Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => Hot Topics => Topic started by: zbr5 on October 11, 2011, 10:53:44 pm
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Most of you have probably already read Daniel Vitalis' post on "Vegans vs Carnivores": http://www.danielvitalis.com/2010/05/vegans-vs-carnivores/ (http://www.danielvitalis.com/2010/05/vegans-vs-carnivores/)
It is a nice article that I mostly agree with. We as human beings need balance of veggies (for cleansing, detoxifing purposes) and meats (for building tissues). What makes me think though is his point that we humans adopted to Fire:
"Even more so than animals like the Bear that, while omnivorous, lack Fire, the Elemental tool that renders the inedible edible. Sorry Rawfooders! We are a unique species, specifically adapted as omnivores, and with modifications to our anatomy that attest to this. In fact, it seems to me that our anatomy demonstrates that we have adapted to Fire in the same way an organism like a fish might adapt to the Water, or a bird has adapted to the Air. Our lack of hair being just one example. Another is the fact that we have the smallest mouths and stomachs (compared to our body size) of any of the great apes seems to indicate a selection towards those who ate the softest and most condensed food sources.
A brief survey of those humans we call the “Indigenous” of the world, especially those who were Hunter/Gatherers reveals a diet that, while varying in the ratio of animal to plant food, still always contains both in ample degrees. These people are always cooks, in that they are never found on “Raw Food Diets”. They eat a mix of raw and cooked foods, as well as balancing animal foods against plant foods. I know of no culture that is based solely on plant food, nor one built exclusively on animal foods."
If I understand it correct he suggests that we can thrive on meats as long as they are not overcooked. It is ok in his opinion to eat slightly processed meats (for example steamed salmon steak).
Is it really that straightforward as we think on this forum, that the less processed meat the healthier it is? Or maybe Daniel has some vaild points that meat is healthy as long as it is not cooked over some threshold of time&temperture?
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http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/product-reviews/0465013627/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 (http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/product-reviews/0465013627/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1)
Daniel draws his conclusions from this book. Read best rated comment on Amazon to see what the book is exactly about.
Well...
"Wrangham reports that there are no known cases of a modern human surviving on raw food for more than a month.) "
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Didn't Daniel survive as a raw foodist for over a month among other raw foodists?
Primates prefer the taste of cooked? My cat prefers the taste of cooked, but it makes her very ill. People prefer to be high on crack, does that make it something good? Hence we call cooked food "cat crack" in my house.
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That book raises good arguments but I found it hard to believe what the book said back when I heard about it on NPR, before I ever was interested in raw foods besides raw milk.
Interestingly, Charles Darwin, while calling fire-making "probably the greatest [discovery], excepting language, ever made by man," thought that cooking was a late addition to the human skill-set without biological or evolutionary significance, and anthropologists agreed with him until quite recently.
The whole chewing argument seems pretty weak to me. Honestly, I swallow large chunks of meat most every day, they are always digested well.
Why is it that indigenous people bother to cook their meat? I would really like to know. Sushi had always been my favorite food. I never liked cooked meat, I was vegetarian for 6 years partly because of that. When I started eating cooked meat again I got really good at doctoring it up to make myself like it. With raw meat I love the taste of it plain.
I find cooked meat hard to digest, it gives me stomach upsets, makes me feel hot and angry and emotional. Raw meat is exactly the opposite.
I feel like cooking was mainly used originally for cooking inedible foods like acorns and tubers. Those cooked by themselves don't taste so good either so throw in some bones and some chewy scraps of meat why not?
Perhaps the arguments are valid with cooked plant matter, however I have to whole heartedly disagree with the cooked meat. I have experimented quite a bit eating cooked meat and raw meat back and forth. I digest raw meat much better, I feel better, I LOOK better, I gain muscle mass better, I have more energy and need less sleep, I sleep less, I feel a higher degree of mental clarity.
When I relapse and eat some cooked meat I INVARIABLY become anxious and nervous, not about food but my life in general. I begin to doubt myself. With raw meat I feel confident and self assured.
Cooked vegetables don't bother me so much, but cooked meat does. I don't know, perhaps it's because I am dealing with a wreckage of a digestive tract. I don't know.
Raw meat does taste better though, the more cooked a meat is, the more it tastes like cardboard. That is sufficient evidence for me that it is not as healthy.
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"Wrangham reports that there are no known cases of a modern human surviving on raw food for more than a month.) "
Wrangham also reports that the moon is made of green cheese.
Wow, is he ever going to feel stupid when he finds out how wrong he is.
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This is the closest thing I found in Wrangham's book to what the reviewer claimed:
"You might think that when humans are forced to eat raw, they would grumble at the loss of flavor but nevertheless be fine. However, I have not been able to find any reports of people living long term on raw wild food.
The longest case that I found of survival on raw animal foods lasted only a few weeks. ....
Their fantasies focused on cooked food." --Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Basic Books, c. 2009
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Didn't Inuits eat by far mostly raw before colonialists traded them iron pots?
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Perhaps, but Wrangham didn't say "mostly raw." Anyone know of someone who lived on 100% raw, 100% wild foods for more than a few weeks? There must have been times when Inuit did this, but I don't recall seeing any documentation of it. It would be nice to have such documentation in our arsenal.
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Perhaps, but Wrangham didn't say "mostly raw." Anyone know of someone who lived on 100% raw, 100% wild foods for more than a few weeks? There must have been times when Inuit did this, but I don't recall seeing any documentation of it. It would be nice to have such documentation in our arsenal.
I have. I've done it for about 2 months at a stretch when I lived in Costa Rica, and could have gone much longer.
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I have. I've done it for about 2 months at a stretch when I lived in Costa Rica, and could have gone much longer.
Which foods exactly did you eat? Which fruits... which animals.. which fat? Did you loose weight?
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He fails to mention that tools may be a reason why we didn't need bigger mouths. We could mince or chop things. Or even pound or tenderize.
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Raw meat can be pretty easy to chew (or not need much chewing because of moisture), I'd rather eat cooked meat than no meat at all though. I have nothing against rare meats either. Just getting some high quality meat and fat in you is a good start. Whether it's cooked, rare, or raw.
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First of all, never put anti-raw topics anywhere except in the Hot Topics forum. I'll move this topic there now.
Secondly, Daniel Vitalis is a somewhat retarded individual who clearly has not been reading much in the way of scientific literature on the damage caused by cooking.
First of all, there's the silly claim re us having the smallest stomachs of apes. Well, that is easily explained by scientists who have linked this to an increase in (raw)meat-consumption, well before the advent of cooking, which, apparently, led to bigger brains and smaller digestive systems as a result of eating calorie-high foods. The smaller jaws hypothesis could be explained by cooking or tool-use, but there are other ideas too re this.
Then there's the chewing claim by that village idiot, Richard Wrangham. This utter moron tried to claim that apemen would have had to chew raw meats for 5.7 to 6.2 hours in order to get enough calories each day. First of all, we rawpalaeos, RZCers or raw omnivores, certainly do not need to chew raw meats for that long to get enough nutrients, but, also, just like carnivores, we, mostly, just bolt the raw meats down after minimal chewing. So, this claim is particularly stupid and shows that Richard Wrangham has not even bothered to check with raw-meat-eaters such as Primal Dieters and the like.
His cooked tuber hypothesis has been debunked already by beyondveg.com, which, amusingly, is anti-raw too:-
"Recent tuber-based hypothesis for evolutionary brain expansion fails to address key issues such as DHA and the recent fossil record. As a case in point, there has been one tentative alternative hypothesis put forward recently by primatologist Richard Wrangham et al. [1999] suggesting that perhaps cooked tubers (primarily a starch-based food) provided additional calories/energy that might have supported brain expansion during human evolution.
However, this idea suffers from some serious, apparently fatal flaws, in that the paper failed to mention or address critical pieces of key evidence regarding brain expansion that contradict the thesis. For instance, it overlooks the crucial DHA and/or DHA-substrate adequacy issue just discussed above, which is central to brain development and perhaps the most gaping of the holes. It's further contradicted by the evidence of 8% decrease in human brain size during the last 10,000 years, despite massive increases in starch consumption since the Neolithic revolution which began at about that time. (Whether the starch is from grain or tubers does not essentially matter in this context.) Meat and therefore presumed DHA consumption levels, both positive *and* negative-trending over human evolution, track relatively well not simply with the observed brain size increases during human evolution, but with the Neolithic-era decrease as well, on the other hand. [Eaton 1998]
These holes, among others in the hypothesis, will undoubtedly be drawing comment from paleo researchers in future papers, and hopefully there will be a writeup on Beyond Veg as more is published in the peer-review journals in response to the idea. At this point, however, it does not appear to be a serious contender in plausibly accounting for all the known evidence.
" taken from:-
http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview1f.shtml (http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview1f.shtml)
Anyone trying to pretend that cooking is beneficial to humans, needs to look at the extensive number of studies showing seriously harmful, long-term effects from consuming heat-created toxins derived from cooking, such as advanced glycation end products, nitrosamines, heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
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I find cooked meat hard to digest, it gives me stomach upsets, makes me feel hot and angry and emotional. Raw meat is exactly the opposite.
Same here. Furthermore cooked animals fats clog my intestines, make my skin sensitive to sunlight and cause brown spots on my forehead.
Löwenherz
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Boyd Eaton's comment is nice but could still be explained by a combination of cooking tubers (for more energy) and meat (containing therein the necessary brain building components).
Wrangham is taken very seriously in academia. I heard him on public radio a while ago (which basically means you're considered the leader in your field by the liberal media, a very strong force in American elite culture and academia) and a professor working at my University is testing his hypothesis and has no idea of alternatives to it. In other words guys like Eaton or Cordain or whoever else might disagree with him, their message isn't even getting to academicians.
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I think we can agree that Wrangam has made enough unsubstantiated claims to make him fairly non-credible here..but that in the end does not mean some of the other ideas are definitively false.
DV (wrong or not) has been active in raw food for decades, eating raw animal food at least half that I think and meeting all kinds of people due to the very practice of his shtick. I don't think he has to believe Wrangam is unilaterally right to make his other observations nor do I think Wrangram is his only source for this idea that cooking is perhaps integral to the human experience or is ideal for human health.
Virtually anything can be proven to be harmful, its whether there are benefits that outweigh harmful things. I don't think he is saying that eating many foods raw (including meat) can't have value. What he is saying is that diets whos goal is to eat all raw might need to analyze how natural that diet is in the wild. That it has no real known precedent for any people eating a all raw diet (nevermind with the types of supermarket foods and monocrop agricultural foods) when using Wrangram's timeline (of sorts) of 'being human' and not some human precursor.
For most reasonable people here they are going to find at least one kind of raw diet which does not meet the minimums that another diet with some cooked foods can provide. These degrees of 'unnatural' whether its veganism or other restriction for most will trump any accepted knowledge of toxins through cooking in terms of long term harm. So a debate about whether one could provide a diet with no need for fire as more free of toxins or more suitable to people far in the past..I don't think is getting at the larger conversation. That of relating 'humanity' and its experiences to fire or how people might recieve benefits cooking food as opposed to other entire approaches which may be much more unnatural for them.
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Boyd Eaton's comment is nice but could still be explained by a combination of cooking tubers (for more energy) and meat (containing therein the necessary brain building components).
Wrangham is taken very seriously in academia. I heard him on public radio a while ago (which basically means you're considered the leader in your field by the liberal media, a very strong force in American elite culture and academia) and a professor working at my University is testing his hypothesis and has no idea of alternatives to it. In other words guys like Eaton or Cordain or whoever else might disagree with him, their message isn't even getting to academicians.
The notion that cooking meat allowed hominid brains to get bigger, due to releasing calories or some such nonsense, is debunked by the fact that studies by Oste et al show that cooking makes meat less digestible, not more:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodism#Potential_harmful_effects_of_cooked_foods_and_cooking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodism#Potential_harmful_effects_of_cooked_foods_and_cooking)
(refs 95, 96 and 97).
I disagree that academics all agree with him. If you read online articles about Richard Wrangham, one constantly reads derogatory stuff about him. The Bigger Brains article has this excerpt, for example:-
"n the 10 years since coming on his theory, Wrangham has stacked up considerable evidence to support it, yet many archaeologists, paleontologists and anthropologists argue that he is just plain wrong. Wrangham is a chimp researcher, the skeptics point out, not a specialist in human evolution. He is out of his league. Furthermore, archaeological data does not support the use of controlled fire during the period Wrangham’s theory requires it to." Another major article states that "most other anthropologists" disagree with Wrangham etc.
The basic flaws behind the pro-cooking camp are as follows:-
a) Evidence of cooking is non-existent past 300,000 years or so. Past that point, evidence is extremely rare and seen as being inconclusive. So, cooking is highly unlikely to have influenced human evolution re bigger brains.
b) Cooking makes some foods(eg:- grains) more digestible but other foods, such as raw meats become less digestible.
c) For someone to claim that humans are fully adapted to cooked foods they would have to prove that we are all somehow immune to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods or that we needed to eat some of those toxins in order to stay alive. A scientific impossibility, and one that Wrangham can't get round.
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Wrangham is taken very seriously in academia. I heard him on public radio a while ago (which basically means you're considered the leader in your field by the liberal media, a very strong force in American elite culture and academia) and a professor working at my University is testing his hypothesis and has no idea of alternatives to it. In other words guys like Eaton or Cordain or whoever else might disagree with him, their message isn't even getting to academicians.
Could it be that all elite academias produce nothing else than massive amounts of nonsense?
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Could it be that all elite academias produce nothing else than massive amounts of nonsense?
Having seen all sorts of b*llsh*t being peddled as "truth" in academic circles such as Derrida's deconstructionism nonsense, I have to agree with that.
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a) Evidence of cooking is non-existent past 300,000 years or so. Past that point, evidence is extremely rare and seen as being inconclusive. So, cooking is highly unlikely to have influenced human evolution re bigger brains.
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c) For someone to claim that humans are fully adapted to cooked foods they would have to prove that we are all somehow immune to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods or that we needed to eat some of those toxins in order to stay alive. A scientific impossibility, and one that Wrangham can't get round.
a) Homo Sapiens are only estimated to have been around for 200,000 years
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c) Why would we have to be fully adapted? We could just have become more adapted to cooked than to raw..
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Archaic Homo Sapiens existed for a longer period. To be more full adapted to cooked than raw, we should have some sort of immunity to heat-created toxins in cooked foods - we do not have any such immunity.
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We could just have become more adapted to cooked than to raw..
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't say I'm more adapted to cooked than raw, unless maybe vegetables.
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I have. I've done it for about 2 months at a stretch when I lived in Costa Rica, and could have gone much longer.
Which foods exactly did you eat? Which fruits... which animals.. which fat? Did you loose weight?
Yes, which wild foods were you eating, how did you obtain them (foraging, hunting, fishing, wild game market, etc.) and did anyone witness you eating an all-wild raw diet for the 2 months?
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Yes, which wild foods were you eating, how did you obtain them (foraging, hunting, fishing, wild game market, etc.) and did anyone witness you eating an all-wild raw diet for the 2 months?
I ate mostly wild coconuts and mangos, and some wild greens (greenbriar, which grows wild throughout the Americas). I also had wild figs and wild almonds. I got it all from foraging.
I did have a friend who was with me for about 6 weeks of that time. He was eating a very similar diet.
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So you were eating a raw wild vegan diet for a couple months at a time?
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To be more full adapted to cooked than raw, we should have some sort of immunity to heat-created toxins in cooked foods - we do not have any such immunity.
Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."
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Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."
Depends on the timeline and how thoroughly cooked things turn out to be. It was only in the 20th century when people really cooked their meats to death thoroughly all the time.
Look at the demographics today. It sure seems like people are failing to reproduce. Total fertility rates in the biggest cities at 1.0 ? Nationwide fertility rate of Japan or Italy at 1.2? Population pyramids are reversing.
Just look at our own forum. How many of us are so un-paleo like, not reproducing, late in reproducing, not reproducing enough. We got weak females who can't give birth without the medical industry and infertility treatments are in full swing. Weak females who refuse to be pregnant and are afraid to be pregnant.
Give me a break... what other animal in this world is afraid of getting pregnant? Afraid of having real sex. Humans these days are a sad shadow of its original design.
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So you were eating a raw wild vegan diet for a couple months at a time?
Yes.
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Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."
I disagree that being able to reproduce implies adaptation - indeed, the very fact that people are usually able to breed before they start getting long-term health-problems from eating cooked foods, would imply a steady, dysgenic effect on the human race in the long-term. One thing that would really interest me is how many more birth-defects there are in the human population compared to wild animals in unpolluted areas. I strongly suspect that, as a result of cooking, the human birth-rate defect is much, much higher than for wild species. Certainly, cooking seems to have led to a reduction in jaw-size/tooth-size.
