This is a Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

There are sort of three main ways that our species has developed to break down foods or process foods in a primordial way and that is by

cooking, by fermenting foods and by drying them or desiccating them.

Paul Breslin, professor of nutritional sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

He's also a member of the Monel Chemical Sciences Center in Philadelphia.

And the first two cooking and fermenting are older than our species is.

Homo sapiens came about in the presence of fire

and probably eating some fermented food

since that happened spontaneously.

Breslin spoke February 20th at a press briefing at the annual meeting of the. spontaneously. among the apes and that we can detect when a food has been cooked or fermented and

that this allows us to identify the benefits of those which is that they're

detoxified they have greater available nutrients, and they are, in the case of fermented food, going to have probiotics or good microbes that we want and need in our intestines in order to survive in the world.

The second leading cause of death of children on Earth today is diarrhea, following pneumonia,

which is number one, and that diarrheal disease is in fact the most common

disease on earth in humans, and that eating fermented foods, properly fermented foods of any kind, can in fact deliver probiotics which help prevent

these diseases and I believe could in fact save lives if they were more commonly adapted

in society.

Thanks for the minute.

For Scientific Americans 60 Second Science, I'm Steve Mursky.