Intelligent critique of raw food diets?

Great Debates
1

When I was in the Navy I became a vegetarian that ate only eggs and the salad bar for 1 year. I’ve never really cooked for myself - I just ate what was available. The motivation was that I am spontaneous and it was something new and I was taking a moral philosophy course. I remember switching off of meat being painful and switching back to meat being painful, but in the interim it wasn’t bad. It helps that I absolutely love a salad that contains as many things in it as possible.

So lets talk about raw foodists, just because I’m spontaneous and oh, Whole Foods/Wild Oats are the only nearby grocery stores at my new place. I’m willing to try it out, you don’t have to…:slight_smile:

Raw foodists like to talk about what our ancestors ate and that appeals to me as I’m a big evolutionist. I see they are criticized as being unscientific. Particular arguments may be, but I’m not seeing the overall failure of logic. If anything I need fewer food comas and more energy and longer days. I don’t know if I can get that from raw foods - maybe. I’m sure a vegetarian diet is just as (if not moreso) sufficient, but I already tried that and its no longer new.

Our ancestors have been eating cooked food for up to 2 million years, at least 400,00 years and its been widespread for 100,00 to 50,000 years. Even the 50k mark is sufficient for significant evolution to occur. What were the benefits of this evolution? It could have been purely societal, not related to the brain and cognitive development at all. They expended less energy and got more calories and so were more efficient and less likely to die before reproduction, etc… Perhaps it was the billions of years of evolution before that time that really mattered - during that time our ancestors adapted to take in an astonishing variety of forms of food. Fruits and vegetables could potentially be considered a scarcer source than meat considering that anyone can walk up to a tree and snag a banana, but not anyone can chase down a monkey and eat it (enter humans).

So you’d be hard pressed to argue that I’m simply not going to get my nutrition. It seems like its there. So what’s the real difference between our ancestor raw foodists and a modern day raw foodist? I think it boils down to concentration. They are blending together a wider variety of fruits, vegetables and nuts than any single ancestor is likely to have had access to and they are doing it multiple times a day. If there is any argument against raw foodists its that our body actually hasn’t adapted to that. My own experience goes against that though - one of the thing my body loves most is a Nature’s Way Alive! shake (link). Have a gander at the ingredients list. It makes me feel wonderful and if I have one for breakfast I sometimes forget to have lunch.

The argument that would hold the most sway with me, and that I know the least about, is that raw foodists are actually missing out on key bits of nutrition that we get from cooked foods (especially cooked meat - I’m also curious about eating raw meat, it doesn’t gross me out too much, presumably my stomach can adapt to that?) and that makes us smarter. In other words, that raw foodists are stupider than the rest of us in virtue of their diets. I would also be swayed by other intelligent critiques but so far I haven’t seen one. If you can prove that to me that it will make me stupider or unhealthy I will consider not trying it. If not then please stop rolling your eyes :rolleyes:

2

I thought cooking was a way of helping to break the food down so that our stomachs could more easily and quickly digest and make use of what was being eaten. I know that this is especially true regarding meat.

I am a nearly 20 year vegetarian, and have had several co-workers and acquaintances that ate a raw foods diet. I eat a raw foods place here in Vegas occassionally. I have never seen any evidence that eating a raw food diet will impair your intelligence. I have seen idiots who maintained a raw foods diet, but they would have been idiots no matter what they ate; it wasn’t caused by their intake of carrots and apricots.

But mostly I am posting to ask: how much does that Alive shake stuff sell for? I hate that kind of thing, but after reading the ingredients, it doesn’t sound bad at all.

3

It’s around 20 bucks for a big can. They sell it at every grocery store here in Boulder, even the big commercial ones.

4

Excellent. I’m sure I can find it a Smith’s or Albertsons or (of course) at Whole Foods. f&e might even carry it.

Just tell me a) it doesn’t taste horrible & b) it doesn’t taste like strawberries.

Have you started a raw foods diet yet? Or just contemplating it?

5

What’s the debate?

You admit that our species evolved eating cooked food and has eaten cooked food ever since. IOW the natural state of humans is to eat cooked food, and eating raw food is unnatural for our species.

That’s about the only possible debate I can see here, but nobody seems to be disputing it.