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I ate mostly wild coconuts and mangos, and some wild greens (greenbriar, which grows wild throughout the Americas). I also had wild figs and wild almonds. I got it all from foraging.
I did have a friend who was with me for about 6 weeks of that time. He was eating a very similar diet.
Aren´t wild almonds toxic?
Wiki says:
The wild form of domesticated almond grows in parts of the Levant; almonds must first have been taken into cultivation in this region. The fruit of the wild forms contains the glycoside amygdalin, "which becomes transformed into deadly prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) after crushing, chewing, or any other injury to the seed."[6]
However, domesticated almonds are not toxic
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Aren´t wild almonds toxic?
The wild almonds I collected, ate and shared were skinnier than commercial almonds, but otherwise they were exactly the same, only fresher.
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Aren´t wild almonds toxic?
Wiki says:
You shouldn't eat them in large amounts. Certainly I never ate more than 2 or 3 at a time, and the edible part is very small.
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Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."
In fact they are reproducing like rats.
Cooked food causes sexual overstimulation first and a "few" years later all kinds of problems including infertility.
Löwenherz
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The wild almonds I collected, ate and shared were skinnier than commercial almonds, but otherwise they were exactly the same, only fresher.
Then they weren't wild.
Really wild almonds taste extremely (!) toxic, you have to spit them out as fast as possible.
Löwenherz
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I strongly suspect that, as a result of cooking, the human birth-rate defect is much, much higher than for wild species.
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We are now at the beginning of a HUGE wave of serious human genetic defects, a scientist told me recently.
Löwenherz
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Really wild almonds taste extremely (!) toxic, you have to spit
Do you have a picture of the extremely toxic tasting almonds, or its fruit or the trees they come from? The fruit from these almonds are stringy, look like an almondish shaped peach, are semi-edible from my experience and are fairly hard. You chop them in half with a machete, and there's an very skinny almond inside, same for the whole tree and all the trees pretty much all year round, never fatter almonds. What are yours like?
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Truly wild almonds are called "bitter almonds" (Prunus amygdalus amara). Unsurprisingly, they reportedly taste bitter and contain enough cyanide to be deemed lethal to an adult human who eats 50 unprocessed bitter almonds in one sitting:
http://homecooking.about.com/od/cookingfaqs/f/faqbitteralmond.htm (http://homecooking.about.com/od/cookingfaqs/f/faqbitteralmond.htm)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond)
(http://chestofbooks.com/health/materia-medica-drugs/Manual-Pharmacology/images/Fig-169-Prunus-Amygdalus-1-flowering-twig-2-twig-wi.jpg)
I'm guessing that before the domestication of almonds, people probably soaked or blanched them (maybe in lye water, like with acorns), and maybe dried and pounded them, to make them edible.
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I LOVE your last post Good Samaritan!
So sad, but so true. I was so F'd up, I feel so blessed to have discovered raw foods before I finished growing up.
The Native Americans ate choke cherry pits which have a similar cyanide problem as wild almonds. They pulverized the pits with the fruits and that eats the poison.
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Then they weren't wild.
Really wild almonds taste extremely (!) toxic, you have to spit them out as fast as possible.
Löwenherz
Yes, this seems to apply to all wild almonds (except for mutations):
"...not even the most ardent nut lover among us will eat wild almonds; their lousy taste keeps us away, which is fortunate, since just a few dozen of the wild nuts contain enough cyanide to kill us."
http://discovermagazine.com/1994/sep/biologyandmedici422 (http://discovermagazine.com/1994/sep/biologyandmedici422)
BTW, this is an interesting article:
"... occasional individual almond trees have a mutation in a single gene that prevents them from synthesizing the bitter- tasting amygdalin. Such trees die out in the wild without leaving any progeny, because birds discover and eat all their seeds. But curious or hungry children of early farmers, nibbling wild plants around them, would also have sampled and noticed those nonbitter almond trees, and the non- bitter almond seeds are the ones ancient farmers would have planted, at first unintentionally in their garbage heaps, and later intentionally, by 3000 B.C., in their orchards."
Truly wild almonds are called "bitter almonds" (Prunus amygdalus amara). ...
http://homecooking.about.com/od/cookingfaqs/f/faqbitteralmond.htm (http://homecooking.about.com/od/cookingfaqs/f/faqbitteralmond.htm)
Interesting, Phil, so the toxicity of wild almonds is destroyed by heat.
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Although the fruit was fibrous and barely edible, I was mostly into fruit anyway, and ate mostly fruit with the rare nut. Nice to have the fruit for kids, rather than candy or other garbage. Lol we Didn't call them wild, but they were different than the almonds you know more than in freshness.
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And how do you guys relate to this part of DV quote?:
"A brief survey of those humans we call the “Indigenous” of the world, especially those who were Hunter/Gatherers reveals a diet that, while varying in the ratio of animal to plant food, still always contains both in ample degrees. These people are always cooks, in that they are never found on “Raw Food Diets”. They eat a mix of raw and cooked foods"
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And how do you guys relate to this part of DV quote?:
"A brief survey of those humans we call the “Indigenous” of the world, especially those who were Hunter/Gatherers reveals a diet that, while varying in the ratio of animal to plant food, still always contains both in ample degrees. These people are always cooks, in that they are never found on “Raw Food Diets”. They eat a mix of raw and cooked foods"
Well, first of all, Inuit and the Nenets of Siberia hardly eat plant foods at all, just a very few berries or seaweed, and then mainly only seasonally. More to the point, these hunter-gatherers are not trying to practise the "Perfect Diet", despite what DV lyingly tries to claim - they are just trying to survive as best they can, with the limited food-resources they have, so they will just eat whatever they can get hold of - if the Inuit could only ever find plant foods in their habitat within reach, that's all they would eat etc.. That's why hunter-gatherers so often opt for tubers, despite the fact, as I showed to PP a long while back re refs, that they find the taste of tubers to be the most repellent of all foods and the least nutritious.
Then there's the issue of cooking. Cooking is useful for making otherwise inedible foods like cyanide-rich cassava tubers more edible, and also for quickly thawing foods that have been left frozen in the snow(usually meats). Since it is well-known that cooking creates opioids which have an addictive effect on the brain(see similiar articles on junk foods and their addictiveness), it would explain why cooking was, eventually, also used on wider varieties of foods over time.
Then there is the truly arrogant, Noble-Savage-like nonsense that DV peddles, though he is not the only blackguard to do so. The unspoken implication he makes is that these hunter-gatherers were somehow near-perfect examples off humanity who somehow always magically "knew" what was healthy and what was not, regardless. Fools like DV don't want to recognise that HG lives were nasty, brutish and short, as that would ruin their overly romantic, quasi-utopian vision of HGs.
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TD raises good points about expecting contemporary HG diets to mirror the health of HGs or even expect it was perfect to begin with, but I'm not totally convinced DV is saying that eating every type of raw diet here is bad or unnecessary, only saying that it has no real precedent to point to. That in the end they are largely experimental and should be seen as such. That there is a possible nutrition people can miss out on or other unknown variables when people choose limited diets that very well might not line up at all with how our ancestors ever ate.
Whether we have adapted to cooked foods the one thing most people now agree with is this raw vegan notion that cooked food contains 0 nutrition or whatever is false. That even if one can point to problems with cooked foods that people will end up living healthier with them than eating totally inappropriately - and this is what history shows. That some dietary decisions and restrictions are worse than damage done by cooked foods and the obvious that some cooked foods are way worse than others. With DV, In regards to the foods that need to be cooked being less nutritious or with information on toxic cooked foods I don't think these are argued entirely and that it is more a view of an entire approach. Its an approach not a 1:1 dissection of toxicity or saying raw celery is less bad to cooked celery or whatever. or arguing that a piece of fruit (and not 20 pieces of modern fruit) is not surely better than a potato.
I know partly the concern he's always expressed is these raw 'diets' are seen as holy grails of which people don't have to examine the other unnatural and unhealthy conditions they can take control over or might do more harm than a somewhat imperfect diet of HGs. He has alot of useful information on everything from spring water to medicinal plants..which of course gets constantly pushed under the rug from raw foodies whose 'purity' trumps such things.
I do agree that there is some naivety to admiring HGs as perfectly healthy but I think often enough its contrasting to which programs are working right now as well as putting up trends in the only known examples we have. He may be guilty of saying his type of approach is 'enough' (when coupled with other lifestyle and factors such as clean water, clean household etc...) and preferable to many raw food diets or ideas like ZC, vegans or perhaps primal, paleo for maintaining health, but I don't see why this is wrong if it matches his or others experience. Perhaps if he was saying that raw food diets have no place in healing (not maintaining) I would be more in disagreement. I know in the past he's brought that up as having value (even raw vs cooked meat)...just not being the MOST important thing ...unless he changed his tune further.
I'm sure alot of people here will disagree with that on the individual level - about which health programs are 'good enough' but personally I don't think this qualifies as being deceptive if this lines up with his and other people experiences.
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I disagree that being able to reproduce implies adaptation
Here's the problem, that is actually exactly the definition of adaptation. If a species can successfully reproduce throughout the generations in a certain environment then it is adapted to that environment. It's not really a point to argue.
What you're referring to is "optimization" not "adaptation." I just kind of made that term up for this situation, but being "healthy" and "feeling good" aren't really things that can be measured objectively, especially for non-human animals.
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Look at the demographics today. It sure seems like people are failing to reproduce.
Just look at our own forum. How many of us are so un-paleo like, not reproducing, late in reproducing, not reproducing enough.
Give me a break... what other animal in this world is afraid of getting pregnant?
I don't reproduce because of the cost associated with raising children. I'm referring to the cost in time as well as money. I see that as more of a reflection of laws and fiscal/monetary policy than a measure of my health. By your standard the poor obese woman I see walking down the street with 5 kids in tow all screaming at each other is healthier than I, and her children (statistically very much more likely to reproduce sooner and more often than myself) as well.
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To be more full adapted to cooked than raw, we should have some sort of immunity to heat-created toxins in cooked foods - we do not have any such immunity.
Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."
I disagree that being able to reproduce implies adaptation
Here's the problem, that is actually exactly the definition of adaptation. If a species can successfully reproduce throughout the generations in a certain environment then it is adapted to that environment. It's not really a point to argue.
What you're referring to is "optimization" not "adaptation." I just kind of made that term up for this situation, but being "healthy" and "feeling good" aren't really things that can be measured objectively, especially for non-human animals.
By your definition, we are "adapted" to the SAD, since humans have continued to reproduce through the generations for thousands of years while eating it and actually started reproducing at a faster rate with the advent of agriculture, to which there had not been any genetic adaptation at all since it had just started, than at any previous time in human history. I'll take good health over your "adaptation" any day, thanks. Most people try diets like raw Paleo because they are interested in health improvement, not increased reproduction. It's about thriving, not surviving. Who cares if we can survive or reproduce while eating something if it makes us sick?
Dr. Loren Cordain's definition of dietary adaptation is reestablishment of "relative genetic equilibrium" and he recommends adopting a diet to which we are "most ideally adapted," not just one we can survive and reproduce on:
When or if environmental conditions again change significantly, most individuals in the population experience what can be termed in plain language as "evolutionary discordance"--the negative results of having genes not as well-suited to the new environment (which again includes diet) as the former one. Such discordance results in poorer survival rates and less reproductive fitness for the majority of the population.
Those individuals whose genetic variability is better suited to the new conditions survive and reproduce better, thus leading to another round of evolutionary/genetic adaptation.
Such genetic adaptation, however, takes time, that is, many successive iterative generations to achieve. Evolution is conservative, and relatively permanent changes in the genetic makeup of a population do not take place without sustained changes in environment, which--once again, in the context of this paper--includes diet. The time span for relative genetic equilibrium to be reestablished can span many thousands of years for a species (i.e., humans) which reproduces a new generation approximately once each 20 to 25 years.
...the human genome is most ideally adapted to those foods which were available to pre-agricultural man....
Simoons classic work on the incidence of celiac disease [Simoons 1981] shows that the distribution of the HLA B8 haplotype of the human major histocompatibility complex (MHC) nicely follows the spread of farming from the Mideast to northern Europe. Because there is strong linkage disequilibrium between HLA B8 and the HLA genotypes that are associated with celiac disease, it indicates that those populations who have had the least evolutionary exposure to cereal grains (wheat primarily) have the highest incidence of celiac disease. This genetic argument is perhaps the strongest evidence to support Yudkin's observation that humans are incompletely adapted to the consumption of cereal grains.
http://www.beyondveg.com/cordain-l/grains-leg/grains-legumes-1a.shtml (http://www.beyondveg.com/cordain-l/grains-leg/grains-legumes-1a.shtml)
Even the cooking advocates don't claim that not failing to reproduce is a sign of full adaptation to cooking. Instead they point to signs of "reduced digestive effort (e.g., smaller teeth) and increased supply of food energy (e.g., larger female body mass)." (Wrangham et al, The Raw and the Stolen. Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=wrangham%20pilbeam (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=wrangham%20pilbeam))
What you are talking about is partial adaptation, not the full adaptation that Tyler was talking about. Sure, humans have partly adapted to agrarian foods, and maybe there has even been some adaptation to industrial foods, but that doesn't make them the best choices for health or body fat loss, which is what's important in the real world for most people interested in dietary change.
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Here's the problem, that is actually exactly the definition of adaptation. If a species can successfully reproduce throughout the generations in a certain environment then it is adapted to that environment. It's not really a point to argue.
What you're referring to is "optimization" not "adaptation." I just kind of made that term up for this situation, but being "healthy" and "feeling good" aren't really things that can be measured objectively, especially for non-human animals.
No, again, I disagree, adaptation, according to the dictionary is simply:-
" An alteration or adjustment in structure or habits, often hereditary, by which a species or individual improves its condition in relationship to its environment."
So far, we have no real scientic evidence that our bodies have been permanently altered to absorb cooked foods more effectively. Nor is there any scientific evidence that we have even partial immunity to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods, let alone full immunity.
Now, of course, cooked foods do not kill instantly, but that does not per se imply adaptation, just that cooked foods are only toxic to a limited extent, nothing more.
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The other thing is that "adaptation" to a particular type of food can involve nasty side-effects. Take the Neolithic era, for example. Cooking allowed us then to consume lots of grains(and thereby eat less meat) - the result was that our average brain-size decreased by 8 percent!
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The other thing is that "adaptation" to a particular type of food can involve nasty side-effects. Take the Neolithic era, for example. Cooking allowed us then to consume lots of grains(and thereby eat less meat) - the result was that our average brain-size decreased by 8 percent!
Don't forget to mention the mass insanity and widespread plagues of the populations that lived off of grains during the dark ages.
There are people alive today that seem well adapted to processed, chemical laden foods. But when you measure the overall wellness of such polluted populations in comparison to those of more paleo leaning diets, the differences in health and wellbeing are evident.
I have seen flowers, sprout,bud,and bloom in some of the most polluted and nutrient deficient soil. That in no way proves there is an adaption to pollution. All it proves is that life is resilient and will find a way to survive even in harsh environments. Though life does sprout and blossom in such harsh environments, it doesn't prove the adaptions that do take place to ensure survival are Ideal.
The seeds of such a flower that blooms in the wasteland would grow and bloom much more magnificently if it were transplanted back to the prairie lands of its own evolutionary origin.
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Yeah.
Maybe it is like tobacco and such, you get used to it, survive, but sure feels better without.
I do feel better with raw (I do not really care why, I just feel it), even if I occasionally eat something lightly cooked - I tolerate it quite well if it is just lightly cooked and otherwise "healthy".
I want to feel great, every day :). Not only okay. Not just survive.
I just feel more alive with raw, believe me!
The dark ages really was horrible. Never come to think of that, what they ate back then. No wonder it was as it was... :'(
Inger
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" An alteration or adjustment in structure or habits, often hereditary, by which a species or individual improves its condition in relationship to its environment."
What does "condition" mean in this context? It means fitness ie the ability to reproduce. As long as a species is maintaining or increasing it's representation or domination of it's ecological niche, which humans have been doing regardless of diet since there have been humans, then the "condition" is good. Maybe horses would live longer and be healthier eating meat or dairy or fruits rather than grass. Does that mean they're adapted to that? Fitness, which is how adaptation is measured, doesn't care how well you feel or how long any individual member of a species lives. It only refers to the species reproductive success. Until world population starts dropping then humans are "adapted" to whatever it is they're doing by the biological term of adaptation. There are many other disciplines that use that word as well as the lay definition that mean more of what you're getting at.
