Tubers couldn’t be more ‘paleo’, in my book. And I digested the raw filet I ate on Saturday perfectly. Fruit, on the other hand, disagrees with me…
It’s pretty amazing the variety of diets the human animal can thrive well enough on to reproduce. And even live to a reasonably old age. I’m more interested in optimal health and longevity, since survival seems pretty easy as long as you have adequate calories and medical care.
We need to keep to our ancient diets, but we do have to be on the lookout. Suppose some species comes along that figures out how to transform raw food into something that provides more sustenance? Or even started to try and change the very food they eat in order to make it better for them? With such power, who knows what they could do? Such a species would have to be stopped, and quickly.
Dude, Processed foods make everything in the body weaker by comparison to eating non-poisonous raw foods(non processed).
Its not that these foods are bad for you, it is that half of these foods you think are raw have been processes in some way.
If you look of MSG, Sulfates, and Phosphates, you will be surprised that they are in almost everything you find in a grocery store, even health food stores.
Milk, rice, beans, juice, some raw fruits, etc… contain these things. There is a law against putting additives in RAW foods, but you really have to read the label or go to their website and see how they handle the food.
We’ve been cooking our food for, arguable, > 500k years. I think that gave us enough time to evolve for it. I can get on board with the idea that the less processing a food has the better, but I can’t see why we have to go totally raw. Nope, not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.
Some of us had ancestors that mutated to become cow parasites and are actually capable of digesting and utilizing milk throughout our lives and not just as infants.
Back at the dawn of my internet access usenet was still florishing, and somehow I got signed up for a raw food list. Sweet jebus it was like watching a slow motion train wreck. I stayed signed up mainly for giggles. I think somehow I got there from an atkins list. Or maybe my roomie of the time snuck onto the computer and signed me up as a joke.
I happen to love cooking from scratch, I think the food quality and taste is much better than using mixes or frozen convenience stuff, in general. I always figured that we evolved to eat what we make from raw fresh ingredients, and too many chemicals were just wrong. I have to admit a certain schadenfreud every time they announce that something that has been touted as really good is actually bad for you, or that something that is horribly bad for you turns out to be either good for you or at least null.
MSG is natural- mono-sodium glutamate- being the amino-acid glutamate combined with a sodium atom. Glutamate is present in high quantities in seaweed and tomatoes, to name but two.
Sulphates and phosphates are also natural, organic* compounds containing sulphur and phosphorus- elements* which are vital for health.
NOBODY on earth follow a paleolithic raw diet- even tribes living in the Amazon and South Pacific eat tubers, cook meat and cultivate grains.
Where on earth did the idea come from that people living in the paleolithic era were healthier?
Obviously, people who cooked their meat and cultivated vegetables and grains had a survival benefit over those who didn’t, because they and their descendants survived, while the raw food eaters perished.
If raw food was so much healthier we’d still be eating it.
That is what Survival of the Fittest MEANS!
Sure, eat more fruit and veg, less fat, sugar and salt and keep things high in fibre and as unprocessed as you can- but seriously- have a little common sense.
I do not think it is so much that raw food eaters all died, I think they just determined that cooked foods tended to taste better than raw in most cases. Although I do eat a majority of my veggies raw, but that is because I tend to prefer them that way. I can’t think of a fruit I prefer cooked, other than pumpkin - I cook it to a puree and then modify it into a butter [sweetened and spiced], a pie filling [sweetened and spiced], a mashed potato equivalent [unsweetened] or as soup [unsweetened and spiced].
Growing up it was not unusual for me to grab a handful of wheat grains or oat grains while passing through a field headed to the woods or over to a cousins to nosh on, or wander through the garden and grab raw veggies to eat. Even now Ill eat raw potato occasionally. Yukon Golds are quite good raw. Dried chickpeas are a good snack, pop them in the mouth and suck on them until they start to rehydrate in layers, skin first
People eat all sorts of things they are not supposed to.
Link in case people were confused: It isn’t that raw meat is indigestible, it’s that cooked meat is easier to digest. This gave us more time to do stuff with all that extra energy instead of sitting around gnawing raw meat into little bits (chimps may chew for 6 hours a day), including putting that energy into fueling and building the brain.
It’s because they didn’t get chronic diseases.
Of course the acute kind, say from ingesting a parasite from insufficiently cooked food, would kill them first.
The fossil record is pretty convincing that humans have evolved to eat cooked food. Just compare the size of the jaw muscles on the earliest hominids (or, on modern chimpanzees) against modern humans.
Now, the medical evidence is pretty clear that we haven’t evolved to eat a nearly fiber-free and very high-fat diet (burgers and fries, baby!), especially in a sedentary lifestyle, so there’s a decent argument for some kind of ‘paleolithic diet’, but a paleolithic diet most definitely includes cooking.
Additionally, genetics makes it clear that some populations of humans have in fact evolved to consume milk as adults.
Agreed. But I would quibble about the last part. Genetics prove that some human populations have evolved to digest milk as adults, but it’s unclear if consuming dairy products as adults is, overall, better than not doing so, even in those population with the lactose tolerance gene(s).
And that is exactly why I have decided to call the crap on TV ‘mockumentaries’. I have been whinging for years about the craptastic fact checking [or seeming lack of fact checking] like just out and out announcing that raw meat is indigestible. I spent more than 20 years as a medieval recreationist, specializing in food and cooking and you have no idea how much crap is on TV that is wrong about Roman, medieval and Persian medieval cooking. :rolleyes:
