Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => Hot Topics => Topic started by: Nicola on December 14, 2008, 10:10:03 pm
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I would like to share this with you - it has opend my eyes to how the internet can get hold of our mind; it has happend to me with raw vs. cooked and just makes your mind go off (if you let it)!
Two answers from Dr.med. B. Groves:
Answer Nr. 1
There are actually no studies that 'confirm that animal fats are unhealthy'. The
ones that purport to show this invariably class saturated fats and trans-fats
together. In fact, all naturally-fed animal fats are entirely stable whether
cooked or not.
It is only the highly unstable, polyunsaturated fats, and their trans-fat
cousins, that have even been shown to be harmful, particularly when heated.
AGEs are not produced from heating fats; they are produced only by heating
sugars (hence advanced 'GLYCATION' end products). Glycation = glucose.
Fats only figure in the AGE picture when heated with carbohydrates. Cooking meat
alone, whether fat or lean, does not produce AGEs.
Answer Nr. 2
This is explained at my
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/tempera...-oils.html and
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/fats.html. But there is one relevant point,
below, I have missed. I'll have to add it on my website.
The relative susceptibility to oxidation of a fatty acid is dependent on the
number of 'double bonds' it has. Fatty acids are not attacked by oxygen at their
double bonds, as I had originally been led to believe, but at the carbon atom
between double bonds.
Saturated fatty acids have no double bonds at all, so they are stable.
Monounsaturated fatty acids such as oleic acid (the major fatty acid in olive
oil and animal fats), have one double bond, so again they are stable. But
polyunsaturated fatty acids have two or more double bonds which are generally
three carbons apart. These are not stable.
There is an exception to this, however. In 'conjugated' fatty acids, such as CLA
found in the fat of cattle, sheep, etc, which with two double bonds, is a
polyunsaturated fatty acid, the double bonds are only two carbons apart. With no
central carbon, these are also stable.
I hope that helps.
For me I am shore that many lives are affected to a unhealthy and unsocial way; our body can deal with a lot more than we think - it's just the mind!
Nicola
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This encourages me to try some pemmican and lard-fried potato chips! I was afraid of the cooked animal fats, even though they are saturated fats.
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Nicola, 2 things:- First of all, any controversial topic MUST be moved to the Hot Topics section, not discussed elsewhere. Not everyone wants to read this kind of anti-raw nonsense all the time, especially when there's little to back it up.
Secondly, it is highly inappropriate to take arguments from another board, in this way - what if I wasn't a member of this board? In this case, I feel obliged to post here the rebuttal I posted re Barry Grove's remarks as stated above. In future, please allow me time to post my own rebuttals on the other group and then post both sides , here.
Here are my points debunking Mr Grove's notions below:-
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I'm afraid this is erroneous information. For one thing, the report I mentioned
http://www.newcastleyoga.com.au/links/Food%20AGEs%20text.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/5mgyzh
made it very clear indeed that it was those foods highest in (heated) animal fats which had the highest levels of toxic AGEs(advanced glycation end products - butter being a prime example thereof, being rich in saturated fats(at 265 KU/g, in terms of AGE-content!). This, of course, doesn't even include the levels of heterocyclic amines(HCAs)(present in cooked, muscle-meats), the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons(PAHs) present in cooked-foods in general, among other issues.
Here's a pertinent extract from this report(the most comprehensive study of AGE-levels in foods , to date):-
"The fat group contained the highest mean AGE food
values. Among the items of this group, spreads, including
butter and processed cream cheese, margarine, and mayonnaise,
showed the highest amounts, followed by oils
and nuts (Tables 1 and 2). Thus 5-g servings of butter and
oil contained 1,300 and 450 kU AGE, respectively.
[High AGE values were also observed for the meat and
meat-substitute groups] (437 kU/g). Within this group,
highest levels were determined for cheeses, followed by
beef and poultry, tofu, fish, and whole eggs (Tables 1 and
3). [In all categories, exposure to higher temperature
achieved a greater AGE content for equal weight of the
sample]. The trend for AGE values achieved was ovenfrying
deep frying and broilingroastingboiling. Thus,
90-g servings of chicken breast prepared with these methods
yielded 9,000, 6,700, 5,250, 4,300, and 1,000 kU AGE,
respectively.