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I have seen flowers, sprout,bud,and bloom in some of the most polluted and nutrient deficient soil. That in no way proves there is an adaption to pollution. All it proves is that life is resilient and will find a way to survive even in harsh environments. Though life does sprout and blossom in such harsh environments, it doesn't prove the adaptions that do take place to ensure survival are Ideal.
You guys are throwing around the word adaptation quite cavalierly. Pollution, if it makes an organism sick enough to not reproduce, would be adapted to if the organism came up with a way to reproduce still exposed to it. If it wasn't preventing it from reproducing in the first place then it wasn't necessary to adapt to. Adaptation is an ongoing process, as long as a species can A) die and B) reproduce with genetic fidelity then adaptation is happening. Adaptation isn't this magic change that takes an organism from being sickely to looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If an organism reproduces at rate X and within the same environmental conditions it's reproduction goes up to X+Y (both being positive numbers) then it is increasing it's adaptation to that environment. If the organism still has reproductive rate X but likes how it looks in the mirror more and has more energy to play with the kids that's great but it's still the same adaptation to it's environment.
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Now, of course, cooked foods do not kill instantly, but that does not per se imply adaptation, just that cooked foods are only toxic to a limited extent, nothing more.
Everything is toxic at a certain amount! And guess what, the condition of being alive leads invariably to dying. Oxygen is one of the most potent toxins around and your cells are constantly making enzymes to render it inert. Living on earth or outside of earth is toxic to a limited or greater extent. None of these statements or yours above have anything to do with biological adaptation.
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What does "condition" mean in this context? It means fitness ie the ability to reproduce. As long as a species is maintaining or increasing it's representation or domination of it's ecological niche, which humans have been doing regardless of diet since there have been humans, then the "condition" is good. Maybe horses would live longer and be healthier eating meat or dairy or fruits rather than grass. Does that mean they're adapted to that? Fitness, which is how adaptation is measured, doesn't care how well you feel or how long any individual member of a species lives. It only refers to the species reproductive success.
Not remotely valid. For example, many species of dogs are severely inbred and have all sorts of congenital health problems, but are still able to breed. The only reason they haven't completely died out due to natural selection is that humans protect them and feed them etc.
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RK, you are also overlooking one important point. The relevant concept we are discussing is not "Survival of the Fit" but "Survival of the Fittest".
Being able to reproduce means nothing re fitness to survive. I mean, someone with a mental age of 2 could still reproduce, as can most of those with chronic, crippling genetic illnesses. All those can be propped up by technology, but that's all.
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What does "condition" mean in this context? It means fitness ie the ability to reproduce.
You're changing the subject. Tyler didn't mention "fitness," he spoke of "full adaptation." Again, try to keep in mind why people eat raw Paleo diets in the first place. It's not to reproduce or to meet some theoretical ivory tower standard of evolutionary "fitness," it's to improve actual health. Sure, health is difficult to measure, but people know when their health improves. If the ivory tower scientists can't measure that, then too bad for them. They actually do have some metrics for health, such as CRP, HDL, blood pressure, ..., all of which do tend to be better among people eating hunter-gatherer type diets than modern processed diets. So both human individual experience and scientific metrics support eating more ancestral-style diets. Maybe rawness/less-cooking is one of the factors in that, who knows?
No one knows whether we are fully adapted, in the genetic and health sense that Cordain discussed, to cooking and anyone who claims that we are is speculating. It seems that Wrangham and his ilk want to believe that we are adapted to cooking and that it produces benefits. In no other species than humans is decreased jaw size and crowding of teeth regarded as an improvement. Wrangham also points to brain size increases, but he downplays the fact that brain size increase began BEFORE even his early estimate of cooking (before 1.9 million years ago).
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You guys are throwing around the word adaptation quite cavalierly. Pollution, if it makes an organism sick enough to not reproduce, would be adapted to if the organism came up with a way to reproduce still exposed to it. If it wasn't preventing it from reproducing in the first place then it wasn't necessary to adapt to. Adaptation is an ongoing process, as long as a species can A) die and B) reproduce with genetic fidelity then adaptation is happening. Adaptation isn't this magic change that takes an organism from being sickly to looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If an organism reproduces at rate X and within the same environmental conditions it's reproduction goes up to X+Y (both being positive numbers) then it is increasing it's adaptation to that environment. If the organism still has reproductive rate X but likes how it looks in the mirror more and has more energy to play with the kids that's great but it's still the same adaptation to it's environment.
I don't think I am being too cavalier, if you consider that I have bought on adamantly to the theory of epigenetics, as well as this notion that the DNA has the intelligent determination to survive built within its structure. The structure of life reacts to the environment wether or not the conditions prevent reproduction. Even within a single generation genes can be turned on and off in responce to environmental stimuli. There is a proactive drive that allows organisms to adapt to conditions that aren't necessarily extreme enough to disrupt reproduction. If all the raw materials are available for the optimal well being of the life form then the genetic code will not only adapt for survival , but it will adapt toward the optimal.
This is my new religion: I believe that the structure of life held within the genetic code has the power to perceive and envision a more optimal design in accordance to the demands of the environment. There are mechanisms within the code of life that allow for the forging of a life form, that not only adapts to any circumstance, but thrives in any circumstance. Just look around planet earth and you will see for your self. Life forms extracting geothermal energy from volcanic vents, thieving at temperatures that are near boiling. Animals that fly, swim, burrow in the ground. Every niche on this earth has a life form that has been fitted to it. Survival of the fittest doesn't explain how thouroughly and quickly these adaptions have taken place. An intelligent determination to adapt must be at play.
There is also the phenomenon of gene suppression where the genes that normally operate in order to provide the optimal mode of life are sacrificed( turned off) in order to ensure the survival of the organism in less than optimal conditions.
There is evidence within our evolution of genetic austerity in the face of adverse conditions. Our ancestors survived while other more robust species like cromagnon died out because we have special metabolic adaptions that allowed us to survive off of less calories, as well as the ability to extract nutrients from plant sources. While the more carnivorous hominids died out. Many of these survival adaptions have been passed onto modern man and explain how we can tolerate grains, legumes and starches.
Those adaptions that occurred during the extinction of the other great hominids made us human.We are a product of this genetic will to survive, and those changes that occurred during the end of the paleolithic era are responsible for us having smaller frames and brains than our cromagnon cousins.
No doubt that the process of genetic adaption continues to this day.
The question is a matter of quality, are the current conditions involved in human evolution creating a humanoid of higher quality?
Another question involves the idea of genetic suppression. In order to adapt to cooked foods, heat generated toxins, and other such toxic waste, are we somehow switching off the genes which would normally be active in the structuring of the optimal being of the organism. Are we being genetically gelded? If the preservation instinct of genetic code detects a problem it will switch into austerity mode and dedicate its life energy to survival. The end result will be to cull off the resources that would create a being with the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and use its energy to form a being with the ability to metabolize toxins as a Kieth Richards. Only when optimal resources are made available to the organism will the DNA be able to engineer the optimal being.
After generations of harsh environmental changes the genetic changes due to environmental distress may not become an adaption, but insted a degeneration. A species may devolve before adaption becomes a survival necessity. Then only after a mass dieoff of those who failed to make the adaption occurs, will the adaption be carried over into a new species. This may not happen so neatly within the context of modern man because of technological interference. Then agin the spirit of life may call out in distress and be the beacon of hope for people like us who can use technology in a way that will return us to the optimal mode of living.
(only time will tell)
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You're changing the subject. Tyler didn't mention "fitness," he spoke of "full adaptation." Again, try to keep in mind why people eat raw Paleo diets in the first place. It's not to reproduce or to meet some theoretical ivory tower standard of evolutionary "fitness," it's to improve actual health.
Some people are forced to eat a raw paleo diet because if they didn't they'd be miserably sick all throughout and probably die.
I count myself in this category.
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Sabtertooth, the Cro-Magnon were actually the ones who survived and passed on their DNA to modern Europeans. I know several people who share many of the same sort of physical characteristics the Cro-Magnon had, my own father being among them.
You clearly were thinking of the Neanderthals who people used to claim had died out. However, recent studies have shown this notion to be false, and that (most of us) humans have some sort of Neanderthal DNA in us.
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There was DNA from multiple species of Homo-this and that spewing out from everywhere in those days( all type of freaky encounters must of occurred) , so it is probably true that Cro-magdon, Neanderthal , and the more recent migrant species out of Africa all interbred.
Evolution rarely happens along straight lines of direct descendants.
Whether Cro Magdon is our direct ancestor or are some deadend branch species on our family tree may be a matter of speculative interpretation . Whatever the truth is on that point, I still think I am right about how they(our direct ancestors) were forced to adapt into less the robust type of modern humans due to austere environmental conditions. The species sacrificed brain size and physical power in order to survive famine conditions after the mega fauna were hunted to extinction. The raw materials that maintained the stronger form of our being were no longer available in abundance and so we were forced to downsize.
Perhaps other adaptions also occurred during this time of the great homogenization of the hominids, and even though brain size decreased, perhaps the structural complexity of the prefrontal cortex advanced in some way to compensate; giving us the ability to develop more cognitive function and language skills, etc.
Modern mans genetics may be undergoing a similar reduction of our more robust qualities due to the idiotic dietary practices of today's world. Who knows how our spices will adapt under such wild and unprecedented circumstances. With over 6 billion of us humans all living and interbreding now days there are countless directions and limitless possibilities.
TD; for my own research purposes
I would like to see your resources that prove that Cro Magnon are our direct ancestors. I thought I read somewhere that they were not a direct ancestor to modern man, and perhaps they interbred with an other species of man that left Africa much later, which makes them more like a cousin than a direct ancestor. I believe that there must of been some divergence within the bred at the time of the mass die offs of other hominid species. Different sub groups of Cro-magnon had to have existed at the same time, so it's hard to be sure exactly which sub group bred with each other and in what ways those subgroups interbred with other types of proto humans.
I have this idea
The features that made Cro-Magnon so much more powerful than modern man became a liability during hard times and the strongest of the species with the pure blooded Cro-magnon bloodlines died out. While the sub groups that interbred with the more dainty newcomers that arrived out of Africa much later, were better adapted to live on smaller game and fewer overall calories, so were able to survive in a world without the manna of the mammoth.
(This of course is all speculation, but if anyone has anymore evidence to the contrary. then enlighten me please)
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The info on the cro-magnons is all here, below. They were indeed the direct ancestors of Europeans, and did not die out:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon)
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That article is vague and does not conclusively prove that we are a direct descendant.
It only claims that cro magnon DNA is found among some modern humans.
It also says that there were more negroid like skeletons found and classified as cromagnon during the early discoveries. Skeletons of another out of Africa migrant species were also classified as cro magnon , so perhaps some of the data is based on false assumptions that there was a direct line from cromagnon to modern man. Whereas I claim that the Cro magnon bred into another subspecies and our ancestors only possess a fraction of cro magdon DNA
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If you're making that claim, Sabertooth, then why not provide evidence to support it? If you do, you might want to start a separate thread on it, as I'm not seeing what this Cro Magnon (please note that it's not spelled "Cro Magdon") tangent has to do with Daniel Vitalis' views on cooking meat.
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That article is vague and does not conclusively prove that we are a direct descendant.
It only claims that cro magnon DNA is found among some modern humans.
It also says that there were more negroid like skeletons found and classified as cromagnon during the early discoveries. Skeletons of another out of Africa migrant species were also classified as cro magnon , so perhaps some of the data is based on false assumptions that there was a direct line from cromagnon to modern man. Whereas I claim that the Cro magnon bred into another subspecies and our ancestors only possess a fraction of cro magnon DNA
You have got it so wrong-headed. First of all, the negroid skeleton find appears to be somewhat vague, based on suspect evidence re grimaldi bones, and seemingly distinct from other Cro-Magnon bones, with multiple, widely different theories being put forward re them.
The point is that the Cro-Magnon are simply those early modern humans who were present in Europe from 35,000 to 20,000 years ago. They were no different from modern humans in Europe, with one exception, they had bigger skulls/brain-sizes than the latter.
I also really dislike this notion of "extinction" and "direct descendants". The fact that most humans, other than Sub-Saharans it seems, have some Neanderthal DNA in them means that these are direct descendants of the Neanderthals. More to the point, there is a quasi-Creationist view that suggests that hominid species just miraculously appeared and disappeared, one after the other, in and out of nowhere. In actual fact, I suspect that we are all, ultimately descendants, in various combinations, of Homo Neanderthalis, Homo Erectus and god knows what other types. I don't at any rate believe in the silly notions of earlier decades that the Neanderthals or other apemen were dumb, mute brutes, only to be swiftly followed by the vastly, superior homo sapiens.
Here's more:-
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-11/942782998.Ev.r.html (http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-11/942782998.Ev.r.html)
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Not remotely valid. For example, many species of dogs are severely inbred and have all sorts of congenital health problems, but are still able to breed. The only reason they haven't completely died out due to natural selection is that humans protect them and feed them etc.
Hence these dogs are adapted to their environment, which includes being taken care of by humans. If all humans decided they didn't want to take care of these dogs anymore then only the ones that could survive without that would be adapted to that new environment. Know how you could tell which ones those were? The ones that survive and reproduce in this new environment. I think you're just missing the semantic point of exactly the definition of these words. I understand what you're saying, but a lot of scientists would stop listening to you once you started using words the wrong way and showing a misunderstanding of the words underlying concepts.
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Hence these dogs are adapted to their environment, which includes being taken care of by humans. If all humans decided they didn't want to take care of these dogs anymore then only the ones that could survive without that would be adapted to that new environment. Know how you could tell which ones those were? The ones that survive and reproduce in this new environment. I think you're just missing the semantic point of exactly the definition of these words. I understand what you're saying, but a lot of scientists would stop listening to you once you started using words the wrong way and showing a misunderstanding of the words underlying concepts.
The trouble is that the environment the dogs live in is the same, regardless. The human input which keeps them alive is not part of the natural environment, per se, it is just an artificial, non-natural, intervention that keeps them alive and breed. Remove the human intervention and you would find that all the changes wrought by humans on dogs would disappear, thus proving that those changes were not conducive to their survival. It has been pointed out that since dogs are direct descendants of wolves, that within a certain number of generations of dogs being left out in the wild without any human masters, that they would all quickly revert to resembling wolves, DNA, appearance and all.
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We have a lot of stray dogs in the Philippines.
Maybe multiple generations.
We call them street dogs.
Their breed are seen as sturdier, healthier than those with named "breeds".
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...they will just eat whatever they can get hold of - if the Inuit could only ever find plant foods in their habitat within reach, that's all they would eat etc.. That's why hunter-gatherers so often opt for tubers, despite the fact, as I showed to PP a long while back re refs, that they find the taste of tubers to be the most repellent of all foods and the least nutritious....
Good to see that you've finally come round to acknowledging that tubers are "often" eaten by HGs instead of your past ridiculous claim that tubers were only eaten "in order to avoid starvation during times of famine" (http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/general-discussion/non-mutant-fruits-and-vegetables/msg61238/#msg61238 (http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/general-discussion/non-mutant-fruits-and-vegetables/msg61238/#msg61238)). I commend you for adjusting your views to fit the facts rather than the reverse in this case.
You didn't show that HGs "find the taste of tubers to be the most repellent of all foods," instead it looks like you may have misread the Hadza study. It didn't test all foods they ate, just most of their biggest staple foods, so you have no way of knowing whether the Hadza deemed it the most repellant of all foods, much less hunter gatherers in general or our ancient ancestors. Besides, even if that were true it wouldn't change the fact that it was the least seasonal and thus most available of all their staple plant foods and thus was a significant part of their diet. Nor would it change the fact that underground storage organs have been found in the diets of hominins going back to at least the Australopithecines and that even wild chimps eat them (obviously without cooking them) to this very day. Underground storage organs, including tubers that are edible raw (such as the five species commonly consumed by the Hadza (Sex Differences in Food Preferences of Hadza Hunter-Gatherers, http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07601616.pdf (http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07601616.pdf)), fit the requirements of being considered "Paleo" by the standards of both this site (http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/nutrition (http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/nutrition))--being low enough in antinutrient levels to be edible raw--and Ray Audette--being a food available to someone who is naked with nothing more than a sharp stick.