A few points that you may not dispute but don’t seem real clear on:

Yes our ancestors ate raw food, but not our human ancestors. Using that standard of ancestor (actually ancestral species) our ancestors also ate nothing but worms and insects, and our ancestors filtered all their food out of the mud, and our ancestors all lived on algae they scraped off the rocks. Those are all ancestral diets every bit as much as raw food. That doesn’t make them particularly appealing or healthy.

So why settle on raw ape food? Why not go back to an all algae diet, or start drinking mud through a straw? If there’s merit in the idea that the further back you go the better it is why not go back as far as you can? And if you accept that such diets aren’t healthy for you in the long term then why believe that any other diet we didn’t evolve with would be healthy long-term? I just don’t get the reasoning here.

Our primate ancestors ate raw food, but that consisted of large amounts of raw red meat, including carrion. It wasn’t vegetarian by any stretch. This is the part that always confuses me with raw foodists and I’ve never got a sensible answer. Why eat raw food based on it being “ancestral” and “natural” but ignore the fact that those wonderful natural ancestors were eating raw carrion as much as raw vegetables. Yes you can eat raw meat, but it increases your risk of parasites and food poisoning. If you buy fresh meat from a reputable butcher the risk is slim, though you can guarantee toxoplasmosis infection, the health risks of which are still under debate but may lead to brain damage. Aside from that there’s less problem with raw meat than raw vegetables. And the things you need from meat to keep the brain functioning are fatty acid and B vitamins. You get those just fine from raw meat.
Natural doesn’t equal healthy. Our ancestors that ate raw foods seem to have had an adult lifespan of ~40, the same as modern chimps. They also had massive parasite loads. Do you really want to emulate that? If not then again I ask, why emulate part of the dietary experience without also emulating the parasites and gastric infections?

I wouldn’t be hard pressed to argue that you’re simply not going to get my nutrition. It is in fact one of the major risks of raw food diets. It’s not that raw food diets lack any nutrients. It’s that plants don’t like being eaten. To overcome that most plants produce toxins in large amounts in every organ except the fruit. Lots of leafy vegetables produce oxalates that strip calcium from your blood. Most legumes produce various thiamiases that prevent you from absorbing Vitamin B and so forth. Cooking destroys or at least reduces those poisons. Cooking also makes more calories available so you eat less of those plants. It’s fairly common for raw foodists to suffer nutrient deficiencies. You can’t just assume that every plant that can be eaten cooked can be eaten raw regularly. Make sure you do your research thoroughly.

There’s no obvious health benefits but minimal health risks, no scientific basis but it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Basically it’s a scoreless draw. To me the whole things seems kinda silly, but doubtless a lot of what I do you would find kinda silly. I’d just recommend that you speak to a doctor and a nutritionist before embarking on this diet.

6

When I was an undergraduate I did a big research project on raw foodist for an anthropology course. I participated in raw food events, I read their literature, I visited their websites, and I lived the raw food lifestyle for a week.

To begin with, there are a lot of different types of raw foodist. I tend to divide them into two camps: meat eaters and vegans. Oh, these two groups do not get along well. The vegans completely disagree that human beings were ever meant to eat meat and flatly reject the mounds of evidence that our ancestors as well as our closest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees, eat meat. I found the raw foodist I came into contact with to be profoundly anti-science with a big emphasis on modern western medicine, and, of course, the food industry. More on that later though.

You’re desire to change your diet is something I noticed in the raw food community. For many of them it starts off by trying to figure out just how “raw” you are. ie. is 80% of the food you consume raw with the remaining 20% being cooked. A lot of them were just really interested in making changes to what was already a radical diet by typical American standards. I don’t really know why this was the case but it’d be nice to know why.

Our ancestors weren’t raw foodist in the modern sense and they certainly weren’t vegetarians. Just in case anyone wants to be pedantic I suppose it matters how you define an ancestor. Nothing that we’d call human was a raw foodist. Modern raw foodist have an infrastructure that will supply them with never ending vegetable matter year round. If they really wanted to they could eat strawberries in December. Our ancestors did not have this capability nor could they store food to get them through the winter. Unless they lived in a tropical climate they likely had to supplement their winter diet with animal matter of one form or another.

