Does Cooking Make You Smarter? Evolution, the Brain and the Kitchen
Does cooking make you smarter? No study shows cooking raises IQ. Cooked food may have helped human brains evolve, and cooking classes show small test gains.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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Cooking does not make you smarter in any measurable way: no study has tested whether learning to cook raises IQ, and the few trials of cooking programs in older adults found small gains on one or two executive-function tests at most. The bigger claim is about our species. The "cooking hypothesis" proposes that cooked food gave early humans enough energy to grow large brains, an idea with real supporting evidence and real critics.
This page covers both versions of the question. It explains the cooking hypothesis and the case against it, then looks at what happens when people cook as an everyday activity, from training studies to a Japanese cohort that tracked home cooking and dementia.
The cooking hypothesis: did fire feed the human brain?
The anthropologist Richard Wrangham set out the cooking hypothesis in his 2009 book Catching Fire. His argument is that cooking began early enough to change human biology. Cooking softens food and makes more of its energy available, he says, and our ancestors who controlled fire could therefore support bigger brains on smaller guts and teeth, starting with Homo erectus nearly 2 million years ago.
Several lines of evidence support the energy part of the argument:
• Mouse feeding experiments: Carmody, Weintraub and Wrangham fed mice raw or cooked meat and sweet potato. Cooking increased the energy the mice gained from both foods, and the mice put on more body mass without eating more or moving less. Pounding food raw gave a smaller benefit than cooking.
• The neuron budget: Fonseca-Azevedo and Herculano-Houzel estimated how many brain neurons primates can afford on a raw diet, given how many hours a day they can spend feeding. On raw food alone, a primate with a human-sized brain would have to spend most of its waking hours eating. Great apes, which eat raw food, have large bodies and relatively few neurons, and the authors argued that cooking let early humans escape that trade-off. Our page on brain size and IQ covers how brain size relates to intelligence in people today.
• Modern raw-food dieters: In a German survey of 513 long-term raw-food eaters, Koebnick and colleagues found average weight losses of about 10 to 12 kilograms. Around a quarter of the women were underweight, and about 30% of women under 45 had partial or complete loss of menstrual periods. People eating a raw diet with modern farmed foods struggle to get enough energy, which fits Wrangham's view that cooking was a biological necessity.
The case against the cooking hypothesis
The main problem is timing. Brain enlargement in Homo erectus began close to 2 million years ago, but the oldest secure evidence of fire use is much later. Berna and colleagues found burned bone and ash inside Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa dating to about 1 million years ago, which they described as the earliest secure evidence of burning in an archaeological site. In Europe, Roebroeks and Villa concluded that fire only became a regular part of human life around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, and that early humans reached cold northern regions without it.
Cornélio and colleagues attacked the model directly. Using a similar calculation, they found that the number of neurons a hominin could afford depended much more on how efficiently it foraged than on body mass. Brain volume in the human lineage grew along a steady line with no visible jump when fire appears in the record. In their own mouse experiment, cooked meat did not provide more usable energy, the opposite of Carmody's result.
The debate is open. Cooking very likely mattered for human energy budgets at some point, but whether it caused the early growth of the brain is disputed. Even if it did, that is a story about evolution across thousands of generations. It does not mean that a person who cooks raises their own IQ. Meat is the other food often credited with building the human brain, and whether eating meat makes you smarter today is a separate question with its own evidence.
Does cooking as an activity train the brain?
Cooking a meal involves planning, timing several dishes at once, following steps and adjusting when something goes wrong. That is why claims that cooking is "good for your brain" sound plausible. A few small trials have tested it in older adults:
• A computer cooking game: Wang and colleagues compared 31 healthy older adults trained on a computer version of a breakfast-cooking task, in which players timed several foods on screen to finish together while setting a virtual table, with 26 untrained controls. The training group improved on the task itself and on two related tests, letter-number sequencing and digit-symbol coding, over a short period.
• Sushi and crafts in Japan: Iizuka and colleagues randomized 51 older adults to 12 weekly sessions of hands-on activities, half making accessories and half creatively decorating sushi, or to health lectures. The activity group improved more on the Trail Making Test Part B, an executive-function test, and on nothing else. A private company funded the trial, and it recruited fewer people than planned because of the pandemic.
• Cooking as dementia rehabilitation: Murai and Yamaguchi randomized 36 care-facility residents with dementia to a 12-week cooking program or usual recreation. Executive function held steady in the cooking group while it declined in the controls, and behavioral symptoms improved. Only 29 residents were analyzed.
• Cooking with a caregiver: Yu and colleagues randomized 60 pairs of older adults with memory complaints and their caregivers to a 5-week cooking course or a wait list. Well-being and cooking skill improved. Cognitive tests were not the outcome.
These results fit a well-known pattern. Practice improves performance on the trained task and on tests that closely resemble it, which psychologists call "near transfer." Gains on broad abilities such as reasoning or IQ, called "far transfer," are rarely found. Sala and Gobet's meta-analyses of cognitive training across many domains found minimal effects on general cognitive ability once study quality was accounted for. The cooking trials are small, mostly in people with or at risk of cognitive decline, and none measured IQ.
Home cooking and dementia risk
The most interesting recent evidence comes from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study. Tani, Fujiwara and Kondo followed 10,978 older adults for 6 years and matched frequent cooks (at least once a week) with infrequent cooks of similar demographic, socioeconomic and health backgrounds. Frequent cooking went with a 23% lower risk of dementia requiring long-term care in men and a 27% lower risk in women. The apparent benefit was largest in people who rated their cooking skills as low.