Rawkyle, you're still talking about partial adaptation, rather than the full adaptation that Tyler was talking about. Humans are partially adapted to all the foods they currently eat, including those of the SAD, that doesn't mean we are fully adapted to them, which is what Tyler was talking about and which is what Loren Cordain, Staffan Lindeberg and others have written about--the problems that arise from incomplete adaptation. If humans were fully adapted to all foods that we can eat and still reproduce, there would be no need for a "Paleo" diet at all and you wouldn't be here at this forum discussing it. Survival and reproduction are not the only factors in full adaptation. Have you read Cordain's The Paleo Diet or any of the writings of Lindeberg, Boyd Eaton, Ray Audette or any of the other Paleo diet writers? They discuss this at length. If Tyler's using the term "adaptation" the wrong way, then so are a lot of other scientists, including many more than the ones I mentioned.
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I'm afraid you are misrepresenting both what I and that study stated. I only made it clear, from the study, that the Hadza ate those tubers as a last resort to avoid famine(famine is , after all, a fairly frequent potential occurrence in HG societies given scarcity of foods). The study did indeed, contrary to your claims, make it very clear that the Hadza loathed the taste of the tubers and considered them the least nutritious of their foods, they simply picked them as they were, at various times of the year, somewhat more plentiful than their more preferred foods. Now, maybe they disliked one type of tuber more than the rest or some other quibble, but the fact remains that they loathed tubers as a food-group.
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On the contrary, you misrepresented my views, whereas I quoted yours (and I've asked you before, and I ask you again, to please quote me instead of trying to represent my views with your own words, as you invariably fail miserably at the latter--if you can't be bothered to quote me then please don't refer to my views at all). As usual, your criticisms, of which you seem to have an inordinate supply, apply more to yourself than your target.
Where in the Hadza study does it say that they loathe tubers or turn to them only in famine instead of just saying that tubers were fallback foods least preferred of five staples but eaten throughout most of each year? What I recall from it is that they ranked them last of the five staple foods that were studied. It would be ridiculous to interpret that as meaning that they loathed them. Surely you wouldn't stoop to that level of exaggeration? If the tubers were loathsome, how would they get the youth to eat them, especially given that most HGs are widely reported to practice rather laissez faire parenting?
As for "least nutritious," only five foods were tested in the Hadza study, so it would be irresponsible and unscientific to assume that the Hadza regard tubers as the least nutritious of all their foods based on that study. I think we can safely guess that tubers were the least nutritious of the five foods studied, based on their taste preferences, but to go farther than that would be irresponsible.
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The fact that a food is found to be tasteless does not prevent them from eating it simply so as to avoid famine. So your point is illogical.
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Where does it say that the Hazda in the study regarded tubers as "tasteless" or only ate tubers during famines? You could use the same ridiculous argument against meats, berries and baobab fruit, claiming that because they were lower rated than honey that they were only eaten to avoid famine. I'm not a big fan of tubers myself, but you're still using rather exaggerated language that undercuts the credibility of your argument. I notice that you failed to produce any evidence to support your extreme claims and your attacks on me. The Hadza study showed tubers to be a fallback food for the Hadza, not "loathsome." Loathsome is not even a term one would find in a scientific study. It's the language of fanatics.
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You clearly didn't even bother to check what the study's definition of a fallback food was, namely a food only eaten when a more popular food was not available, and tubers are mentioned in connection with using them during times of starvation/famine to ward off wasting etc. And those 5 categories of foods more or less cover most of what the Hadza eat, according to the study:-
"The Hadza are hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. Their diet can be conveniently categorized into five main categories: tubers, berries, meat, baobab, and honey. We showed the Hadza photos of these foods and asked them to rank them in order of preference. Honey was ranked the highest. Tubers, as expected from their low caloric value, were ranked lowest. Given that tubers are least preferred, we used kilograms of tubers arriving in camp across the year as a minimum estimate of their availability. Tubers fit the definition of fallback foods because they are the most continuously available but least preferred foods. Tubers are more often taken when berries are least available. We examined the impact of all foods by assessing variation in adult body mass index (BMI) and percent body fat (%BF) in relation to amount of foods arriving in camp. We found, controlling for region and season, women of reproductive age had a higher %BF in camps where more meat was acquired and a lower %BF where more tubers were taken. We discuss the implications of these results for the Hadza. We also discuss the importance of tubers in human evolution. Am J Phys Anthropol 140:751–758, 2009. VVC 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. Natural selection should favor exploitation of low-quality foods when they minimize wasting and starvation during hard times. The term ‘‘fallback foods’’ refers to these lower quality foods that are eaten when more preferred foods are not available. "
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You clearly didn't even bother to check what the study's definition of a fallback food was, namely a food only eaten when a more popular food was not available
I did read that and understood that, but I don't see that as meaning "loathsome"--so I don't know where you are getting that extreme unscientific claim from.
"The Hadza are hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. Their diet can be conveniently categorized into five main categories: tubers, berries, meat, baobab, and honey. We showed the Hadza photos of these foods and asked them to rank them in order of preference. Honey was ranked the highest. Tubers, as expected from their low caloric value, were ranked lowest. Given that tubers are least preferred, we used kilograms of tubers arriving in camp across the year as a minimum estimate of their availability. Tubers fit the definition of fallback foods because they are the most continuously available but least preferred foods. Tubers are more often taken when berries are least available. We examined the impact of all foods by assessing variation in adult body mass index (BMI) and percent body fat (%BF) in relation to amount of foods arriving in camp. We found, controlling for region and season, women of reproductive age had a higher %BF in camps where more meat was acquired and a lower %BF where more tubers were taken. We discuss the implications of these results for the Hadza. We also discuss the importance of tubers in human evolution. Am J Phys Anthropol 140:751–758, 2009. VVC 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. Natural selection should favor exploitation of low-quality foods when they minimize wasting and starvation during hard times. The term ‘‘fallback foods’’ refers to these lower quality foods that are eaten when more preferred foods are not available. "
All of this is what I have been saying from the beginning about tubers being fallback foods, but not necessarily "loathsome", and refutes your extreme claims. How do you see this as supporting your nonsense about tubers being regarded as "loathsome"? Again, where does the study say that tubers were seen as "loathsome"? If you had merely referred to tubers as fallback foods, I wouldn't have had the slightest quibble, but instead you went to the ridiculous extreme of saying they were loathsome. Why undercut your credibility in such an absurd way?
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This is just quibbling re wordage. The fact is that tubers are known to be rather tasteless, often require some form of processing in order to make them properly edible, such as with cassavas etc., and are used to ward off famine when nothing better is available.
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Now, of course, cooked foods do not kill instantly, but that does not per se imply adaptation, just that cooked foods are only toxic to a limited extent, nothing more.
I don't think I started out adapted to cooked meat at all. I was such a skinny bones before I became veg ... then again I remember getting a vaccine when I was about one year of age and who knows what else made me completely ill adapted to cooked meat. I've seen other babies that could not tolerate meat (cooked) when their siblings could, but I'm sure they were vaccinated too.
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This is just quibbling re wordage. The fact is that tubers are known to be rather tasteless, often require some form of processing in order to make them properly edible, such as with cassavas etc., and are used to ward off famine when nothing better is available.
Nonsense. "Loathsome" is not the same thing as least preferred/fallback of five staple foods by any stretch of the imagination. Calling it quibbling is a weak copout revealing your lack of evidence. Do you really believe that the Hadza would only eat tubers if they were starving instead of if they were just hungry and nothing better was available? Regardless of your opinion of tubers and other USOs, the ones that are edible raw have been consumed for millions of years, so you need to come up with some better evidence than your extreme opinions. We agree that they aren't a primary food, as I believed from the start (and I used to suspect that tubers, at least the ones that require cooking, were even more of a problem than I do now, partly due to the influence of Ray Audette's very negative opinion about them), but to call them loathsome and tasteless goes unnecessarily overboard and undercuts your credibility. Luckily, I know that you have a tendency toward hyperbole, so maybe you're just exaggerating to try to scare people off tubers in an effort to help others? You are intelligent enough to know full well that hominins never would have started eating tubers if they were truly "loathsome." Give me a break.
Besides, if you really believe that there's only a semantic difference, then you should have no problem ending your use of "loathsome" and "tasteless" and converting to using "fallback," as I and the study do.
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Pure hyperbole and quibbling on your part, I'm afraid, as usual.
Anyway, what I said was correct, the Hadzas did not consume tubers for fun, but solely because nothing else was available, so that they would starve otherwise. The quoted passages from the article re using tubers re prevention of wasting etc. prove my point.
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The trouble is that the environment the dogs live in is the same, regardless. The human input which keeps them alive is not part of the natural environment, per se
Yes it is. There is no such thing as "natural." Every "unnatural" thing ever devised by humans or any other species came from their brain which came from "nature." Anything around you, part of your diet or the air you breath, the different kind of radiation in the atmosphere, the gravity of the planet you live on, these are all the "environment." And how they interact with your genes in terms of you reproducing, which is the only part of the equation not considered the "environment" is your fitness.
Maybe dogs would resemble wolves, although I think some dog lineages are not directly from wolves. Certainly the dogs that could survive in the wild hunting down animals would be more like wolves than poodles.
Just to be quite clear just because you consider something "unnatural" doesn't mean it isn't part of the environment. "Natural" is a purely subjective term that has no use in discussing adaptation.
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The biophysical environment is further divided into 2 quite separate categories, the natural environment and the built environment:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_(biophysical) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_(biophysical))
As far as adaptation is concerned, it's rather pointless to suggest that one is automatically adapted to everything in an environment. I mean neither wolves nor humans can survive, unaided, underwater for more than a few minutes or so. The fact that humans can survive longer underwater due to extra technology such as scuba-diving gear, does not change the fact that humans are not adapted to breathing water.
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Pure hyperbole and quibbling on your part, I'm afraid, as usual.
Weak excuses for lack of evidence to support your hyperbole, as usual.
Anyway, what I said was correct, the Hadzas did not consume tubers for fun, but solely because nothing else was available, so that they would starve otherwise. The quoted passages from the article re using tubers re prevention of wasting etc. prove my point.
Who said anything about consuming tubers for fun? Still more hyperbole. l)
I think the term you're looking for is hunger, not starvation, which is hyperbole at best. They don't wait until they're starving before they'll eat tubers, they eat them if they're hungry and nothing else is available. Hunger is not starvation (see definitions below, feel free to present other sources), unless you've changed the definition or something. A food that is "taken when more preferred foods are not available in sufficient quantities" is not the same thing as a food eaten only when starving. Surely even you don't regard the difference between the two as quibbling. They also were found to prefer honey over meat and fruit. You're not going to argue that that study means that meat and fruit were semi-starvation foods, are you? The quoted passages prove my point, as usual, not yours.
Tubers are fallback foods for the Hadza, not starvation foods. It looks like we're still in disagreement on this one and shall have to agree to disagree to avoid further tangent. If you want to discuss it further, perhaps we should move the discussion to the tuber thread (http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/general-discussion/non-mutant-fruits-and-vegetables/msg61970/#msg61970 (http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/general-discussion/non-mutant-fruits-and-vegetables/msg61970/#msg61970)).
Starvation: suffering or death caused by hunger:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/starvation?region=us (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/starvation?region=us)
Starvation is a severe reduction in vitamin, nutrient and energy intake. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation)
starve [stahrv] Show IPA verb, starved, starv·ing.
verb (used without object)
1. to die or perish from lack of food or nourishment.
2. to be in the process of perishing or suffering severely from hunger.
3. to suffer from extreme poverty and need.
4. to feel a strong need or desire: The child was starving for affection.
5. Chiefly British Dialect . to perish or suffer extremely from cold.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/starve (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/starve)
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Such above waffle means nothing whatsoever, just less than chaff in the breeze, given that the excerpt I quoted from the study specifically stated that tubers were the least preferred foods, being seen as a way to ward of wasting/famine. No mention was made that honey was a starvation food, just tubers.
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Still more of the same tiresome hyperbole. "Least preferred" food does not mean starvation/famine food. No mention was made in that study that any food was a starvation food, just fallback food. Again, fallback food does not equal starvation food. There's no need to change the study's use of the term "fallback food" to the misleading hyperbole of "starvation food" or "loathesome food." You failed to show where the report used those terms and it was those misleading terms that I took issue with. We agree that the study found tubers to be fallback foods for the Hadza. You take that a ridiculous step further into calling them starvation foods, which is where we shall have to disagree.
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The biophysical environment is further divided into 2 quite separate categories, the natural environment and the built environment:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_(biophysical) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_(biophysical))
As far as adaptation is concerned, it's rather pointless to suggest that one is automatically adapted to everything in an environment. I mean neither wolves nor humans can survive, unaided, underwater for more than a few minutes or so. The fact that humans can survive longer underwater due to extra technology such as scuba-diving gear, does not change the fact that humans are not adapted to breathing water.
That's right humans and wolves are not adapted to living underwater. But some animals are, or are close to it. Dolphins cannot breathe underwater but are adapted to spending their entire life cycle living in water and or that time a good chunk is underwater. So there's a case of not being able to breathe water but being adapted to living underwater, at least for the majority of their lives.
If an organism is reproducing in an environment then by definition it is automatically considered adapted to all of the pieces of that environment. That wikipedia distinction is somebodies made up construct. It's important to point out that adaptation is also a made up construct, just like your use of the word "natural" and "healthy." These are all made up constructs to represent ideas and the only issue here is you're using a construct that has a pretty well defined definition in biology (adaptation) and using to mean more than it does mean. Individual organisms do not adapt, species adapt. Giraffes didn't grow long necks to get to high tree leaves, the giraffes with longer necks already by chance mutation had access to more varied food sources and out bred the smaller necked ones. If there had been no random variability in neck length in giraffes then they wouldn't have adapted in that way. If the short necked giraffes were able to survive in their environment then they were already adapted, but the longer necked ones were better adapted and out competed them. This competition is purely summed up in birth rate, the only thing that matters is at the end of the day (or thousands of years) who is still around and in what numbers. How you got there is not contained within the word adaptation, it's simply that you did get there.
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Cro-magnon is the name of some place in France where 'they' found ancient remnants of modern man - homo sapiens. So cro-magnon is just a term for the early homo sapiens in Europe. i.e. Cro-magnon = Homo sapiens.
Neanderthals, or Homo Neanderthalensis are the homonids who colonised Europe prior to the cro-magnon. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa through a genetic bottleneck due to extreme drought. These homo sapiens then existed there for 10s of thousands of years with little advancement, until there was an explosion in technology despite no actual physical changes occurring - most commonly attributed to development of complex language.
Prior to this explosion there is evidence of homo sapiens moving towards Europe through the middle east but falling back to Africa. The explosion in technology allowed homo sapiens to survive and thrive in Europe, where previously only the hardy Neanderthals were able to survive. It's thought that the Neanderthals were then out-competed and out-bred by the homo sapiens but likely contributed some DNA through interbreeding.
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And Tyler, in your 'conversation' with PaleoPhil you sound like a moron.
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Drivel, as usual, PP, and can't you at least reduce your posts 'length, instead of that longwinded b*ll?
An excerpt from that study proves your point wrong as usual - *¨sigh:-
"Natural selection should favor exploitation of low-quality foods when they minimize wasting and starvation during hard times."
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And Tyler, in your 'conversation' with PaleoPhil you sound like a moron.
Not in the slightest.
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That's right humans and wolves are not adapted to living underwater. But some animals are, or are close to it. Dolphins cannot breathe underwater but are adapted to spending their entire life cycle living in water and or that time a good chunk is underwater. So there's a case of not being able to breathe water but being adapted to living underwater, at least for the majority of their lives.
If an organism is reproducing in an environment then by definition it is automatically considered adapted to all of the pieces of that environment.
The point is that only some types of animals are adapted to breathing water. Dolphins, for example, have some disadvantages, anyway, since they need to surface in order to breathe, so they are most certainly not fully adapted to their particular environment. Their ability to breed does not change their inability to adapt to get oxygen from water.
Also, you have not really addressed my point which was that technology allows humans to survive even when they are maladapted to their environment. Take away all that technology, and most humans today would die like flies.
As for the giraffe comment, I am more and more convinced that major evolutionary changes are driven by epigenetics rather than just random fluctuations in genes combined with natural selection.
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Giraffes didn't grow long necks to get to high tree leaves, the giraffes with longer necks already by chance mutation had access to more varied food sources and out bred the smaller necked ones. If there had been no random variability in neck length in giraffes then they wouldn't have adapted in that way. If the short necked giraffes were able to survive in their environment then they were already adapted, but the longer necked ones were better adapted and out competed them. This competition is purely summed up in birth rate, the only thing that matters is at the end of the day (or thousands of years) who is still around and in what numbers. How you got there is not contained within the word adaptation, it's simply that you did get there.