The carbohydrate group contained relatively low
amounts of AGE (3.41.8 kU/g). Within this category, the
highest AGE content was reported in processed items,
followed by grains, legumes, and starchy vegetables and
breads (Tables 1 and 4). The lowest AGE values were
detected in the milk group, followed by vegetables and
fruits (Tables 1 and 4), although infant formula contained
100-fold more AGE than natural milk.
Microwaving was shown to increase AGE content similar
to boiling cooking methods (data not shown)."
I suspect that you're actually thinking of the heat-created toxin acrylamide, which is, indeed, a carb-oriented issue.
As for the issue of (cooked) animal fats and studies on their harmful effects, there are so many studies out there, that I don't really feel the need to go on about it, but here's a small sample among numerous others on the Net):-
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9F0CE7DF133AF935A35753C1A965958260
http://tinyurl.com/6hybqz
http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news/Animal-Fat-Enhances-Risk-Of-Stomach--578-1/
http://tinyurl.com/5z8hq5
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C0CE1DA1630F930A25751C1A966958260
http://tinyurl.com/6nwtvm
http://www.healthcentral.com/alzheimers/c/62/47555/high-fat-alzheimer
(actually, the above study is an example of where researchers studiously ignored the fact that grassfed meat with its higher PUFA-content etc., is much healthier than grainfed meat - in other words, the healthier the meat'source is, the closer to raw it is, the healthier it is).
All I will say is that these studies are generally highly flawed as they concentrate on the negative effects of consuming cooked meats, without recognising the fact that raw animal foods do not contain the levels of toxins present in cooked animal foods which contribute to modern health-problems:-
"It has been suggested that, "given the prominence of this type of food in the human diet, the deleterious effects of high-fat foods may be in part due to the high content in glycotoxins, above and beyond those due to oxidized fatty acid derivatives." taken from
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=21074&blobtype=pdf
http://tinyurl.com/2kpfbc
The paper and comment are also listed in wikipedia, last paragraph of thise section:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Dietary_recommendations
For those in the group curious about the whole issue of toxins in cooked-foods, here's a list (which is slowly being updated over time), containing numerous info on exactly how cooking damages foods, creating toxins, destroying nutrients etc.:-
http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/important-info-for-newbies/info-on-toxins-in-cooked-foods/msg4791/#msg4791
http://tinyurl.com/6ckuet
"
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This encourages me to try some pemmican and lard-fried potato chips! I was afraid of the cooked animal fats, even though they are saturated fats.
Cooked Pemmican and lard-fried potato chips! Well, that's a great way to get heart-disease.
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Cooked Pemmican and lard-fried potato chips! Well, that's a great way to get heart-disease.
Seems that way, depending on who you believe.
Maybe sitting here reading about it will give me heart disease. Or brain cancer from the monitor radiation.
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Or indigestion from the sarcasm. Sorry.
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I'm gonna put in my two cents here. There is alot of bio-chem related to the study of foods, nutrients, and toxins. Some foods may be more affected by heating than others, some of us may tolerate different cooked foods better than other cooked foods. There is alot going on, and the fact that much of the medical community doesn't recognize the benefits of raw, unadulterated foods is evidence that even for our "vast" information, we truly are only at the beginning of discovery.
So I've always been a big fan of the top down approach when it comes to learning. Understand the basics, the big picture items first, then delve into the details. It seems all to often we study in reverse.
So it seems to me here that the big picture has been lost. From a simple chemical perspective, heat changes the composition of various chemicals, period. This is especially true for biological compounds. The more heat applied the more the chemicals will change, deteriorate and/or form new chemicals. Now our digestive systems have been evolving for tens, if not hundreds of millions of years to process very particular biological chemicals, and just 150,000 years of evolution (at best), is nowhere near enough time to adapt to the thousands? ten thousands? of new chemicals created by cooking, or to compensate for the chemicals lost.
So if you're going to eat fried potato chips, cool, that's your decision. But don't try to kid yourself into thinking that the impact on the body is minimal to none. That's just nonsense. We may debate about whether we should freeze foods, let them spoil at all, should we consume oils (even if cold pressed), eat unfertilized eggs, etc, etc, but the very basics of what we understand is that cooking deterriorates the biological life in our foods. We understand this first from an experiential, then genetic standpoint, and we are only just beginning to understand this from a chemical perspective.
Big picture: Heat destorys the essential biological life in our foods, even if we don't understand it chemically.
If you put life into the body, you will get life back from the body.