This is an observational study, and it cannot rule out reverse causation. People in the early, undiagnosed stages of dementia often stop cooking because cooking is demanding. Our page on whether IQ is correlated with dementia covers the wider evidence on thinking ability and later dementia.
That demand is also why clinicians use cooking as a test. Chevignard and colleagues gave 45 patients with brain injuries a multi-step cooking task. They made more errors than healthy controls, worked more slowly, and more than half did not finish, and their performance tracked standard measures of executive function. Cooking is a good window onto planning and self-control in daily life, which is the territory of an executive function test.
Is being a good cook a sign of high IQ?
There appear to be no studies linking cooking skill to IQ in healthy adults. Cooking ability depends heavily on practice, family habits, culture, time and money, so any link with intelligence would be hard to separate from upbringing. Someone with a high IQ who never cooks will not be good at it, and many skilled cooks would not describe themselves as academic.
Frequently asked questions
Does cooking make you smarter?
There is no evidence that cooking raises IQ. Small trials in older adults found modest gains on a few executive-function tests, which is near transfer to similar tasks.
Did cooking make humans more intelligent?
Possibly, over evolutionary time. The cooking hypothesis argues that cooked food fuelled brain growth, but the earliest secure evidence of fire is about a million years later than the start of that growth.
Is cooking good for your brain?
It keeps people active and engaged, and a Japanese cohort linked regular home cooking to lower dementia risk. That link may partly reflect people who are already declining cooking less.
Does cooked food have more energy than raw food?
In mouse experiments, cooked meat and sweet potato provided more usable energy than raw food. One later mouse study found no benefit for cooked meat, so the size of the effect is debated.
Is being a good cook a sign of high IQ?
No study has tested this. Cooking skill depends mostly on practice and upbringing.
The takeaway
Cooking may have helped make the human brain possible, though the timing is still argued over, but cooking your own meals is not a proven way to raise your IQ. Cooking is a demanding everyday task that draws on planning and attention, and staying able to cook is a sign of healthy thinking in later life. To see where your reasoning ability stands today, try an online IQ test built by psychometricians.
References
1. Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching fire: How cooking made us human. Basic Books. [basicbooks.com](. basicbooks.com
2. Carmody, R. N., Weintraub, G. S., & Wrangham, R. W. (2011). Energetic consequences of thermal and nonthermal food processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(48), 19199-19203. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112128108](. doi.org
3. Fonseca-Azevedo, K., & Herculano-Houzel, S. (2012). Metabolic constraint imposes tradeoff between body size and number of brain neurons in human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(45), 18571-18576. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1206390109](. doi.org
4. Koebnick, C., Strassner, C., Hoffmann, I., & Leitzmann, C. (1999). Consequences of a long-term raw food diet on body weight and menstruation: Results of a questionnaire survey. Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism, 43(2), 69-79. [doi.org/10.1159/000012770](. doi.org
5. Berna, F., Goldberg, P., Horwitz, L. K., Brink, J., Holt, S., Bamford, M., & Chazan, M. (2012). Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(20), E1215-E1220. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117620109](. doi.org
6. Roebroeks, W., & Villa, P. (2011). On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(13), 5209-5214. [doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018116108](. doi.org
7. Cornélio, A. M., de Bittencourt-Navarrete, R. E., de Bittencourt Brum, R., Queiroz, C. M., & Costa, M. R. (2016). Human brain expansion during evolution is independent of fire control and cooking. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 10, 167. [doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2016.00167](. doi.org
8. Wang, M. Y., Chang, C. Y., & Su, S. Y. (2011). What's cooking? Cognitive training of executive function in the elderly. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 228. [doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00228](. doi.org
9. Iizuka, A., Ogawa, S., Cho, D., Fujihira, K., Li, Y., Sato, K., Hinakura, K., Kobayashi-Cuya, K. E., & Suzuki, H. (2025). The effects of the MONOZUKURI program on executive function among community-dwelling older adults: A randomized controlled trial. Brain and Behavior, 15(10), e70888. [doi.org/10.1002/brb3.70888](. doi.org
10. Murai, T., & Yamaguchi, H. (2017). Effects of a cooking program based on brain-activating rehabilitation for elderly residents with dementia in a Roken facility: A randomized controlled trial. Progress in Rehabilitation Medicine, 2, 20170004. [doi.org/10.2490/prm.20170004](. doi.org
11. Yu, R., Lai, D., Leung, G., Tong, C., Yuen, S., & Woo, J. (2023). A dyadic cooking-based intervention for improving subjective health and well-being of older adults with subjective cognitive decline and their caregivers: A randomized controlled trial. The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging, 27(10), 824-832. [doi.org/10.1007/s12603-023-1990-1](. doi.org
12. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2019). Cognitive training does not enhance general cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(1), 9-20. [doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.10.004](. doi.org
13. Tani, Y., Fujiwara, T., & Kondo, K. (2026). Home cooking, cooking skills and dementia requiring long-term care: A population-based cohort study in Japan. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 80(7), 512-518. [doi.org/10.1136/jech-2025-225139](. doi.org
14. Chevignard, M. P., Taillefer, C., Picq, C., Poncet, F., Noulhiane, M., & Pradat-Diehl, P. (2008). Ecological assessment of the dysexecutive syndrome using execution of a cooking task. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 18(4), 461-485. [doi.org/10.1080/09602010701643472](. doi.org
Hero image: Cast iron pot and whisk, by Juha Kämäräinen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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