I still contend that there is more at play in the process of adaption than random mutation and natural selection. This of course is only one of my insane theories that I have no evidence to back up , but please contemplate with me the possibility.
Take the Giraffes for example. Their shorter necked ancestors must of had lived under famished circumstances in which they had to struggle to reach enough food to survive. They may of had to stretch and strain their entire lives in order obtain enough food to barley survive. Those ancestors who lived on the brink of starvation my have developed epigenetic adaptions triggered by some genetic determinism survival mechanism, and those changes may be the catalyst of what people think is random mutation followed by natural selection, but in reality it is a much more intelligently crafted genetic adaption that was engineered to better the chances of the future generations survival. Of course natural selection still plays its role in weeding out those adaptions that are sub-adequate or even detrimental. All I am saying is that there are epigenetic changes that are triggered by some survival mechanism inherent within the genetic program that is the main catalyst behind proactive genetic change(or what we call adaption) Its far more complex than random mutation.
Cro-magnon is the name of some place in France where 'they' found ancient remnants of modern man - homo sapiens. So cro-magnon is just a term for the early homo sapiens in Europe. i.e. Cro-magnon = Homo sapiens.
Neanderthals, or Homo Neanderthalensis are the hominids who colonised Europe prior to the cro-magnon. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa through a genetic bottleneck due to extreme drought. These homo sapiens then existed there for 10s of thousands of years with little advancement, until there was an explosion in technology despite no actual physical changes occurring - most commonly attributed to development of complex language.
Prior to this explosion there is evidence of homo sapiens moving towards Europe through the middle east but falling back to Africa. The explosion in technology allowed homo sapiens to survive and thrive in Europe, where previously only the hardy Neanderthals were able to survive. It's thought that the Neanderthals were then attempted and out-bred by the homo sapiens but likely contributed some DNA through interbreeding.
I basically agree with this.
Originally I only mentioned Cro=magnon in the context of the kind of adaptions I outlayed in the paragraph above. Our Cro magnon?/ mutt mixed breed ancestors were forced to adapt to changes in environment and those changes are responsible for smaller frames, smaller brains, the ability to survive off of a more plant rich diet, and even possible brain structure changes that allowed for the evolution of language and thus civilization. (all real and relevant subject matter to the discussion Paleo Phil.) Without understanding how adaption works how could you possibly understand how we have adapted to cooked foods? It may seem off topic but its relevant to my own understanding and I only wish to add an extra dynamic to the debate.
Of course TD loves to jump on people for trivial errors and ignored what I was at heart attempting to express, when he pointed out that Cro magnons were our direct ancestors, which led to my digressing from the main subject in order to explain to him that cro magnon was just a blanket term that covered many types of homo sapiens that were the precursors to modern humans. The information that I have read was too vague and ambiguous for my own curiosity to be satisfied so I made a simple request for more information. Of course I was rebutted with another vague article which did little to satisfy my curiosity, and to add insult to injury , I was rebuked for a spelling error and told that I was guilty of going off topic.( Which I rebuke )
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Didn't GS vastly improve the spell-check recently? In which case, people really ought to double-check their posts. People are no doubt annoyed with me routinely editing posts in order to improve the spelling in them, but I just think it vastly improves a forum's credibility/readability if the spelling is accurate.
Minor point re Cro-Magnon:- the stance of modern anthropologists is, simply, that cro-magnon were in fact "modern man", not a separate species or whatever,with the term usually being applied to those modern humans in europe from c.40,000 to c.20,000 years ago, but sometimes used to describe remains from that era from the rest of the world(though, more usually "early modern man" is used as a term, in preference).
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That's right humans and wolves are not adapted to living underwater. But some animals are, or are close to it. Dolphins cannot breathe underwater but are adapted to spending their entire life cycle living in water and or that time a good chunk is underwater. So there's a case of not being able to breathe water but being adapted to living underwater, at least for the majority of their lives.
If an organism is reproducing in an environment then by definition it is automatically considered adapted to all of the pieces of that environment. That wikipedia distinction is somebodies made up construct. It's important to point out that adaptation is also a made up construct, just like your use of the word "natural" and "healthy." These are all made up constructs to represent ideas and the only issue here is you're using a construct that has a pretty well defined definition in biology (adaptation) and using to mean more than it does mean. Individual organisms do not adapt, species adapt. Giraffes didn't grow long necks to get to high tree leaves, the giraffes with longer necks already by chance mutation had access to more varied food sources and out bred the smaller necked ones. If there had been no random variability in neck length in giraffes then they wouldn't have adapted in that way. If the short necked giraffes were able to survive in their environment then they were already adapted, but the longer necked ones were better adapted and out competed them. This competition is purely summed up in birth rate, the only thing that matters is at the end of the day (or thousands of years) who is still around and in what numbers. How you got there is not contained within the word adaptation, it's simply that you did get there.
good posts.
Although I think at least the mainstream view of evolution is sorta opposite to what you are saying here. You said in this thread http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/hot-topics/new-daniel-vitalis-interview-about-raw-food-evolution/msg64260/#msg64260 (http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/hot-topics/new-daniel-vitalis-interview-about-raw-food-evolution/msg64260/#msg64260) (which seems to contain lots of these same arguments in case one is interested) that you objected to DV's stance against evolution. Although I can't speak for other people, I think many of the counter-evolutionary ideas that aren't motivated by religion sing a similar tune to acknowledging that things change..but not due to some kind of constraint or adversity causing the adaptation itself.
I'm never found anything coherent in regards to how extreme raw ideologies and evolutionary ideas of any kind reconcile themselves. All evolutionary scientists (as well as technicians and scientists behind any study on cooked foods) would have surely been raw paleo dieters if they believed such a thing had so much importance. (ok ok..please do not obsess over this TD and others. :P)
Despite there being no real satisfying examples (don't care to hear otherwise right now) of things 'evolving' due to pressing factors we generally DO have examples of something that would satisfy Tyler or others, the idea that things 'adapt' to something by scratching some aspect of health. Say the old panda thing that gets thrown around here eating bamboo for however many years.
With me I can strike a compromise and agree that perhaps the adaptions people point out in Asians with soy or something or some whites with milk or even cooked food may infact not be net positive gains for the human race. I still think these generally take a back seat if one can compare the levels of success and health these peoples had in comparison to all the other kinds of factors and the 'diets' people can come up with today raw or not. One doesn't have to glamorize HGs to realize they had a certain superiority to many of our gurus and outspoken proponents of perfect diets.
I don't think one can resolve such things in this format but to me Daniels idea of 'surthival' (which I admit is a bit hokey) seems to be the perfect reaction against the so called 'purity' of raw foodists. This claim that diet can give some abstract idea of health divorced of adapting to be healthy and thrive in modern environments. This means not being sensitive to EMF, or constantly having detoxes, or accepting being underweight or whatever because there isn't enough healthy types of foods. I could probably come up with more examples but basically any other ideas people present which contrast reality. I think the tone of this site is a lot better compared to others regarding that, but it seems that message alone is worthwhile to be promoting to a wide array of raw or even 'paleo' ideologues.
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Take away all that technology, and most humans today would die like flies.
What's the difference, from life's perspective, between human (or other animals) technology and their teeth or claws or eyesight? Technology comes from use of a real organ called the brain that is built based on your organisms genetic code. This then allows you to perform behaviors, just like a bird that knows where to fly at changing seasons and anteaters that know how to dig for ants, which allow you to survive and reproduce.
You have made up definitions for words like "natural" and "adaptation" that aren't objective but subjective to you. Technology came from humans who came from what you call the "natural" world. Tell me Tyler, at what point exactly did human behavior become "unnatural?" What exactly is the tipping point, tell me what that word means.
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Obviously, the tipping point came when fire was invented. Fire greatly reduced the forces of natural selection by allowing hominids to ward off predators as the latter are afraid of fire.
I would not consider humans as being "natural". I mean we have birth-control pills, we have cars which make us walk less which explains our modern-day obesity epidemic, we have lights at night which disrupts our natural sleeping-cycles so that many people take sleeping-pills etc. etc.
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Obviously, the tipping point came when fire was invented. Fire greatly reduced the forces of natural selection by allowing hominids to ward off predators as the latter are afraid of fire.
I don't find the tipping point so obvious. It's hard for me to imagine looking at a bunch of humans, thinking they're "natural," and then all of a sudden one of them is rubbing sticks together and makes a fire and I go "yep there it is, of course they're "unnatural" now." If another species used fire would they automatically become "unnatural?" Some species of pine trees cannot seed unless they are burned by a forest fire. How is the ability for an organisms brain to figure out how to control something like fire different than a dolphins' brains' ability to figure out how to control the sonic energy they can produce to heard fish? Or when apes use sticks to get at insects. How is your brain not a part of natural selection? Would you not have been selected out of the gene pool if you were not smart enough to use fire to ward off predators? Is that "unnatural" selection?
I would not consider humans as being "natural". I mean we have birth-control pills, we have cars which make us walk less which explains our modern-day obesity epidemic, we have lights at night which disrupts our natural sleeping-cycles so that many people take sleeping-pills etc. etc.
I'm still waiting for a definition of the word "natural." So sleeping pills are "unnatural," is chewing valerian root to fall asleep "unnatural?" What if the sleeping pills are extracts of that root? At what point is it "unnatural?"
As for walking less explaining the modern day obesity epidemic I'm flabbergasted that you would suggest and/or believe that. Are you claiming you can treat obesity by prescribing walking? Has that study not been done many times with a failure rate of 100%?
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I meant simply that the obesity epidemic is largely explained by not doing enough exercise in general. In the past, we had no access to cars or planes so we had to slog our way for miles. If one goes further back before roads were built, it was even tougher so that one either was physically fit or died at a much younger age. Look at how slim the modern masai are, even though they are living on grain-filled diets, for example.
The issue is not "making use of" natural fires but creating fires artificially, something no other species has done. This gives an enormous boost in survival re warding off predators as animals are terrified of fires, thus reducing natural selection heavily, plus fires give warmth thus saving humans from exposure to cold.
Passing on the knowledge of how to start and make use of a fire is a question of Culture, not intelligence - intelligence is needed to discover/invent artificial fires in the first place, but the teaching of its use is pretty straightforward. Virtually any low-IQ human can be taught to do simple tasks. I personally know of one adult in particular, with a mental age of 2, who can do all sorts of tasks such as carrying buckets loaded with sand down steps, unlock gates etc., simply because he was constantly trained like one of Pavlov's dogs.
As for the definition of "natural", that is obvious:- behaviours/habits routinely practised by wild animals. Some things like using valerian root are natural since other animals use herbs too, while taking processed pills isn't since wild animals do not make them at all.
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Passing on the knowledge of how to start and make use of a fire is a question of Culture, not intelligence - intelligence is needed to discover/invent artificial fires in the first place, but the teaching of its use is pretty straightforward.
That's why every animal can be taught how to do it...
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Sorry Tyler, a good friend of mine of more than three decades just died suddenly of rapidly-progressing cancer and other friends are sick with cancer (I've reached the middle-aged period where it starts to become somewhat common among people near my age--one of the downsides of eating healthy is surviving to see many of the people around you suffer and die from the curses of modern civilization), so I'm not in the mood to debate right now, but I'll try to remember to respond. I don't share your interpretation of the quote you cited, but maybe we can discuss that in the future. For now we can agree to disagree, if that's OK with you. I don't expect I'll change your mind, which I'm not trying to do anyway (I'm not big on that; I just try to explain and explore my views and learn about other views, which I find debating helps with at times).
Sabertooth, if any of your comments were directed to me, I hope you didn't take any offense at anything I wrote. I was only trying to help with the spelling info. Your success story is motivating. Have you heard anything more about the potential TV show you were interviewed for?
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I meant simply that the obesity epidemic is largely explained by not doing enough exercise in general.
If that is so then putting study subjects on an exercise plan would cause significant long term weight loss, correct? Would you care to show me evidence of that happening?
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I actually didn't think there was anyone left in this crazy alternative diet world that thinks people are fat due to inactivity. Generally almost everyone other than exercise freaks have more or less the same level oflow activity. Some being the most extreme just walking to a car or rolling around on a cart but with many millions of others having all kinds of body types doing very little or any exercise.
Its theoretically possible for some people to lose weight merely by adjusting their activity, with others not losing at all, or just temporarily. Things like removing carbs or going on other restrictive raw or extreme low fat diets generally results in weight loss without exercise for many.
Going with the general subject, Its pretty accepted if one reads all the 'paleo' blogs and such that poorly constructed diets (and the genetics inherited by such) as well as environmental and food related toxins lead to diseased conditions, destroyed metabolisms and stored fat. Ironically because HGs needed to acquire and process their food and be active, the range what they ate was entirely realistic to surviving their environment and sustainable for both it and their bodies. Most people on raw diets have a health, fitness level and relationship to their environment that is totally unrealistic, being unable to actually acquire their food year round or even at all because of this physical discrepancy and in many cases can't even create sustainable health.
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That's why every animal can be taught how to do it...
I'm sure a chimp could be taught to strike a match...
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If that is so then putting study subjects on an exercise plan would cause significant long term weight loss, correct? Would you care to show me evidence of that happening?
Yep:-
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15925949 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15925949)
Obviously, it's a question of activity-levels too. The activity-level of a rower of ancient triremes is way, way beyond what 99.99 percent of people do nowadays as regards daily physical activity, so that trireme-rower would find it much easier to stay slim.
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"The Hadza are hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. Their diet can be conveniently categorized into five main categories: tubers, berries, meat, baobab, and honey. We showed the Hadza photos of these foods and asked them to rank them in order of preference. Honey was ranked the highest. Tubers, as expected from their low caloric value, were ranked lowest. Given that tubers are least preferred, we used kilograms of tubers arriving in camp across the year as a minimum estimate of their availability. Tubers fit the definition of fallback foods because they are the most continuously available but least preferred foods. Tubers are more often taken when berries are least available. We examined the impact of all foods by assessing variation in adult body mass index (BMI) and percent body fat (%BF) in relation to amount of foods arriving in camp. We found, controlling for region and season, women of reproductive age had a higher %BF in camps where more meat was acquired and a lower %BF where more tubers were taken. We discuss the implications of these results for the Hadza. We also discuss the importance of tubers in human evolution. Am J Phys Anthropol 140:751–758, 2009. VVC 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. Natural selection should favor exploitation of low-quality foods when they minimize wasting and starvation during hard times. The term ‘‘fallback foods’’ refers to these lower quality foods that are eaten when more preferred foods are not available. "
So the fruit eaten by the Hadza as a staple food are tastier and provide more calories than cooked tubers. This is a nice argument against Wrangham´s theory - especially since nutritious and edible fruits might have been more plentiful in the paleolithic than today:
The remaining hunting, berry, tuber, and honey grounds of the Hadza are threatened by encroachment. (...) the Datooga are clearing the Hadza lands on either side of the now fully settled valley for pasture for their goats and cattle. They hunt out the game, and the clearing destroys the berries, tubers, and honey that the Hadza rely on (...)
http://maps.thefullwiki.org/Hadza_people (http://maps.thefullwiki.org/Hadza_people)
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Yes, and if you group the baobab fruit together with the berries, then combined fruits category becomes even more important. Plus, KD is right that not all adaptation is positive, and he wisely pointed to the giant panda example, an animal which physically degenerated from eating a diet that it was not fully adapted to and it is now nearly extinct. Despite eating its current bamboo-heavy diet for millions of years (according to scientists), it still is not fully adapted to it (again, according to scientists that study the animal).
There is another animal that is not fully adapted to its current diet and is physically degenerating as a result--modern Western human beings! So much for Wrongham's nonsense. The more I learn about his views and bogus claims and agendas, the lower my opinion goes. Unfortunately, the level of ignorance about raw animal foods is quite high and lots of people accept his claims at face value because his speculations support their own cherished views and habits. It's not just coincidence that lots of Wrongham fans happen to eat lots of cooked tubers and other cooked foods, and many are vegetarians, and they seem to be eager to find justifications for their practices.
Via my experiments, my own diet has developed into being rather similar to the Hadza diet, interestingly, which was not as a result of emulating their diet, but rather via testing various foods. However, I don't eat as much raw tubers as they do, as there's only one in the local market (jicama) and I don't care for it, nor tolerate it very well. Soaked raw sweet potato tastes pretty good to me, and I think Iguana eats it, but I'm not sure that's a good idea for me, as I seem to handle starches more poorly than most.
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I'm sure a chimp could be taught to strike a match...
And this is or is not a measure of the intelligence they have because of their brain (which is genetically very close to ours)?
