must be cooked well to kill most types of bacteria that cause poisoning.

All known human societies eat cooked food, and biologists generally agree that cooking could have had significant effects on the evolution of the human body. For example, cooked foods tend to be softer than raw foods, so humans can eat them with smaller teeth and weaker jaws. Cooking also increases the energy they can get from the food they eat. Potatoes and other starchy tubers, consumed by people all over the world, are barely digestible when raw.

In addition, when humans try to eat more like chimpanzees and other primates, we can't extract enough calories to live healthily. Up to 50 percent of women who eat exclusively raw food develop amenorrhea or lack of menstruation, a sign that the body doesn't have enough energy to endure a pregnancy, a big problem from an evolutionary perspective. While raw meat has more calories and nutrients than cooked meat, the muscles of the human jaw and digestive organs have to work harder to chew and digest raw meat. The cooking process helps break down resistant proteins, making it easier for humans to eat and process.

Some scientists believe that eating cooked meat was an important step in the evolution of the large and complex human brain. Regardless of the volume of food produced, food products undergo the same cooking processes as those prepared at home in the kitchen. During cooking, the moisture inside the food is converted to steam, which is combined with the dry heat of the oven to cook the food. The antioxidant lycopene is also more easily absorbed in the body when obtained from cooked foods than from raw foods (2).

Finally, some of my own work, with psychologist Felix Warneken, has demonstrated that chimpanzees have many of the fundamental cognitive abilities needed to start cooking, such as a preference for cooked foods, patience to wait for food to cook and the ability to plan and transport food Food to a cooking place. Despite the enormous diversity in the manufacture of food products in Europe, the basic process by which a product is created, developed and manufactured is universal throughout the food industry. Raw foods, such as meat, fish and eggs, can contain bacteria that cause food poisoning, which, if consumed, can cause illness. If you choose to eat these foods raw, make sure they're fresh and buy them from a trusted source (3).

Bacteria in eggshells and inside eggs can contaminate this type of food and cause food poisoning.). The optimal temperature for most bacteria that cause food poisoning to multiply is between 5 and 63 °C, while at temperatures above 70 °C, most bacteria die and below 5 °C, most intoxicating bacteria can only multiply slowly or do not multiply in. Proponents say raw foods are more nutritious than cooked foods because enzymes, along with some nutrients, are destroyed in the cooking process. Consequently, the changes in flavor, color, texture, nutritional composition and the generation of desirable and undesirable compounds in foods produced in the kitchen are the same as those produced during large-scale food production.

During this stage, recipes can be modified many times until the desired final product is produced, so small-scale techniques are used to reduce food waste and cooking time. If you need to store food for later use, wait until the steam stops rising, cover the food and place it in the fridge. . .

Jeffry Zlotnick
Jeffry Zlotnick

Hardcore troublemaker. Subtly charming beeraholic. Hipster-friendly food practitioner. Total pop culture fanatic. Award-winning travel scholar. Hipster-friendly beer fan.

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