Tortine cuisine?

[Aretino]

I caught an interesting episode of NOVA recently on the topic of food, including the considerable impact of the invention of cooking on human evolution. In an experiment, monitor lizards were fed the same favorite veggie both cooked and raw, and it was found that 41% less energy was consumed by the process of digestion with cooked food. That's a lot.

So, I thought, why not cook Dinette's veggies? (Apart from the fact that she seems pretty energetic as it is.) I will play the Devil's advocate here and suggest that an animal consuming a variety of foods probably gets adequate vitamins and minerals even when food is cooked.

 

[Tom]

Ummm... Monitor lizards don't eat veggies... Obligate carnivores. There is one species that is very uncommon in captivity that is said to occasionally eat some fruit, but that is an obscure exception to a very known rule.

Cooking does remove and or degrade some of the nutrient content of the food.

 

[Aretino]

Ummm... Monitor lizards don't eat veggies... Obligate carnivores.

Sorry. They were bearded dragons.

"Fortunately, bearded dragons love vegetables, raw or cooked.

The bearded dragon experiments show that cooked vegetables take 40 percent less energy for them to consume than raw ones.

So the python and the bearded dragon help to show that eating cooked food takes less work to get the energy from the fat, protein and sugar in our food."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/can-i-eat-that.html