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Yep:-
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15925949 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15925949)
Obviously, it's a question of activity-levels too. The activity-level of a rower of ancient triremes is way, way beyond what 99.99 percent of people do nowadays as regards daily physical activity, so that trireme-rower would find it much easier to stay slim.
Right in the abstract: "CONCLUSION:
Diet associated with exercise results in significant and clinically meaningful initial weight loss. This is partially sustained after 1 y."
and in RESULTS:
"In both groups, almost half of the initial weight loss was regained after 1 y."
Also this is a study about diet + exercise interventions vs. diet without exercise interventions. I don't see in the meta-analysis a look at any study of exercise without diet interventions.
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And this is or is not a measure of the intelligence they have because of their brain (which is genetically very close to ours)?
Not really. The point is that many animals have started fires by accident:-
http://dogblog.dogster.com/2010/07/15/pets-start-1000-house-fires-per-year-who-knew/ (http://dogblog.dogster.com/2010/07/15/pets-start-1000-house-fires-per-year-who-knew/)
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Right in the abstract: "CONCLUSION:
Diet associated with exercise results in significant and clinically meaningful initial weight loss. This is partially sustained after 1 y."
and in RESULTS:
"In both groups, almost half of the initial weight loss was regained after 1 y."
Also this is a study about diet + exercise interventions vs. diet without exercise interventions. I don't see in the meta-analysis a look at any study of exercise without diet interventions.
There are some studies done solely on exercise(eg:-
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11570117 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11570117)
).
Re the other stuff you mentioned:- Obviously as soon as people stop exercising, they will regain weight, that's obvious, and does not contradict the study per se. My point is that if we had daily physical activity on the same level as our forefathers had centuries ago, we would be even slimmer, and it would be more difficult for us to be obese, even when on a really bad diet.
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Wrongham
:)
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Not really. The point is that many animals have started fires by accident:-
http://dogblog.dogster.com/2010/07/15/pets-start-1000-house-fires-per-year-who-knew/ (http://dogblog.dogster.com/2010/07/15/pets-start-1000-house-fires-per-year-who-knew/)
Are you comparing humans control of fire to cook food, create warmth and ward off predators to dogs and cats knocking over candles in houses?
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Are you comparing humans control of fire to cook food, create warmth and ward off predators to dogs and cats knocking over candles in houses?
Yes. I am pointing out that inventing fire requires a great deal more intelligence than just starting a fire.
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Yes. I am pointing out that inventing fire requires a great deal more intelligence than just starting a fire.
So what is your point? I am saying that the ability to control fire is due to an advanced organ called the brain that is under genetic control similar to the other organs of the body. Since humans "invented" fire and have continued to come up with more applications for and better mastery of fire control I don't see how you're relating to your original point that using fire isn't an adaptive feature just like larger muscles or sharper teeth.
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Using fire is not the same as better teeth or muscles. Controlling fire has, by contrast, led to a huge decrease in natural selection to the point where, arguably, there is now an opposite, negative pressure forcing us humans to degenerate, where the weakest are also increasingly allowed to survive. That's not even taking into account the negative effects of cooked food consumption on human evolution re epigenetics and so on...
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We're going to have to agree to disagree. And you can disagree with biology's definition of natural selection as well. I don't see how a real organ like the brain giving certain behaviors that confer reproductive advantage (controlling fire, using a stick to get at insects, approaching prey down wind etc) can be considered outside of natural selection. If I were you I would try and make sure that my prejudice against cooked food for my own health reasons is not clouding my thought process about things related to cooked food, such as control of fire and it's role in natural selection.
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The simple fact is that human control of fire is merely an aspect of human culture/technology which has nothing whatsoever to do with natural selection, merely hindering it. No one can credibly claim that control of fire aided natural selection since, obviously, control of fire led to increased warmth(and therefore reduced numbers of deaths from exposure and increased survival of the weak) as well as helping to ward off predators who would otherwise have culled the weaker members of palaeo human tribes. Given that fire helps those weaker to survive, in the 2 abovementioned ways, it, overall, can give only a reproductive disadvantage, not an advantageous one.
Approaching prey downwind or getting at insects with sticks are not just a human phenomenon, despite your claim, but found among some other wildlife. I am therefore not suggesting that it isn't natural.
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'aided natural selection' what are you on about? Making fire is like making tools, making clothes, making weapons, making and setting traps, storing water in gourds, firing bows and throwing spears; as well as ability to use language, ability to trade, and to get on well with a group . People who weren't capable of doing these kinds of things would not have done very well at passing on their genes...
Tyler is talking specifically about natural selection for physical prowess.
Using fire, tools, weapons, clothes etc have allowed less physically able individuals to survive, yes... But it also favoured those who were better able to use these things - better mentally able. It was still natural selection, just for things more and more relating to the brain over the rest of the body.
Of course, civilisation allows people to survive who are neither physically nor mentally able, but that's a different matter.
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Just reading this interesting conversation for the first time and would like to make a comment about something from a much earlier section where Cherimoya was eating wild almonds where it was replied that:
Quote
The wild form of domesticated almond grows in parts of the Levant; almonds must first have been taken into cultivation in this region. The fruit of the wild forms contains the glycoside amygdalin, "which becomes transformed into deadly prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) after crushing, chewing, or any other injury to the seed."[6]
However, domesticated almonds are not toxic
End quote
This brings up what the definition of what toxin means and how it relates to survival. Amygdalin is considered to be a cancer cure. People eat handfuls of apricot kernels (well over what is considered to be "deadly") to cure themselves of cancer. I can't remember the culture atm that eats masses of apricot kernels (highest content of amygdalin of the nuts/seeds) - but they never get cancer and people have sworn by eating apricot kernels as having cured their incurable cancers. Supposedly, the cyanide only attacks aberrant throughback (cancer) cells and not normal cells because we have some enzyme that protects us (at least according to debatable science). The other theory is that the toxic substance supercharges an immune response and makes the overall organism stronger. Supposedly you just need to increase slowly - mostly because the kernels also reduce blood pressure until your system adapts. Either way - Amygdalin can prevent and cure cancer and hence contribute to the survival of our species whether the adherents to the enzyme studies are correct or not. But....... with our big brains we also know that there are many other highly affective cures that don't come with the same risk... because our brains are apparently too small to want to explore it more - thinking that money is more important.
This brings up that there are many species that eat foods that have certain poisons and toxic substances in them because there is a greater gain from other components or qualities to the food. Just because cooked foods still have toxins does not mean that eating them was not a greater good or that there are not ways in which we adapted that might not be evident as of yet at our level of understanding. It took them some time to discover the enzyme that made eating apricot kernels not kill people. Along with that smaller brain came many great advancements and I'm not yet totally convinced that brain size per se is conclusively a measure of greater intelligence. I'd be happy to be proven wrong as this is based only my pondering on the incredible intelligence of some bird species with dramatically small brains for their overall size. Super tiny brains - some of the highest intelligence in the animal world. Makes one wonder? Is it just brain size or could have living so close together and cooperating in groups and using language near the water where we had to cooperate to raise the grains have had affects on our intelligence not related to diet? Might it be a leap to consider only food and brain size when considering intelligence?
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Dorothy, you mean vitamin B17 or laetrile?
Apricot kernels look like almonds when I crack them to eat them.
Some of the raw vegan sites sell backs full of cracked kernels to snack on.
Maybe it's only poison on a meat heavy diet?
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'aided natural selection' what are you on about? Making fire is like making tools, making clothes, making weapons, making and setting traps, storing water in gourds, firing bows and throwing spears; as well as ability to use language, ability to trade, and to get on well with a group . People who weren't capable of doing these kinds of things would not have done very well at passing on their genes...
Tyler is talking specifically about natural selection for physical prowess.
Using fire, tools, weapons, clothes etc have allowed less physically able individuals to survive, yes... But it also favoured those who were better able to use these things - better mentally able. It was still natural selection, just for things more and more relating to the brain over the rest of the body.
Of course, civilisation allows people to survive who are neither physically nor mentally able, but that's a different matter.
No, I was not just talking about natural selection in terms of physical characteristics, but mental characteristics as well.
The above examples are dud, these days. Setting traps is a skill most people in the developed world would be hopeless at, for example. Modern technology allows one to circumvent the need to get along in a group - for example, those who have inherited wealth have no real need to "get along" with others as they can pay people to do what they want - the Internet also helps avoid interaction. Storing gourds, firing bows, throwing spears are also meaningless, nowadays. Indeed, one could argue that, even in ancient times, they did not help reproductive success. I mean, the chiefs of tribes generally did not fight or do manual labour, yet had far more wives/mistresses on average than other men, and so had more children than the latter, and were more likely to survive since they were non-combatants.
Besides, what you are talking about is technology, and to a lesser extent culture(re mention of clothes/fire/weapons etc.) which is, of course, quite separate from physical characteristics.
Indeed, culture also ruins natural selection, just like technology. For example, all political philosophies try to socially engineer humans to be different from what they naturally are. Egalitarianism is the worst example thereof in terms of ruining natural selection, but the other ideologies all are unnatural, too. Eyeglasses, a common aspect of technology, notoriously make peoples' eyesight worse. Watching TV notoriously makes small children unable to concentrate and learn properly. And so on and so forth...
Indeed, the clincher is that modern culture/technology does not just allow those to breed who in previous times would have been far too physically and mentally unfit to breed, but it also makes it more difficult for the more intelligent to breed. It is a notorious fact that the more intelligent a person is, nowadays, the fewer children he or she will have. Education also lowers reproductive success since people , as a result, put off having children until later, plus they are more likely to have been taught about birth-control. PHDs have the least number of children, for example.
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Apricot kernels look like almonds when I crack them to eat them.
Some of the raw vegan sites sell backs full of cracked kernels to snack on.
Maybe it's only poison on a meat heavy diet?
Google says:
There are two types of apricot kernels, bitter and sweet. Bitter apricot kernels naturally contain a compound called amygdalin, which has the potential to release cyanide when ingested by humans. Small amounts of cyanide are detoxified by the human body but high doses can be lethal. Alternatively, sweet apricot kernels and the fruit (flesh) of apricots do not pose a risk of adverse health effects from cyanide exposure because they contain lower levels of amygdalin.
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/pubs/securit/2009-apricots-abricots/index-eng.php (http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/pubs/securit/2009-apricots-abricots/index-eng.php)
We test our apricot kernels for presence of cyanide and find the presence to be consistently less than or equal to 5mg/kg (which is the limit of accuracy of the test). Hence you would have to eat at the very least 725 of our apricot kernels in a day to approach a dose which the committee currently consider the to be the (TDI) tolerable daily intake (i.e. 2 kernels a day).
http://www.fullwellmill.co.uk/health/kernels.htm (http://www.fullwellmill.co.uk/health/kernels.htm)
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Dorothy, you mean vitamin B17 or laetrile?
Apricot kernels look like almonds when I crack them to eat them.
Some of the raw vegan sites sell backs full of cracked kernels to snack on.
Maybe it's only poison on a meat heavy diet?
Hi Zi. Amydgalin I think was the name that came first if my memory serves me and then they took the element out and gave it the name of b17 to make it sound official - like it was another essential b vitamin and then when they started using it as a specific cancer treatment they started calling it laetrile. I think that was the progression - but they are all one and the same.
They do look much like almonds but have a nice amaretto flavor to them. Peach pits have even more of that nice flavor and are also high in b17. I doubt if perceived b17 risk relates to high meat diets just because raw vegans like them. Raw vegans are always looking for new food sources to supplement a narrow diet. People cure their cancers and eat masses of them whether they are on vegan diets or not.
Hi Hanna. What one has to remember is that apricot kernels have been considered a powerful cancer cure for a long time now so....... like all the other natural cancer cures great lengths are gone through to make sure that they appear to be as toxic as possible and wikipedia when it comes to alternative therapies is rarely a good source because a lot of trouble is gone through to discredit therapies there in particular. Cancer is a major money-making business in this country. The bitter kernels are higher in b17 content so that's why people fighting cancer buy those.... but they aren't different species..... just different cultivars and growing conditions.
There is very little agreement over the toxicity of these seeds which doesn't matter anyway because it might be the toxicity itself which produces the healing! I would not suggest eating them actually. My body doesn't like them and neither does my dogs. For all I know they might be toxic, or they might not. My big point is that the component that is considered toxic by at least some people in itself might actually be helpful to the survival of entire cultures because in those cultures that eat them, no one dies of cancer, the life-expectancy is longer, and there would be more opportunities to reproduce.
Btw - there are MUCH better cures for cancer and ways to prevent cancer. I was just using apricot kernels as means to make a bigger point about toxic substances in foods, adaptation, evolution and survival of species.
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Hi Zi. Amydgalin I think was the name that came first if my memory serves me and then they took the element out and gave it the name of b17 to make it sound official - like it was another essential b vitamin and then when they started using it as a specific cancer treatment they started calling it laetrile. I think that was the progression - but they are all one and the same.
They do look much like almonds but have a nice amaretto flavor to them. Peach pits have even more of that nice flavor and are also high in b17. I doubt if perceived b17 risk relates to high meat diets just because raw vegans like them. Raw vegans are always looking for new food sources to supplement a narrow diet. People cure their cancers and eat masses of them whether they are on vegan diets or not.
Hi Dorothy. In my family we ate plum kernals etc, didn't 'waste' a thing. "Didn't" is a key word there. I've been living kind of disposably for the past fifteen years. I hope to change that back permanently. I remember I first heard about laetrile I think it was the early 1970's. People were going to Mexico for the treatment. My family has always for generations liked apricots and cracking almonds etc. I always liked bitter flavors too, except when I'm eating raw animal foods. I don't think eating peach flesh, that there's laetrile there. I think eating fruit flesh necessitates having something bitter to make it balanced.
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Hi Dorothy. In my family we ate plum kernals etc, didn't 'waste' a thing. "Didn't" is a key word there. I've been living kind of disposably for the past fifteen years. I hope to change that back permanently. I remember I first heard about laetrile I think it was the early 1970's. People were going to Mexico for the treatment. My family has always for generations liked apricots and cracking almonds etc. I always liked bitter flavors too, except when I'm eating raw animal foods. I don't think eating peach flesh, that there's laetrile there. I think eating fruit flesh necessitates having something bitter to make it balanced.
Ah - yes. Interesting point. When you eat raw flesh you don't want the bitters or the pits - but then again - eating raw flesh foods probably will also keep you from getting cancer so you don't need to. ;)
Fruits are interesting when it comes to how many of them have anti-cancer properties in them or in the seeds. It's almost like taking the cure with the poison. Cancer cells feed off of fructose but if along with the fructose are things that kill cancer cells then the fruit will not feed cancer cells and allow them to become tumors like the refined sugars and carbohydrates will. Many fruits are considered to be cancer cures as long as you eat no other processed sugars because those poor starving cancer cells that use so much sugar open up their greedy little mouths and take in what will kill them even more readily.
So when you eat an apricot or a peach, it makes a good deal of sense to me to eat that kernel that is inside and which goes so nicely with the flavor of the fruit (and also adds fats and proteins that go so well with the sugars I think too). Whether to go about eating loads of kernels without the fruit just because you can eat the nut by itself in these days of mass production (if you are not already trying to un-do a previous imbalance) is defintely questionable. The nut goes with the fruit so if you are not eating fruit (which you are right, does not contain b17) there is probably usually is little need for the lots of these nuts eaten on their own in a healthy person and that's my guess on why your body doesn't like it. But, if you are vegan that has no better source of protein and fats and eating lots of sugar that can feed cancer cells - then perhaps you might crave them more.
I am also trying my best to slowly live a life that is less "disposable". That's one of the reasons I love my chickens so much! :D
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claws, teeth and large muscles function to keep otherwise weak individuals alive
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claws, teeth and large muscles function to keep otherwise weak individuals alive
They are not weak, though. I mean, a man who is intelligent but who is short-sighted and slight in build will have no chance in an unarmed fight against someone with large muscles, regardless of his intelligence. Only through the crutch of having extra technology such as weapons would he have a chance of winning.
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claws, teeth and large muscles function to keep otherwise weak individuals alive
... and so do wings (to fly away, e. g. in birds), long legs (to run away), shells (e. g. of turtles), stings (e. g. in bees or hedgehogs) etc. Small birds without wings, turtles without shells, hedgehogs without pricks would hardly have any chance to survive.
So does natural selection ruin darwinism? ;) Even today, birds are a very successful species.
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Tyler you talk some shit y'know.
Can some smart people go back and read the exchange between me and Tyler and comment?
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Tyler you talk some shit y'know.