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I agree that heating changes food but ultimately, the question is whether cooked foods have any effect on the human body and lead to certain health problems. And by cooked foods, I mean animal fat and meat. Nothing else. Is a person eating a few fruits, here and there (like Tyler) and meat all raw, better off in the long run than say someone like me who eats no fruits at all and eats their meat and fat slightly cooked? We just don't know. We make assumptions. We assume that because food is modified through eating that it must have some negative consequences on the body but where is the proof?? There's none. I'm not saying that cooked meat is without health consequences but I'm not saying the opposite either. I don't know but I have my UNFOUNDED suspicions.
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I'm not too sure what exactly would constitute 'proof,' but I do know there is a remarkable amount of evidence to support the idea of raw foods. The inuit are a prime example, along with the native Americans. I know for myself the changes have been remarkable.
Also, cooking vs not cooking is not entirely black and white. Foods heated to only 110 degrees F would of course be much better than foods cooked at 250 degrees F. But foods heated at 250 would surely be better for you than those cooked at 500. The higher the temperature, the more vitality that is lost, the greater the change in chemical composition.
Heating above 105 F kills most all of the enzymes, which forces your body to produce them. This not only takes a toll on the body, but you have a limited ability to produce only so many of them in a lifetime - which many scientists speculate is related to aging.
But if you're eating a very rare steak, with heating limited to the outside, you're probably doing pretty well, as most of the enzymes on the inside are still preserved.
And I'm no saint here. Just 2 nights ago I ate a medium cooked steak b/c I was at a banquet. Stayed away from the mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli though. Ugh, but it made me feel not so great.
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If you had to choose, between eating a cooked paleo diet and a raw vegan diet, which would you choose? Please post your answer..
This really comes down to your belief about how bad cooked animal food is.
To be honest, I don't think it's absolutely necessary to be 100% raw. Go and talk to people in your area who have lived past the 100 mark - I assure you most of them have never eaten raw muscle meats or raw organs.
And the Inuit, while being an example of a population that did eat raw meats, didn't actually eat everything raw. Their lack of degenerative can also be due to the fact that they lived in isolated areas with no pollution, pesticides, toxins and fast food restaurants at every corner lol. And their live span was actually not that long (probably due to lack of medical care, but still..)
and don't forget:
Eating a significant amount of fresh or raw food is important, but 100% raw is not necessarily better (based on attempting to assess the experience of many Natural Hygienists and other raw-fooders, given the lack of any official studies). In fact, given that it often significantly restricts the diet, it actually can be worse than eating some cooked food.
What 100% raw foodists are doing today (and this goes both for raw vegans and raw paleo dieters) is something we have no evidence that any population has ever done in history, ever. And scientific proof is also lacking on raw food diets.
That's why you also have to trust your body's reaction to the food. I know for sure that if I eat my steak bloody rare it will be digested a lot better than if I eat it cooked through. I also know that eating some meat/fish for a meal will leave me with much better energy than if I eat 10 bananas for that meal . So I'm following my body's hints instead of too much science.
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If you had to choose, between eating a cooked paleo diet and a raw vegan diet, which would you choose? Please post your answer
That's a tough question to answer. Do I get to eat sushi? Can I eat sunny side up eggs? What about rare steak? These are things that are all partially raw foods that I ate before I ever started this diet. This issue is less about my belief about how bad 'cooked' animal food is, than it is about shades of gray and having to choose between the lesser of 2 evils. Nonetheless, I would have to go with cooked paleo as opposed to raw vegan, as I believe animal prodocts are essential to human life, and were essential in our evolution. Again though, that kind of choice seems a very limiting way to look at this issue, I'd rather think of things in terms of varying degrees of what is ideal.
To be honest, I don't think it's absolutely necessary to be 100% raw. Go and talk to people in your area who have lived past the 100 mark - I assure you most of them have never eaten raw muscle meats or raw organs.
How many people do I know in my local area that have EVER consistently eaten raw muscle meats or organs? Don't exactly have a sample size to compare apples to apples. Also, who's to say those same people wouldn't have lived even longer if on RAF?
What 100% raw foodists are doing today (and this goes both for raw vegans and raw paleo dieters) is something we have no evidence that any population has ever done in history, ever. And scientific proof is also lacking on raw food diets
Interesting statement. Are you saying that all humans cooked their foods before 200,000 years ago? Or are you just referring to recorded history. Again, maybe not what you're looking for in 'proof,' but there's still a wealth of evidence for RAF, and it just makes good sense.