I only met a few raw foodist who ate raw meet and they kept it hush hush so as not to stir the pot. Like I said, the meat eaters and vegans don’t always get along in the raw food community. I was a raw vegan for a week as I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating raw meat, or, ugh, a raw meat smoothie.

Let’s get back to the anti-science I mentioned before. Many of the raw foodist I met fervently believed that raw food was a health panacea. I met one woman who claimed that raw food cured her of mercury poisoning. Many others believed the raw food lifestyle could cure cancer, full blown AIDS, diabetes (all forms of diabetes), and I sat through at least one discussion about whether or not a raw foodist should use a condom during sex. After all, if they’re living the lifestyle then they’re immune to disease. I will admit that the folks who believed this kind of thing represented a significant radical minority.

However if you talk to them enough you will run into something they call mucoid plaque. This is supposedly mucus in our GI tract that is deposited by all the bad stuff we eat. It prevents us from efficiently digesting our foods and may cause some other health problems. The solution is to get your colon irrigated on a regular basis, though, for those who are raw foodist, they will not need the irrigation as frequently. Mucoid plaque is a myth but it’s pretty much mainstream raw foodist belief.

It won’t make you stupid or unhealthy provided you take care about getting the nutrients you need. Just don’t pretend like a raw vegan diet is natural.

Odesio

7

Actually, I ended up somehow subscribed to a raw food email list [I have absolutely no idea how, it just sort of started coming into my email box one day, or perhaps I should say as emails from raw-food usenet]

There were the normal range of raw foodie vegans, but there were a few paleos that did the raw meat [and one guy who was bringing his family up on essentially pemmecan, meat fat and berries pounded together into a paste then dried jerky like]

Of course they were all almost entirely against grains, saying that they were inedible to humans, and I kept pointing out to them one of my favorite snacks when hanging out reading in my tree on summer vacation when I was growing up was raw legumes and grains in addition to veggies snarfled out of my grandparents garden and the farmers field. I seem to have survived without being poisoned =) they kept telling me I was wrong and grains and legumes had to be cooked to be edible … but I ate my share of raw green beans, garden peas and both oats and wheat from the field as well as raw sweet corn. Ant they kept trying to convince myself and the paleos that we had pounds and pounds of meat sludge in our intestines and were going to die a horrible death from cancer=)

8

If we had ancestors who ate raw meat, they didn’t get their meat from farms where lots of animals were crowded together. I’d be very wary of eating raw meat or poultry that came from a normal supermarket. One advantage of cooking food is that it does kill potentially harmful bacteria such as salmonella.

Evolution is not an optimizing principle. If our ancestors managed to survive by eating raw food, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that was the best possible thing for them to eat. If it did, why wouldn’t the fact that most of us eat cooked food now mean that cooked food is the best thing for humans to eat? Don’t assume that if our ancestors did something different than we do, they were necessarily wiser than us- they also believed some things that were just plain wrong.

9

Has anyone else run into the raw foodist meme that every vegetable “contains all of the enzymes necessary to digest it properly” as long as you don’t cook them and destroy the enzymes. Very generous of them, don’t you think?

10

In fact, virtually every culture–certainly any agrarian culture–has developed elaborate methods and tools for the preparation and cooking of food, thereby making nutrition more accessible and expanding the domain of foods that can be digested, thus allowing human cultures to become more populous, settled, and enjoy more leisure time in which to innovate.

Blake has essentially covered all the technical aspects of the consumption of raw food, and I don’t think I can add much materially to that, other than that while cooking does diminish some soluble or perishable nutrients in foods, it also makes many otherwise inedible foods digestable.

Stranger

11

You’d probably be better off eating a vegan raw food diet than an all Big Mac diet. But you don’t have to choose.

Hominids have been using fire for a long time, although exactly how long is unclear. So cooking food is natural for humans. Humans are able to eat food that our chimpanzee-like ancestors couldn’t, because we are able to process material that would otherwise be inedible into something edible.

If you want to eat more like people did back in the Paleolithic, go right ahead. But while they probably ate a lot more raw foods than people do today, they certainly cooked some of their food.

12

The only food I can think of that is more nutritious when cooked is the tomato, though I’m sure there are others.