Can some smart people go back and read the exchange between me and Tyler and comment?
Could it possibly be that you are the one with a low IQ, you foolish little troll? So far, you have not come up with a decent riposte to my answers. One would at least expect that from a long-time member, not just stupid, knee-jerk comments like yours! l) :o :( ;D ;) Sorry, I forgot, you did ask if someone (else) smart could comment about my posts, making it clear that you don't have such high hopes about your own intelligence! :( :o ;D l) :P -[ :'(
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There is very little agreement over the toxicity of these seeds which doesn't matter anyway because it might be the toxicity itself which produces the healing!
Bingo! That's what I suspect is the main factor. It's called hormesis. The hypothesis is that some amount of poison can be healthy, whereas too much can make you ill or even kill you. The tricky part is figuring out which "toxins" to use with whom and how much to use of them. Apparently, only certain toxins tend to have hormetic effects and some may work for one person but not another, or at different doses.
Tyler you talk some shit y'know.
Can some smart people go back and read the exchange between me and Tyler and comment?
As far as I can tell, it seems to me that people are talking past each other. As I said before, Tyler is talking about full adaptation to a food, so that it has no seriously degenerative effects and even promotes health, whereas RawKyle has appeared to be talking about partial adaptation to food that enables survival and reproduction, but is not necessarily healthy. All foods in the current SAD meet RawKyle's apparent definition, whereas raw Paleo foods probably fit Tyler's definition better. Regardless of whether RawKyle's definition is scientific or not, it's not of much use to me in the real world, unfortunately. :shrug: So in this case I find myself in rare basic agreement with Tyler, though I wouldn't use the same language he used in some instances where it seems like he was trying to make RK or you look dumb. I try to analyze things objectively and give even the devil his due. ;)
Wrangham's hypothesis of improved diets and larger brains via cooking and resulting increased tuber consumption fails to explain certain things, such as why BOTH jaw size and strength AND avg brain size and brain/body ratio have declined since Cro Magnon and Neanderthals and why the raw-meat-eating first-contact Eskimos had BOTH larger, stronger jaws (the strongest ever tested) AND larger than avg brains and brain/body ratio and why brain size increased between gracile Australopithecus and H. erectus, before even Wrangham's early estimate of the advent of cooking (1.9+ million years ago). The near-vegetarian Wrangham's hypothesis also fails to explain why vegetarian brains shrink, especially vegan brains (http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/health/going-veggie-shrinks-the-brain/story-e6frer7f-1111117468644, (http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/health/going-veggie-shrinks-the-brain/story-e6frer7f-1111117468644,) http://cavemanforum.com/diet-and-nutrition/can-a-vegetarian-diet-shrink-your-brain/ (http://cavemanforum.com/diet-and-nutrition/can-a-vegetarian-diet-shrink-your-brain/)).
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My definition is the definition of adaptation in biology. Feeling good and healthy and liking your reflection in the mirror have nothing to do with it. If our ancestors hadn't been adapted we wouldn't be here, regardless of how they felt about their health.
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Your definition still has no bearing on my real world experience, which is what I'm interested in, sorry. I'll leave the ivory towers to the scientists.
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So in this case I find myself in rare basic agreement with Tyler, though I wouldn't use the same language he used in some instances where it seems like he was trying to make RK or you look dumb. I try to analyze things objectively and give even the devil his due. ;)
I did NOT try to make RK look dumb. Just Miles, and, in Miles' case, I was just trying to adopt his own tactics/behaviour. As for the devil reference, thanks - I often like to play the role of devil's advocate in certain discussions.
Wrangham's hypothesis of improved diets and larger brains via cooking and resulting increased tuber consumption fails to explain certain things, such as why BOTH jaw size and strength AND avg brain size and brain/body ratio have declined since Cro Magnon and Neanderthals and why the raw-meat-eating first-contact Eskimos had BOTH larger, stronger jaws (the strongest ever tested) AND larger than avg brains and brain/body ratio and why brain size increased between gracile Australopithecus and H. erectus, before even Wrangham's early estimate of the advent of cooking (1.9+ million years ago). The near-vegetarian Wrangham's hypothesis also fails to explain why vegetarian brains shrink, especially vegan brains (http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/health/going-veggie-shrinks-the-brain/story-e6frer7f-1111117468644, (http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/health/going-veggie-shrinks-the-brain/story-e6frer7f-1111117468644,) http://cavemanforum.com/diet-and-nutrition/can-a-vegetarian-diet-shrink-your-brain/ (http://cavemanforum.com/diet-and-nutrition/can-a-vegetarian-diet-shrink-your-brain/)).
Very good points. I had forgotten the vegan/shrinking brains points. I must include all that in my revised anti-cooking essay on rawpaleodiet.com. I never liked the current draft much.
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My definition is the definition of adaptation in biology. Feeling good and healthy and liking your reflection in the mirror have nothing to do with it. If our ancestors hadn't been adapted we wouldn't be here, regardless of how they felt about their health.
If you are talking about partial adaptation, one would need to find a study supporting that, such as a benefit countering the disadvantages of cooking(eg:- linking cooking to bigger brains - so far the evidence is overwhelmingly against that, though) or show that humans are somehow partially resistant to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods etc.. Otherwise, I mean one could, quite wrongly for example, state that animals are all "adapted" to stinging nettles because they only get a painful feeling from it , but don't die from it.
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Maybe we could say that our FITNESS is negatively affected by cooked food compared with raw foods provided that a sufficient range of suitable raw foods is available. Nevertheless, our fitness would even more be compromised by starvation - and this is what we (or many of us) would suffer from if all humans in the world would begin to eat strict rawfood diets. Obviously, cooking has increased the fitness of the human species as a whole because it enabled us to reproduce at a high rate.
Adaptedness and fitness
From the above definitions, it is clear that there is a relationship between adaptedness and fitness (a key population genetics concept). Differences in fitness between genotypes predict the rate of evolution by natural selection. Natural selection changes the relative frequencies of alternative phenotypes, insofar as they are heritable.[18] Although the two are connected, the one does not imply the other: a phenotype with high adaptedness may not have high fitness. Dobzhansky mentioned the example of the Californian redwood, which is highly adapted, but a relict species in danger of extinction.[15] Elliott Sober commented that adaptation was a retrospective concept since it implied something about the history of a trait, whereas fitness predicts a trait's future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation)
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There is a difference between tolerance and adaption.
Perhaps the human body can't adapt in a way that completely mitigates all the toxic effects of cooked meat, but I still believe that the body does find ways to tolerate such poisons.
People with scarred arteries will increase cholesterol production in the liver as an attempt to protect the already damaged tissue from further deterioration.
This development of tolerance to chronic toxicity may not fit the scientific definition for adaption, but these types of toxin mitigating reactions may have some root in evolutionary developed survival mechanisms, from a time when we foraged on the verge of starvation and were often forced to eat semi poisonous plants.
It could explain how my ancestors could eat cooked meats, grains legumes, and copious amounts of alcohol and smoke nicotine; while still reproducing prolifically and living into old age.
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Maybe we could say that our FITNESS is negatively affected by cooked food compared with raw foods provided that a sufficient range of suitable raw foods is available. Nevertheless, our fitness would even more be compromised by starvation - and this is what we (or many of us) would suffer from if all humans in the world would begin to eat strict rawfood diets. Obviously, cooking has increased the fitness of the human species as a whole because it enabled us to reproduce at a high rate.
No evidence exists that the world's population would all starve if we ate raw. It might require some form of reorganisation(so, we might have to eat mass-produced insect grubs instead of eating cooked grains, for example).
As for cooking and reproduction, that's more complex an issue. Palaeolithic tribes did not proliferate due to cooking, far from it. The palaeolithic populations remained stable until the Neolithic era, when a more settled life and further access to unnatural foods like grains meant they could afford to have more children than before, instead of enduring the high infanticide rate in palaeo times. Plus, it is telling that as modern foods have become ever more processed, that men in developed countries have incurred rapidly decreasing sperm-counts with women having rising infertility-rates as well. This suggests that all cooked foods have some negative effect on fertility, with cooked junk foods just being worse in effect.
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Palaeolithic tribes did not proliferate due to cooking, far from it. The palaeolithic populations remained stable until the Neolithic era, when a more settled life and further access to unnatural foods like grains meant they could afford to have more children than before
They were able to take advantage of grains just because they cooked. Grains have to be cooked to be reasonably digestible for us. So cooking enabled the grain-based proliferation.
The fact is that the raw eating tribes / primates did NOT proliferate, but the cooking tribes / primate did. So the cooking tribes (or humans as the cooking species) were better adapted to their environment according to Kyle´s (or the biological) definition of "adaptation".
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As far as I can tell, it seems to me that people are talking past each other. As I said before, Tyler is talking about full adaptation to a food, so that it has no seriously degenerative effects and even promotes health, whereas RawKyle has appeared to be talking about partial adaptation to food that enables survival and reproduction, but is not necessarily healthy. All foods in the current SAD meet RawKyle's apparent definition, whereas raw Paleo foods probably fit Tyler's definition better.
My definition is the definition of adaptation in biology. Feeling good and healthy and liking your reflection in the mirror have nothing to do with it. If our ancestors hadn't been adapted we wouldn't be here, regardless of how they felt about their health.
Perhaps the human body can't adapt in a way that completely mitigates all the toxic effects of cooked meat, but I still believe that the body does find ways to tolerate such poisons.
It could explain how my ancestors could eat cooked meats, grains legumes, and copious amounts of alcohol and smoke nicotine; while still reproducing prolifically and living into old age.
The largest percentage of 'paleo' literature has nothing to do with raw and does suggest that SWD foods specifically won't fit this model of adaptation citing already the problems of reproduction (particularly when taking out any assistance) with even poorer predictions for future generations.
I'm unaware of anyone suggesting that plains Indians of 1541 were significantly degenerated than those of the 12th century and so on or any uncovered information that these people were on a constant quest to figure out if they were a less healthy generation which required bringing scrutiny to their methods. Correct me if I am wrong there.
What we DO see is that plenty of people in the bible and so on were far sicker than people living 100 years ago or perhaps today...THE paleo argument...when eating a traditional diet. Ditto the Dark Ages etc... and yet many of these people at the root of western civilization had progeny that were able to live healthier on different diets of cooked foods - and without significantly increasing their raw foods - up to the present.
Humans (and animals) are both adapted to garnering nutrition from cooked foods. This can not be questioned by pointing out other problematic issues with such. So therefore we are adapted to eating cooked foods far better than eating rocks, solid minerals, dirt, and most grasses and raw grains that exist naturally on the planet and do not provide nutrition for humans. You can say the same about possible combinations of foods that are edible but do not fulfill all nutritional requirements.
Obviously everyone here is of some opinion that cooking creates compounds best left avoided if possible. To get back on the subject it is indeed suggested by such 'guru' that this is true and not that one necessarily can ameliorate all toxins of cooking just because we are adapted. What is simply being suggested is that cooking unlocks certain kinds of nutrition. That without getting proper nutrition from a diet that simply 'lacks toxins' it becomes irrelevant and improper to refer one diet as one we are adapted to and another not based on those terms. Once one has a healthy diet, then they can decide how the negative aspects impede on the positive impacts of having a healthy diet and can adjust the amount or percentage of raw food according to their needs healing specific conditions, building some abstract health etc...
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Humans (and animals) are both adapted to garnering nutrition from cooked foods. This can not be questioned by pointing out other problematic issues with such. So therefore we are adapted to eating cooked foods far better than eating rocks, solid minerals, dirt, and most grasses and raw grains that exist naturally on the planet and do not provide nutrition for humans. You can say the same about possible combinations of foods that are edible but do not fulfill all nutritional requirements.
The rest of the text has been already debunked in other threads. This particular claim is meaningless:- the fact that we are better adapted to eating cooked foods than granite, for example, is irrelevant. That does not per se imply that cooked foods are OK just because they are "less worse" than lethal poisons, say. Nor does their "less worse" aspect mean that we are adapted to them in any way. The real test would be evidence showing that we were somehow immune to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods. Plenty of wild animals have adapted, over millions of years, to eating highly toxic foods without incurring any injury therefrom, but they adapt because they become immune to the poisons therein.
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They were able to take advantage of grains just because they cooked. Grains have to be cooked to be reasonably digestible for us. So cooking enabled the grain-based proliferation.
The fact is that the raw eating tribes / primates did NOT proliferate, but the cooking tribes / primate did. So the cooking tribes (or humans as the cooking species) were better adapted to their environment according to Kyle´s (or the biological) definition of "adaptation".
The trouble is that the advent of grains came many hundreds of thousands of years after the advent of cooking, so the 2 are not interlinked. Palaeo tribes did NOT proliferate as soon as cooking was introduced, only after the Neolithic era. It could also be argued that the settled life and more access to foods via domestication of animals of meat-consumption prevented the risk of starvation(and caused population-increase) to a far greater extent than grains ever did. Grains only provided a regular supply of "food" but it is a fact, based on archaeological evidence from bones, that Neolithic-era tribes suffered appalling health-problems from eating grains including a drastic decrease in height and longevity,
http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/angel-1984/angel-1984-1a.shtml (http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/angel-1984/angel-1984-1a.shtml)
so that grains cannot be considered to have been adapted to.
I suppose it makes sense that a person who has access to only a limited supply of high-quality raw foods is not going to have the same chance of success at surviving as a person who has access to a huge amount of mostly very low quality cooked foods, as the former is more subject to the possibility of famine. But if the latter is frequently ill as a result of his poor choice of diet, he cannot be said to be adapted to his environment.
Re adaptation:- Another definition re adaptation to one's environment is that one is in harmony with the environment. Raw-eaters, by definition, are more in balance with the environment than cooked food eaters because the former don't need vast fields of grains to feed themselves, so don't need to destroy the local wildlife so much.
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The rest of the text has been already debunked in other threads. This particular claim is meaningless:- the fact that we are better adapted to eating cooked foods than granite, for example, is irrelevant. That does not per se imply that cooked foods are OK just because they are "less worse" than lethal poisons, say. Nor does their "less worse" aspect mean that we are adapted to them in any way. The real test would be evidence showing that we were somehow immune to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods. Plenty of wild animals have adapted, over millions of years, to eating highly toxic foods without incurring any injury therefrom, but they adapt because they become immune to the poisons therein.
I would think the 'real test' as even PP points out is whether one can become a healthier in the real world following DVs information, or whether they are better off with eating any diet that can be considered raw which is mostly what the argument is. I don't think you are prepared to defend all raw diets (vegan and otherwise perhaps primal or ZC too?) as healthier than ALL cooked/raw diets (even high percentage raw) so I think you are the one as usual arguing abstract information. Included in this 'real test' would be a actually proving one had healthier tissue/bone structure , live longer etc.. than someone following traditional diets both in past and present. Personally I would agree as usual that merely following a 'traditional diet' is not necessarily enough to create good health, but this does not mean that many raw diets have even adequate nutrition or even avoid more toxic foods or are removed from the possibility of having greater 'toxic' effects than diets with cooked foods. This can be shown with REAL evidence.
Your insistence that one has to prove immunity to 'cooked food toxins' is actually the one thing in this conversation which is 1.) not in dispute b.) totally irrelevant if one isn't thriving on their raw diet as much as DV on his and so on . You are infact now saying animals do adapt to harmful foods in nature that are uncooked? Dismissing my account of HG tribes or western civilization as likely having the SAME or perhaps BETTER health century after century is appalling when we are talking about which factors decrease health the most and whether 'raw' even factors in as a variable - more than improper diets. Unless one can say that humans degenerated measurably year after year eating their mixed cooked/raw diet in nature then there is literally no argument against cooking as being something we are not 'adapted' to. Whether it creates significant damages otherwise or not or whether people can use a raw diet to create the best of health.
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Well, your above points are very easily debunked:-
1) You are actually the one being too abstract, not me. You are trying to compare any and all raw diets to any and all mixed cooked/raw diets. This is wholly dishonest. First of all, a fair comparison, in your absurdly limited range, would be between any and all 100 percent raw diets versus any and all 100 percent cooked diets - obviously any mixed cooked/raw diet would be better than any 100 percent cooked diet simply because of the raw component of the former, which just proves the point, yet again, that cooking is harmful. The simple point is that when DV talk about the so-called "benefits" of cooking, they should not be hypocrites and eat raw as well.
Then there's the fact that we on rawpaleoforum specifically state that the raw component is just as equally important as the palaeo component. Sure, for some of us the raw component has been far more important than the palaeo component and vice-versa for others, but the general concensus is that both raw and palaeo are needed for health, not raw, non-palaeo or cooked-palaeo.
