Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think I'm qualified to poke any holes in this book. I read it, and was fascinated by it. I did some cursory searches of book reviews to see if anyone a lot more educated than me on hominid evolution had some problems with the book in any fundamental way. One guy writing for the Telegraph thought that Wrangham didn't really prove his hypothesis about how cooking led to modern familial dynamics, but I can't find much else. And even then, he didn't say he thought he was wrong, just that there was a bit too much conjecture for his taste.

As far as the simple molecular and nutritional science he goes into, topics about which I do know a thing or two, I really can't argue with anything he had to say. It seems self-evident to me that breaking food down releases more caloric content--just chew a saltine for a few minutes and taste how sweet it becomes when the starches start to break down. I thought one of the most salient points he makes is in the epilogue where he suggests that processed foods are really bad for us because they're processed, and not because processed foods tend to lose nutrient content--that the act of pre-processing itself is allowing us to extract more sugar, fat, and protein than ever before, and that if we want to combat this, we need a new nutritional science that can more accurately rate the caloric content of food (as even the milling of flour, for example, can change its usable calories by dramatic amounts).

Anyway, like I said, I appreciate the recommendation. I learned a lot, and would certainly recommend this book to anyone else out there interested in human evolution or nutrition, but I don't really have the knowledge to offer anything like a takedown.