Re. Food, tools, cooking, speech

On Sun, Apr 3, 2022, 1:11 PM DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves <daud.deden@gmail.com> wrote:

REMARKS:
Some years ago it was discovered that feeding large quantities of dried egg white to animals produced a nutritional deficiency, which was treated by administration of vitamin H. Eventually it was determined that this deficiency was caused by vitamin H- also called biotin- being bound by a protein in egg white, soon called avidin, due to its "avidity" for biotin.

The avidin-biotin association constant (K=1015) is one of the strongest affinities known. This complex is therefore an extremely important tool in immunochemistry. Avidin is stable to about 85EC without biotin, but
the complex is stable to 100EC...
- All hominoids eat eggs opportunistically.
Only Homo cooks eggs.
Raw egg yolk does not bond avidin and biotin.
Raw egg white (transparent part of egg) binds avidin to biotin.

I occasionally eat raw eggs, but I'll switch to soft boiled eggs, wherein the egg white avidin won't bind biotin.

Learn something new every day.

DD

Added: wikipedia new information, 2 minute cooking reduces avidin binding but 4 minute cooking eliminates it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avidin

This appears to support my conjecture that amongst archaic Homo cold-blooded fauna (eg. fish, shellfish) weren't foods that selected for cooking, but warm-blooded fauna (eg. birds, eggs, mammals) were foods selected for
1) ultra-thin slicing {small flake tools, reduced jaws & canines, more habitual chewing [possible link to human conversational speech]}
2) sun heating {unintentionally UV radiation killed most exposed endoparasites}
3) friction heating (cooking) allowed sunless heating in order to bring the meat up to mammalian/avian 'normal operating temperature' also killed endoparasites and brought more nutritional benefits (more protein from eggs, more carbs and less toxins from root rhyzomes).

DD