2) Re wild animals adapting:- Sure, I did state that wild animals can adapt to previously unhealthy foods over millions of years. But those are all RAW foods whereas cooked foods are such a totally different category that it is extremely questionable that they can ever be adapted to.
Wrong re no argument needed as one could only prove the necessity of cooked foods for survival by testing everyone on a 100 percent cooked diet and seeing the results. Whatever the case, your whole thesis breaks down when one considers those studies showing a link between rising rates of malocclusion and other dental problems, and the advent of cooking. Plus, as more varied cooked foods entered the diet(ie grains) , the size of the average human brain dropped by 8 percent, so that's another nail in the coffin.
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sheesh, another nail in the coffin for me. uh oh. We are comparing the diets being suggested - as everyone else in the dietary world - to see what to eat today. People have the option to eat a variety of foods and weigh which things have the worse consequences. Saying cooked food toxins have any more relevance than other issues in constructing a diet is in fact false and you know this. No one has to eat a 100 % cooked diet to say that many raw diets are not working. This is crazy as we already know you CAN get nutrition from cooked foods and one doesn't need to claim they are free of any toxins just as raw foods are not free of toxins. Its not necessarily even an issue of which cooked foods are 'beneficial' (which is a whole other argument) but only which process are less detrimental than poorly constructed and deficient diets. One only has to prove that diets that contain cooked foods (and raw foods ) can be healthier than alot of diets constructed of purely raw food and this has been done ad nauseum.
People can cite the advent of cooking or neolithic food, and associate with many x problems or x degenerations, fine. The point is that at THAT point very little degeneration is known amongst traditional peoples after they adapted cooking up until say to say 100 years ago. Without this extreme degeneration between say 1000 B.C. and 1800 A.D. this bodes very poorly that we have not leveled off at some adaption, and that this adaptation is clearly absent from many diets composed TODAY of a problematic grouping of things in the natural world..to outright poisons and chemicals manufactured by man. Certainly we are less adapted to many extremes offered as healthy alternatives to in-taking cooked food toxins and that having an overall DIET that covers our needs and eliminates problems of dietary composition -even with 'natural' raw foods- is more important than raw over cooked. This is all. Again, unless there is significant deterioration in that period above, the cooking that they DO employ, or the similar cooking that one can to employ today is not very relevant in comparison to eating a completely unhealthy diet (low or high or missing in this or that) and saying it is healthy because it is 'raw'.
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It could also be argued that the settled life and more access to foods via domestication of animals of rmeat-consumption prevented the risk of starvation(and population-increase) to a far greater extent than grains ever did. Grains only provided a regular supply of "food" but it is a fact, based on archaeological evidence from bones, that Neolithic-era tribes suffered appalling health-problems from eating grains including a drastic decrease in height and longevity,
If meat or the milk of domesticated animals would have caused the proliferation of homo sapiens, then stock-breeders such as the Masai, the Mongols or the Nenets, who did not suffer the drawbacks of grain, would have populated the world. However, they didn´t. Our culture is based on grain, because it is storable and has minimum space requirements, which is important if you have to feed (masses of) workers, establish labor division, live in cities etc. Furthermore, grain provides almost all nutrition needed, including protein.
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Re adaptation:- Another definition re adaptation to one's environment is that one is in harmony with the environment. Raw-eaters, by definition, are more in balance with the environment than cooked food eaters because the former don't need vast fields of grains to feed themselves, so don't need to destroy the local wildlife so much.
I agree that a more systemic approach would make more sense than "adaptionism", particularly as the proliferation of a species is not necessarily sustainable...
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As usual, KD, you have not actually answered my points.
First, like I said, you are unfairly comparing all-raw diets to mixed cooked/raw diets., when you should be examining how much worse all-cooked diets are than all-raw diets. Plus, you are unfairly criticising all raw diets when there are far more cooked-diet-variations which are far worse than most raw diets. I mean, one can't pretend that all cooked/mixed diets are cooked-palaeo-like in quality when there are millions of obese people who now subsist largely on cooked junk food like MCDonald's and doner kebabs and the like.
Secondly, you are claiming that raw foods contain toxins just like cooked foods do. In actual fact, cooked foods contain far more toxins(eg heat-created toxins) than raw foods, unless you count foods like raw grains which virtually no raw foodists eat anyway, unless possibly fermented/improved. So invalid point on your part.
Thirdly, there has indeed been some deterioration up to 100 years ago, it's just speeded up in recent years, nothing more. I mentioned serious deterioration in dental health since the advent of cooking, but there are now some claims that cooking got mental conditions like schizophrenia to start. Obviously, studying something that happened so many hundreds of thousands of years ago is difficult, meaning that it will take time to get more data, but that's all.
The real problem with your claims, though is this:- many members here benefitted far more from the raw aspect than the palaeo aspect. I'm one of them, cooked-palaeo was absolutely useless to me in terms of regaining my health. By contrast, my raw vegan phase was a lot less worse re pain and other symptoms.
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If meat or the milk of domesticated animals would have caused the proliferation of homo sapiens, then stock-breeders such as the Masai, the Mongols or the Nenets, who did not suffer the drawbacks of grain, would have populated the world. However, they didn´t. Our culture is based on grain, because it is storable and has minimum space requirements, which is important if you have to feed (masses of) workers, establish labor division, live in cities etc. Furthermore, grain provides almost all nutrition needed, including protein.
Err, the Mongols did rather "populate" much of the world, given their invasions of Europe and Asia, and all that rape and pillage!
I doubt that grains are a complete food. Indeed studies done on ancient egypt show that grains-heavy diets led inevitably to nutritional deficiencies and various vitamin-related diseases of deficiency. Same happened in Neolithic times when they transitioned to grains. The only benefit re grains was its longer shelf-life and mass production possibilities.
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Sigh, as usual I failed to give what seemed to me a conclusive argument...
As usual, KD, you have not actually answered my points.
First, like I said, you are unfairly comparing all-raw diets to mixed cooked/raw diets., when you should be examining how much worse all-cooked diets are than all-raw diets. Plus, you are unfairly criticizing all raw diets when there are far more cooked-diet-variations which are far worse than most raw diets. I mean, one can't pretend that all cooked/mixed diets are cooked-palaeo-like in quality when there are millions of obese people who now subsist largely on cooked junk food like MCDonald's and doner kebabs and the like.
I don't understand why we can't compare the diet DV is suggesting and its balance of cooked and raw foods and the results it has given him and others in comparison at least to the raw variations they had tried, even ones that included raw meat. Certainly many people will argue a cooked zero carb diet is the best diet or that a diet that contains regular daily cooked or rendered food has given them better results than raw diets - at least in the short term - so even in your extreme I would say having a composition of a diet closer to nature is more ideal than whether or not one is bombarded with cooked food toxins. The more raw food the better perhaps but no use if the composition is not appropriate or lacking necessary things.
Secondly, you are claiming that raw foods contain toxins just like cooked foods do. In actual fact, cooked foods contain far more toxins(eg heat-created toxins) than raw foods, unless you count foods like raw grains which virtually no raw foodists eat anyway, unless possibly fermented/improved. So invalid point on your part.
My point is more that even if one is eating in a way that YOU would be ok with as sufficiently raw and paleo, they arn't necessarily going to get great results or better than what DV is suggesting. You may disagree all you like but you have to accurately measure the real world trends and not what is said on paper about which things have more toxicity. lots of things create problems, even 'diets' of all raw foods with no real documented level of toxin.
Thirdly, there has indeed been some deterioration up to 100 years ago, it's just speeded up in recent years, nothing more. I mentioned serious deterioration in dental health since the advent of cooking, but there are now some claims that cooking got mental conditions like schizophrenia to start. Obviously, studying something that happened so many hundreds of thousands of years ago is difficult, meaning that it will take time to get more data, but that's all.
The point was that you could find people just 100 years ago that were healthier than people 1000's of years ago that ate a less appropriate diet, so certain things we are indeed more adapted to than others as creating realtivly similar offspring free of most degeneration. Also that even if there was degeneration that it was at a level so low as to signify the proper definition of adaptation.
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Err, the Mongols did rather "populate" much of the world, given their invasions of Europe and Asia, and all that rape and pillage!
The Mongolians plundered grain and, most notably, the Mongol´s life style did not become prevalent at all. On the contrary, Europeans still eat grain and Mongols are more and more adopting the Western way of life including a western diet.
I doubt that grains are a complete food. Indeed studies done on ancient egypt show that grains-heavy diets led inevitably to nutritional deficiencies and various vitamin-related diseases of deficiency.
Nevertheless, most people in the world, including the Egyptians, are still eating grain-heavy diets without suffering from deficiencies which prevent reproduction.
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Sigh, as usual I failed to give what seemed to me a conclusive argument...
I don't understand why we can't compare the diet DV is suggesting and its balance of cooked and raw foods and the results it has given him and others in comparison at least to the raw variations they had tried, even ones that included raw meat. Certainly many people will argue a cooked zero carb diet is the best diet or that a raw meat diet that contains regular daily cooked or rendered food has given them better results than raw vegan diets - at least in the short term - so even in your extreme I would say having a composition of a diet closer to nature is more ideal than whether or not one is bombarded with cooked food toxins. The more raw food the better perhaps but no use if the composition is not appropriate or lacking necessary things.
Again, some members here have, instead, found the raw component to work better for them than the "natural", palaeo component. Plus, the whole ethos of this forum is that both raw and palaeo/natural foods are needed for real health, not just either or.
As for the comparisons, they are fine, it's the false conclusions that are unacceptable, such as the notion DV holds which is that if a partially-cooked diet is "less worse" than one type of all-raw diet(ie raw vegan) that that means that cooking is not harmful at all, if the foods are only mildly processed or prepared in the HG fashion. That is a false logic. To show that cooked foods are genuinely not harmful means proving that heat-created toxins do not affect us etc. If, in turn, a few raw diets(rawpalaeo, instincto, primal diet etc.) happen to outperform DV's cooked-palaeodiet-type and other cooked diets, then that means that cooking is harmful. Some forms of cooking or cooked foods may be "less worse" but that's all.
My point is more that even if one is eating in a way that YOU would be ok with as sufficiently raw and paleo, they aren't necessarily going to get great results or better than what DV is suggesting. You may disagree all you like but you have to accurately measure the real world trends and not what is said on paper about which things have more toxicity. lots of things create problems, even raw foods with no documented level of toxin.
The science against your notion, however, is damning:-
many heat-created toxins exist in cooked foods, some of which are also present in cigarette-smoke and car-exhaust fumes (such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, for example). AGEs, for example, are linked heavily with most aging-related conditions and general inflammation in the body etc. Then there is the nutrient-loss caused by cooking which explains why so many people nowadays are said to be vitamin-deficient etc. Then there's the lack of bacteria and lack of enzymes in cooked foods which also tax the body heavily. So, DV's diet could only ever be "less worse" than a raw, palaeolithic diet. Sure, some people may make a mistake re the correct dietary proportions for their own bodies re quantity or type of food etc., or wrongly avoid eating certain mineral-rich raw foods they desperately need for good health, but other people following DV's diet will also make similiar mistakes as regards their diet. This is not a problem confined solely to raw foodists.
The point was that you could find people just 100 years ago that were healthier than people 1000's of years ago that ate a less appropriate diet, so certain things we are indeed more adapted to than others as creating relatively similar offspring free of most degeneration. Also that even if there was degeneration that it was at a level so low as to signify the proper definition of adaptation.
Degeneration , even if slow, is constant so inevitably ends badly in the long run. Your claim re people living better, healthier lives a 100 years ago than 1,000 years ago is meaningless. That is mainly due to superior technology, especially medical care. Nothing to do with diet. Indeed, one could claim that diets have steadily deteriorated in the last 150 years or so.
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The Mongolians plundered grain and, most notably, the Mongol´s life style did not become prevalent at all. On the contrary, Europeans still eat grain and Mongols are more and more adopting the Western way of life including a western diet.
Incorrect, the Mongolian diet is and always has been overwhelmingly grain-free:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_cuisine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_cuisine)
As for the Mongolian lifestyle mention, that is really to do with the conflict between settled peoples and nomadic tribes, nothing to do with diet per se. I mean, arctic explorers a 100 years ago did fine on pemmican-heavy diets, needing no grains.
Nevertheless, most people in the world, including the Egyptians, are still eating grain-heavy diets without suffering from deficiencies which prevent reproduction.
Like I said before, this is highly questionable given that people in the West are now experiencing dramatic drops in sperm-levels and loss of fertility. Those in developing nations have diets which are "less worse" than Western diets, because of incorporating more natural and more raw foods then the latter, so have fewer problems in this regard.
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...in Miles' case, I was just trying to adopt his own tactics/behaviour. As for the devil reference, thanks - I often like to play the role of devil's advocate in certain discussions.
So I see! >D
What are the ingredients of traditional Mongolian khuushuur/hushuur and buuz?
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So I see! >D
What are the ingredients of traditional Mongolian khuushuur/hushuur and buuz?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuushuur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuushuur)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buuz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buuz)
Yes, I see what you mean, there is also dough involved in some cases. But the mainstay of the diet is still meats.
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Mainstay yes, but they also have long eaten wheat and I have seen historians make the same point as Hanna about Mongols plundering the grain of other societies (along with horses, cattle, gold and women, of course) and recently adopting more and more the bad habits of modern Westerners, so unless you have counter evidence, then she seems to have the balance of the evidence on her side, sad as it may be. -[
On the other hand, recent evidence has shown that the grain-eating ancient Egyptians suffered nutritional deficiencies. Nutritional deficiencies usually do not prevent reproduction. On the contrary, agrarian societies tend to have BOTH higher rates of deficiencies AND higher rates of reproduction than hunter-gatherer societies. High levels of reproduction are a sign of ill health, not good health and less spacing between births means less time for mothers to build up nutrient levels for the next child. It's one of the curses of civilization, not evidence of beneficial adaptation.
The tendency to put on weight was to have another effect on the living conditions of Neolithic peoples. In spite of a much shorter life span, population densities grew dramatically. As women must have a certain minimum percentage of body fat to ovulate, the tendency of agricultural people to become fat resulted in women becoming pregnant at an earlier age and becoming pregnant again much sooner after giving birth. Studies of contemporary female hunter-gatherers have shown them to reach first menstruation several years later than agricultural women. Hunter-gatherer women averaged four years between births versus eleven months for agricultural women. [There is even a colloquial term for this phenomenon of getting pregnant twice in less than twelve months: "Irish twins."] As it was no longer necessary to carry infants from place to place, the natural constraints on family size experienced by nomadic hunter-gatherers were no longer in effect.
Obviously, greater populations required larger crop yields for sustenance. Methods of agricultural intensification such as the plow and irrigation were soon invented to boost yields. As these more intensive methods accelerated the exhaustion of the topsoil and populations continued to grow, new lands for cultivation had to be found. The process of colonization continued until recent history, until the civilized world became agricultural, polluted, overpopulated, and overweight.
--Ray Audette, NeanderThin
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will you all ever tire of the same discussion? -X
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Good question, Jessica ! ;D :P
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Our culture is based on grain, because it is storable and has minimum space requirements, which is important if you have to feed (masses of) workers, establish labor division, live in cities etc. Furthermore, grain provides almost all nutrition needed, including protein.
The only benefit re grains was its longer shelf-life and mass production possibilities.
Well, that´s a huge benefit! I read that wheat can be stored almost indefinitely or at least 15 to 20 years (barley more than 10 years) and even keeps its germination ability during this period. This reminded me of the bible story about Joseph in Egypt (Pharao dreaming of lean cows eating fat cows; the seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine; the successful prevention of famine in Egypt by storing grain):
The Biblical story of Joseph in Egypt, storing grain in “fat” years against the “lean” that might follow, exemplifies probably the most common method of famine prevention in antiquity and medieval times. The rulers of the Inca Empire guarded against famine by storage and by construction of irrigation canals. (...)
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Famine.aspx (http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Famine.aspx)
However, Joseph´s grandfather still lived 180 years, Joseph´s father 147 years, Joseph only 110 years...
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Biblical lifespans can hardly be trusted to be accurate! I mean, Methuselah was supposed to be 969 years old at the time of his death!
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I'm 952 years old, so I'm nearly there, and I'll make it too, if the gol durn yuppies in my neighborhood don't give me a heart attack first. ;) :P
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Biblical lifespans can hardly be trusted to be accurate! I mean, Methuselah was supposed to be 969 years old at the time of his death!
Yeah, that's wonderful. Normal people say that we can't live without cooking.
Are we still too normal?
Löwenherz