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The mouth wash people have certainly caught on. Their products certainly mention how good they are a dealing with excess oral acid.

There is a more interesting food item. That is, that the invention of cooking is what powered the human race to the giddy height it has presently achieved. The theory is that you just can't generate enough surplus energy to drive a big brain on raw food. Part of the problem being the time required to eat and chew raw food. You have to cook the stuff to get the conversion costs down.

So I got to thinking about this. What is there in the way of raw food? Raw meat is certainly digestible, certainly if you cut it up small. But this last might have been a problem in those far off pre-fire days. Raw grass seed - wheat not having been invented at that time - would indeed have taken a fair bit of chewing. But once one had threshing and querns, one could have converted the stuff into a sort of cold porridge. No idea whether our digestive apparatus can do much with raw wholegrain porridge - although I did as a child, and occasionally still do eat raw pastry. I rather like it, although my mother used to say that it was bad for the digestion. From which observation we deduce that there is digestion? After all, horses digest grass after a fashion even though they have digestions more like ours than those of cows, who are, it has to be said, much better at it than horses. Then there is cabbage. Quite eatable raw but not much in it beyond water, vitamins and fibre. So much for meat and two veg.. Not going to get us very far on the quest for big brains.

Eggs and cheese would be OK without cooking, although once again, the chaps without fire probably had not got onto cheese. And I personally would have trouble getting raw egg down. Maybe just about OK if it has been whisked, but certainly not out of the shell.

Then we move onto chimpanzees whom I believe to eat mostly fruit, occasionally varying the diet with raw monkey. Bananas, dates, nuts, oranges, apples, pineapples. Plenty of sugar and vitamins. Fruit and nut bars without the chocolate. This would certainly be a way to get the calories in.

So we have the answer. Make up a cold porridge with crushed grass seed and add suitable fruit and nuts. The former gives the food a bit of bulk and fibre, the latter some calories. Top up with a few eggs in season. This would keep one going during the week but maybe add a bit of raw meat at weekends to provide essential amino acids. The perfect diet for a warm climate. Might not be too hot in a cold climate where much of the food is going to be seasonal.

Although it should be said that eskimos manage OK and some of their cooking used to be pretty basic, to the point where one is more or less eating lumps of raw seal floating around in warm blood.

My bottom line on this one is not proven. I can see that getting enough food for big brains is going to be a lot easier if one has cooking. But I am not convinced that it is a necessary condition.