Perhaps a nutrition-based argument for raw foodism can be made, but I’ve known people who’ve gone on raw food diets (if only for a few months) and it immediately became clear to me that 1) Pretty much all of them had serious issues with food in general, some to the point of being anorexic and 2) The expense and time needed to make (or buy) even a cracker or faux cheese makes it a completely unrealistic lifestyle choice for the majority of Americans.

13

Beyond vegeterianism

14

Interestingly, this is today’s “Book of the Times.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?hpw

15

Wow, that book is truly relevant to this thread. I think I’ll read it before coming back here. I did read and do appreciate the very thoughtful replies, esp. Blake & Odesio.

16

Of course he was. Because while cooking is unnatural, stripping and grinding and drying several different foods together for several weeks is just the type of thing chimpanzees do. Right? It seems this is one of the diets that just seems to attract the crazies.

That’s actually true, surprisingly. Any organism will contain the enzymes necessary to digest the structure of the organism. Thats not really that odd when you think about it. When a cell becomes old and needs to be removed, how do you do it if you can’t digest it? This is just as true of animals as it s of plants.

What isn’t true is the implication that such enzymes play any significant role in the mammlian digestive process.

Any starchy food that you can name is much more nutritious with cooking. Humans just aren’t very good a digesting starches. We get something like 90% more calories ofrm cooked potatoes and 30% more from cooked rice.

The ability to cook enables humans to utilise grains, tubers and unripe fruit which are normally useless to us as food.

You can add to that numerous food such as soybeans that are actually toxic eaten raw.

17

Koebnick C, Strassner C, Hoffmann I, Leitzmann C:
Consequences of a Long-Term Raw Food Diet on Body Weight and Menstruation: Results of a Questionnaire Survey.
Ann Nutr Metab 1999;43:69-79

Ganss C, Schlechtriemen M, Klimek J:
Dental Erosions in Subjects Living on a Raw Food Diet.
Caries Res 1999;33:74-80

Donaldson MS:
Metabolic Vitamin B12 Status on a Mostly Raw Vegan Diet with Follow-Up Using Tablets, Nutritional Yeast, or Probiotic Supplements.
Ann Nutr Metab 2000;44:229-234

Low Bone Mass in Subjects on a Long-term Raw Vegetarian Diet

Luigi Fontana, MD, PhD; Jennifer L. Shew, BS; John O. Holloszy, MD; Dennis T. Villareal, MD
Arch Intern Med. 2005;165:684-689.

Hmm. I retract my earlier statement. raw food diets have no obvisou benefits and are posively harmful to your health.

Don’t do it, and if you must do it don’t do it for more than few weeks.

18

I had a roommate once who flirted with rawfoodism. He showed me a manifesto that pointed out that pigs fed on cooked potatoes got obese, but pigs fed on raw potatoes stayed slender. It was later that I thought about it and realized that the latter group was probably starving, since they couldn’t digest the raw potatoes.

One thing people forget about nomadic hunter-gatherer, non-grain-eating types is that they go through extended fasts. If you want to eat a paleolithic diet, sure, eat meat a lot–but several times a year you should go a week or so without eating anything.

19

Sorry to revive an elderly thread, but I’ve been lurking for a while, and this was one of the topics that convinced me to join.

I think I have a critique of the raw food movement, but I’d really like to hear some feedback on this from Dopers with more bio/chem/general science background than me:

Most of the raw foodies talk about these wonderful enzymes that food contains, enzymes which are both highly desirable for our systems, and also highly delicate and easily destroyed by heating foods past a certain temperature.

But enzymes are proteins, right? (Other than ribozymes, which seem irrelevant here.) Proteins are denatured by acids - like “cooking” ceviche in lime juice. (yum)

If our stomachs are just bags of highly acidic, well, stomach acid - including hydrochloric acid - then can someone explain to me how these enzymes, which are too fragile to survive a light *steaming *ferchrissakes, can possibly survive being dunked into a vat of hydrochloric acid?

I’ve never in my life gotten a straight answer to that. Anyone here have any sort of rebuttal?

20

The so called Primal lifestyle (along with kettlebells) is the best thing that ever happened to my body. And I used to think I was fit as a cross country runner and wrestler. Seriously, alterego, you should check out the following link.

edit:

Close. One can even choose to go on short frequent and irregular fasts, (36 hrs a week, random day) or eat during a smaller window, thereby increasing the length of our daily overnight fast.