The stomach is a first pass digestor. It takes big chunks of stuff and tuns it into smaller chunks, but it doesn’t come close to complete digestion. Whole cells pass through the stomach with their contents intact, including the enzymes.
Cooking OTOH will denature proteins evenif the cell wall does remain intact.
Of course it’s all moot anyway because there’s no evidence that plant enzymes aid digestion one iota. The body digests them just like it digests any other protein.
Why would one want to do that? I have often heard to eat more smaller meals, for all kinds of reasons - what is the argument for fasts?
Dag
There is some evidence that fasting may reduce the incidence of diabetes, especially if you are overweight.
There’s all kinds of claimed benefits, from increased insulin sensitivity like Blake said, to fat reduction, to just letting your body reset and feeling refreshed. Many studies involving animals show increased longevity and reduced risk of some cancers with intermittent fasting and or caloric restriction. These aren’t directly applicable to humans of course, but what seems more natural–the tsunami of caloric intake modern humans face, or occasionally going without, and eating naturally the rest of the time?
What, you mean raw carrion, grubs, earthworms and sour fruit?
Because if that sort of thing isn’t the bulk of your diet then you aren’t eating any more naturally then a 100% McDonald’s diet.
I mean more like lots of veggies, protein and fat from a variety of cooked dead animals, a whole lot of fish, and sub 150g carbs/day. And as little of the obviously manufactured “food products” as possible. Also, if you think a 100% McDonalds diet is automatically bad, check out the movie Fat Head, which questions the almost universally held notion that fat=death by cholesterol and that carbs are the most important macronutrient.
I don’t think McDonald’s is automatically bad.
But I do find the it amusing that you call of a diet of genetically modified, fertilised, irrigated plants and genetically modified, drugged, castrated and fed animals “natural”.
Unless your diet consists primarily of raw carrion, grubs, earthworms and sour fruit then it’s no more natural than any other diet on the planet.
Well then I retract my original use of the word “naturally”…“sensibly” would have been a better choice. I don’t understand your behavior though–is there some beef you have with trying to eat well?
You misread what I wrote. I wasn’t talking about what was ideal for health, I was talking about a paleolithic diet. Paleolithic diets weren’t 36-hour fasts, they were fasting for a week or so when food was scarce.
I do agree that eating lots of vegetables is good. I’m unconvinced by the “evils of carbohydrates” theory, just as I’m unconvinced by the previous decade’s “evils of fat” theory (I suspect the next big diet will be the “evils of protein” theory, covering all bases).
Not really, but you’ll find a lot of people here have a problem with the use of “natural” (also “organic”) because:
A) It is almost invariably used as part of a naturalistic fallacy (as in the OP)
B) It is almost completely meaningless when applied to anything a human does
Essentially if you make a contention in a debate it’s worth being clear about what you mean.
Of course you can eat raw meat. Not just raw fish such as is found in any sushi bar (along with yummy rice and vegetables) but also raw red meats such as cow, lamb, etc. When I was a child I used to steal raw meat from the kitchen when mom was cooking all the time with no ill effects. I’d still eat raw meat except now, being older and wiser, I know about things like bacterial contamination and parasites that my younger self was oblivious to. There are also dishes such as steak tartar which feature raw meat. I don’t know where people get this notion that raw meat is somehow inedible. You may not like the taste or texture, you may be squicked out at the notion of eating raw meat, but you are certainly capable of doing so.
However, the notion that cooking food is somehow “unnatural” for human beings is bullshit - hominids have been using fire for longer than H. sapiens has existed.
Indeed, aside from cooking making some foods more nutritious (tomatoes, grains, etc.) and other foods safer (meat, by killing bacteria and parasites) it also detoxifies certain other foods that would otherwise not be food sources at all. Off the top of my head: tapioca (poisonous in the raw state), acorns (a staple food with some cultures), pokeweed, and quinoa. One could argue that this is somehow “proof” that those foods aren’t “natural” to humans because of that, but wearing clothes, central heating, and stitching up bad wounds are also “unnatural” yet not many people, even raw foodists, want to give those up.
