If you have ever experienced vomiting from eating hopniss, sunchokes, or jicama (and possibly other root vegetables) - hey look, there is a vomiting smiley face up there! - I'm interested in finding ways to prevent this, because I am emetophobic and I really, really want to avoid vomiting at all costs. 

Native Americans ate hopniss, some kind of lily root tubers, and other root vegetables without getting sick, but when they gave them to the white people, the white people weren't able to prepare them properly, and got sick.  (Same with corn, which has to be soaked in water and ashes, called nixtamal, although corn did not cause vomiting, but rather, malnutrition from anti-nutrients.)

Sun drying is the universal primitive food preservation method, for people who don't have refrigerators. 

I tried eating a jicama.  I cooked it for what I thought was a long time, but when I put a tiny bite of it into my mouth, I had strange, tickly, twinge-like sensations in my mouth, and I know from experience that this means the food will make me vomit.  I did swallow one bite, and later on, had huge, strange twinges in my abdomen, which felt like electrical shocks. 

It is not inulin fiber.  I did not get gas.  Inulin would not give me twinges in my mouth.  It is rotenone, a natural insecticide in the roots to protect them from being eaten.  Rotenone causes vomiting and affects the nervous system, which explains why my twinges felt 'electrical' in nature. 

Rotenone is destroyed by sunlight. 

Sunlight was universally used to preserve foods. 

I still have the leftover uneaten jicama in the fridge.  I am going to take it out and sun dry it and see if I still get the twinges. 

The twinges in my abdomen were extremely intense even from one tiny bite of jicama.  If I had eaten any more I would have been vomiting uncontrollably.  It felt like it was making my whole intestine move around. 

I know I'm talking about cooking, in a raw forum, but this applies to eating it raw, too.  Even animals will dry their foods to preserve them.  I forget which kind of rodent it is, but there was some rodent that dries out a bunch of grass to store it for the winter.  They're eating it raw after it's been dried.  If someone wants to eat raw hopniss or any other foraged root, but finds that it's too toxic and it causes vomiting, sun drying is the perfect solution.  It isn't cooking, it's something primitive stone age people can do, and even animals can do it, so it doesn't violate the principles / guidelines that paleo dieters are following. 

Hm.  I just read the 'read this' post at the beginning here and it said to put your gender in your profile.  I've already been struggling to modify my profile but can't add anything at all to it - nothing is clickable or editable and there aren't any fields to enter things into.  I wonder if maybe it's my Opera browser not showing some options or something.  Oh well.  My name's Nicole.  I am a 38 year old woman in Pennsylvania.

Anyhow, hello everyone.  Right now I am on just about the worst diet imaginable because, for a variety of reasons, I can't cook for myself at the moment.  But I will be cooking again in the future.  And I just realized that I use the word 'cook' to mean 'prepare food at all,' regardless of whether I actually cook anything. 

I came here to learn about others' experiences with various diets so that I can do troubleshooting.  I have tried a couple of things and had problems with them and wanted to find out what other people have done.  I have a lot of respect for individual people's anecdotes ('I tried doing X, and it resulted in ABC'). 

I am not necessarily aiming for an all raw diet, and since I can't prepare any of my own food at the moment, it doesn't even matter much what kind of diet I would like to do, I'll just have to wait until I can really do it.  I've loved reading about Weston Price for many years now - it gives me so much hope to know that you can prevent deformities if you eat nutritiously and avoid particular drugs and chemicals.  I myself have the narrow face and maloccluded teeth (before braces) that Weston Price wrote about, and I want to prevent that in my future children. 

I'm fascinated with primitive tribes and primitive diets.  I like to be an original observer, trying something and observing how my body feels afterwards.  This is how primitive people found out which foods were edible, for the very first time, when no one was there to tell them.

I've also used the Feingold diet for hyperactivity.  I was a hyperactive child, and my parents put me on the diet, and it instantly calmed me down on the very first day.  I tried it as an adult but for various reasons was never able to get completely on the diet, so I never really tested it as much as I would have liked to.  My life has been chaotic for the past few years.

Oh, I should warn everyone that I am still drinking large amounts of coffee (for the time being, but hopefully very soon I will be able to quit it again), and this makes me EXTREMELY VERBOSE, which means that my posts are often gigantically long and detailed and hard to read.  This improves when I quit coffee.

So, well, hello everyone.