Effects of a cooked diet on mouse gene expression

The typical human diet differs substantially in a number of ways from that of other primates. For instance, although many humans consume meat on a regular basis, non-human primate diets are typically dominated by plant foods. In addition, most human populations cook the majority of their foods, whereas all other free-living primate species eat exclusively raw diets. Such differences in food substrates and food processing are hypothesized to exert a large influence on metabolism. If maintained over evolutionary timescales, dietary differences may have contributed to shaping important human-specific features. To index the effect of food substrate and food preparation on metabolism we measured liver gene expression in mice fed diets of meat or tubers served either raw or cooked.