And really, cooking is neither more or less unnatural than some of the food processing done by raw foodists, such as marination, drying, or fermentation.
Bottom line, as humans are omnivores capable of a wide range of diets you probably could eat a raw diet that supplied all your needs. It would, from my viewpoint, be an interesting experiment. It would, however, cut you off from some convenient sources of nutrients.
The OP does not contain a naturalistic fallacy.
Tell it to eskimos or nomadic tribes. They hunted and cooked for a long time. Vegetables are not always in season. Meat is. Meat can be cured and salted for eating in lean times. It has lots of practical advantages over vegetarianism and raw meat people. We hunted for survival. We ate meat because it kept us alive.
:dubious:
What is this, if not a a naturalistic fallacy. “An argument whose premises merely describe the way that the world is, but whose conclusion describes the way that the world ought to be, introduce a new term in the conclusion in just the same way as the above example. If the premises merely describe the way that the world is then they say nothing about the way that the world ought to be. Such factual premises cannot establish any value judgement; you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.”
In this case the argument is that we are evolved for creatures that ate raw food, therfore we ought to eat raw food.
And that is a classic naturalistic fallacy.
If you think that some other arguments being attempted here then please tell me what it might be. Because when you start a thread talking about what diet you ought/ought not be indulging, and then justify the appeal of that diet by talking about what our ancestors are, that sure seems like a classic naturalistic fallacy.
Meat is no more “always in season” than vegetables, in fact quite the opposite. While animals always need a supply of plant matter, plants can survive in conditions that would not support animals. In the middle of a drought you are much more likely to find a tuber than a buffalo or even a rat.
Firstly, it is much harder to salt and cure meat than it is to cure vegetables, which don’t require salt to cure.
Secondly, with the ecception of the very atypical villagers of the Pacific Northwest, HGs never curd any food of any type, meat or otherwise.
You forgot the two biggest advantages of vegetables: they’re easy to sneak up on, and they don’t run away.
I am not concerned with “natural”, just what is good for me. Lower total calories may lengthen life and help in lots of ways, but aside from the possible benefit of helping with type II diabetes, I still don’t see what would be good about doing a weekly fast instead of keeping intake more even. I get light headed and feel bad when I get low blood sugar. How does it affect any of you who fast?
Additionaly, one of the things I was thinking about as a reason to graze and not binge and fast is that I have heard that doing that increases the risk of type II diabetes. I guess the issue is more about sugar level spikes than long periods of low levels of sugar?
Thanks, for the answers!
Well whether you’re concerned about it or not, what you eat is obviously more important than just how you eat. The grazing vs. fasting to avoid blood sugar spikes is also a false dichotomy–one could graze on pb&j sandwiches and have much higher blood sugar than someone who fasts and breaks it with a salad and some roast chicken. Anyway my first concern is with eating (what I believe is) “right”, and fasting is secondary. So like I detailed above, I avoid carbs and sugar (to avoid the resulting insulin response) and eat tons of veggies and meats. I try to eat in a 7 hr window daily and maybe once a month I do a real fast. Here’s a little article that goes into more detail about the claimed benefits of fasting.
Also fwiw, I did the grazing 6 small meals a day for a while, and eating and planning your meals basically becomes your life–there’s alot of calorie counting and fretting inherent in that school of thought, but eating the way I do is pretty much worry free and I’ve never felt better.
Well, I did not say that I successfully graze, and you are right it is a lot of work. When I was younger I often lived on one large meal a day, and it was easy, but then I realized why I was grumpy on those days. I take the middle road now, usually 3 meals a day.
Thanks for the link!
You are reading way to far into my “argument”. It is not an argument for eating raw food. It simply says that the argument against eating raw food which is based on raw foodists not getting adequate nutrition is not well founded.