If you strip away every modern ideology about food-- (every moral spin, every TikTok purity cult, every nutritional marketing scheme, etc.) --you're left with a species that is biologically bound to fire. Not spiritually and not metaphorically, but literally. Our guts, our jaws, our caloric math, and the giant power-hungry supercomputer inside our skulls all evolved around the simple fact that one day during our evolutionary development, we started cooking.
Somewhere in the modern discourse, people started treating cooking like a "break" from nature. Usually, the rhetorical reasoning they'll give you is that if you take a raw apple and you bury it, the seeds will grow a new living tree. But if you cook the apple and then bury it, the seeds will do nothing, and the apple will simply rot away without growing any new life. Therefore, raw food has life force within it, while cooked food is energetically dead and provides no life force.
Which... is certainly a cute idea, I guess, but it is simply not applicable to the way our bodies access the nourishment that food offers us. In fact, the truth of the matter is pretty rough: Without cooking, we never would have become truly Human in the first place.
If that makes anyone uncomfortable, then that is A-Okay. Because their personal feelings are Valid-- AND evolution doesn't care! BOTH of these things are correct and mutually inclusive. Biology simply does not and will not negotiate such. Learning to use fire made us the advanced hominids that we are.
Modern evidence places habitual cooking somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago. And the species most strongly associated with early controlled fire isn't Homo sapiens-- it's actually Homo erectus.
Key archaeological sites include:
Wrangham's landmark work (Catching Fire, 2009) argues that Homo erectus didn't just use fire, but were literally shaped by it. Their bodies changed DRASTICALLY IN A VERY SHORT PERIOD OF TIME:
This is known as "the Cooking Hypothesis". The caloric boost we were suddenly able to absorb from cooked tubers and meat wasn't supplemental, rather it was the catalyst behind the core evolutionary upgrade that allowed our kin to grow the incredible brain size (as well as fuel said brains of incredible size) that we now use today for arguing online about dietary choices.
Cooking our food is not an optional extra in human biology. It is the foundation of our metabolic architecture.
If you look at the digestive tracts of many primates, they're basically fermentation factories. Chimps and gorillas have long colons built to break down raw plant matter. Their bodies spend enormous time extracting calories.
Humans? Total opposite. Our guts are compact, efficient, and heavily biased toward foods that have already been softened or broken down, such as like cooked starches and cooked meat.
Highlights from the real anatomy:
The digestive system evolved around cooked food and mixed diets, not raw-food asceticism. When people today try to go fully raw, their bodies quietly panic. One study on long-term raw-foodists found that over half of the women stopped menstruating, because they simply weren't absorbing enough calories to fuel that basic bodily process (Koebnick et al., 1999).
Humans are built for efficiency, not chewing sessions that last six hours a day.
Stable isotope analysis on the bones of early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals shows trophic signatures on par with wolves. (Not similar-- but certainly on par.)
Sources: Richards and Trinkaus (2009), Bocherens (2011)
This doesn't mean we're now all obligate carnivores either, necessarily-- because we're not. Nowadays, go ahead and eat what works best for your own body an dcircumstances. However, the metabolic evidence shows that animal fat and animal protein played a major role in our evolutionary nutrition. In other words, Eating Meat is not unnatural, and cooking isn't either. Both are things we were physically designed to do.
Brain tissue--especially the myelin that lets neurons fire rapidly--depends heavily on long-chain fatty acids. These are abundant in animal foods, harder to source in plants (especially pre-agriculture), and completely missing from many "ancestral purity" fantasies. Given that fact of our brains being made pretty much entirely of cholestoral, by the way, it's no wonder why alzheimers didn't really seem to exist at all until we as a population were all told to stop eating things with high cholestoral like eggs and real butter. But that's another discussion for another time.
The point is, though, that humans were never designed for any type of dietary monotheism. Flexibility is the strategy that we were made to be the best at.
The "Eat Right For Your Type" fad book is... mostly nonsense, honestly. BUT: the underlying physiology--which has nothing to do with the author's claims--DOES in fact have ACTUAL solid scientific footing.
Blood type correlates with digestive chemistry and metabolic processing. Below is the clinically-supported pattern:
| Blood Type | Dietary Strengths and Weaknesses (Actual Science) |
|---|---|
| Type A |
Lower stomach acid; higher sensitivity to saturated fat; better insulin response to plant-heavy diets.
Thrive on: grains, legumes, vegetables
Struggle with: high meat intake
Sources: Furnari et al., 2019; Iwamoto et al., Biochemical Genetics, 2018. |
| Type O |
Highest gastric acidity; high intestinal alkaline phosphatase (IAP) activity; excellent digestion of animal proteins.
Thrive on: meat-inclusive diets
Struggle with: grain-heavy vegan diets
Sources: Templeton et al., 2020; Samanez-Larkin et al., 2017. |
| Type B | Mixed digesters; strong lactose tolerance in many populations. Thrive on: mixed omnivory including dairy |
| Type AB | Intermediate chemistry; flexible diet compatibility; moderate stomach acid. Thrive on: balanced omnivory |
So yes-- when someone with Type O says they feel sick and exhausted on a strict vegan diet, they're not imagining it. Their stomach and enzyme profile isn't built for that kind of a metabolic workload.
Again, not a moral failing. Just the chemistry of life that none of us gets to choose.
Humans can absolutely thrive on well-planned vegan diets. Keyword there is well-planned. Pre-modern environments rarely offered the nutrients vegan diets require without supplementation, special ecological conditions, or a shit-ton available surplus of disposable income that is always on-hand.
Modern vegan successalmost always depends on:
Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with veganism. But it is not "ancestral". It's just... modern with supplements. Which is not necessarily bad-- just the honest fact of things.
The real problem starts when people reinterpret personal dietary style as an indicator of morality, spiritual maturity, or like... proof of one's personal Ascension of Consciousness or whatever. Biology isn't a pick-and-choose democracy, and evolution doesn't participate in ideological purity tests.
Humans did not rise to the top of the food chain because we "returned to nature." We rose because we hacked nature. Fire was the first biotech, and cooking was the first crude form of caloric engineering. Mixed diets were never a failure of purity, rather they were our species' most powerful survival trait and evolutionary launch-pad.
Anyone can choose veganism, vegetarianism, paleo, carnivore, or whatever else fits their values and body. But the moment someone decides that one dietary path is the "only natural" one, they've stepped outside the realm of biology and into personal myth-making.
Humans are omnivores built by fire. No ideology is going to rewrite that code.