I do agree with you though, listen to your body, listen to your instincts. But as a result of civilization, instincts MUST be tempered with the reasoning capacities of the mind. If I instinctively want twinkies and diet soda, doesn't mean I should eat them. This is why we all post on this forum, to gain information, knowledge, and to share experience - to use the reasoning mind to seek out what is ideal (or at least more ideal that where we each might currently be at).
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TylerDurdan, I don't see why you have felt the need to respond so aggressively to Nicola's remarks. So what if she has brought some views to the table that potentially run counter to your orthodoxy? In the first case, I think you have misunderstood the message that she was trying to get across: that with the amount of contradictory information sounding scientific to us non scientists and having the veneer of correctness, its all but impossible not to go crazy about one's diet. I don't think she necessarily has her mind made up on the cooked food question, she's just bringing to light how complicate the question on raw vs. cooked really is, and how challenging diet in this age of contradictory information has been for her.
But more importantly, I am bothered and perplexed in equal measure by your claim that Nicola is peddling "anti-raw nonsense all the time...(with) little to back it up." In the first place, she has backed it up. In the second place, her sources are no more questionable than yours, and in some cases decidedly less as far as I can tell. Pulling up a NYT article on how fat causes disease and cancer proves in no way shape or form that the cooking is what makes it lethal. It could very well be the case that it is simply the combination of animal fat and carbs that causes disease and illness. Alliteratively, perhaps we've all got it wrong and fat really is the source of man's plagues (unlikely, but its really hard to actually PROVE any of these hypothesis right or wrong). You have obviously chosen to look at thing in a black and white way--Cooked is bad, raw is good, end of the debate. This inclination is understandable, and it is clearly one that Nicola struggles with, wanting so badly to have the right answer but not being able to make up her mind on what the right answer is. Nonetheless, I think that we are all better of if we are willing to be a little more open minded about things. Clearly all of us who regularly post on this forum have at least toyed with the idea that raw animal food is healthy, but a large portion of us still have our doubts, and I think it is wrongheaded to close out discussion on any and all views to the contrary of raw dogma (science in some cases, other times, not so much). As the principal moderator of this forum, you set tone, and in my humble opinion you are not setting the right one. I feel that you should be encouraging Nicola to look for answers and think for herself rather than demand that she subscribe to your orthodoxy or else clear thing with you before posting. The responses to this thread are evidence enough that we members generally embrace this sort of input. So long as you create a hostile environment closed to reasonable contrarian ideas, you will loose some of the most thoughtful, intelligent and charming members of your forum--Nicola being one of them.
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Cooked Pemmican and lard-fried potato chips! Well, that's a great way to get heart-disease.
Is there a raw pemmican recipe? I've never tried pemmican. Is it better than jerky? Jerky makes me sick.
If you had to choose, between eating a cooked paleo diet and a raw vegan diet, which would you choose? Please post your answer..
If I could choose, I'd choose raw vegan. Cooked meat makes me sick. But I can't choose. Raw vegan no longer works for me, so...
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TylerDurdan, I don't see why you have felt the need to respond so aggressively to Nicola's remarks. So what if she has brought some views to the table that potentially run counter to your orthodoxy? In the first case, I think you have misunderstood the message that she was trying to get across: that with the amount of contradictory information sounding scientific to us non scientists and having the veneer of correctness, its all but impossible not to go crazy about one's diet. I don't think she necessarily has her mind made up on the cooked food question, she's just bringing to light how complicate the question on raw vs. cooked really is, and how challenging diet in this age of contradictory information has been for her.
But more importantly, I am bothered and perplexed in equal measure by your claim that Nicola is peddling "anti-raw nonsense all the time...(with) little to back it up." In the first place, she has backed it up. In the second place, her sources are no more questionable than yours, and in some cases decidedly less as far as I can tell. Pulling up a NYT article on how fat causes disease and cancer proves in no way shape or form that the cooking is what makes it lethal. It could very well be the case that it is simply the combination of animal fat and carbs that causes disease and illness. Alliteratively, perhaps we've all got it wrong and fat really is the source of man's plagues (unlikely, but its really hard to actually PROVE any of these hypothesis right or wrong). You have obviously chosen to look at thing in a black and white way--Cooked is bad, raw is good, end of the debate. This inclination is understandable, and it is clearly one that Nicola struggles with, wanting so badly to have the right answer but not being able to make up her mind on what the right answer is. Nonetheless, I think that we are all better of if we are willing to be a little more open minded about things. Clearly all of us who regularly post on this forum have at least toyed with the idea that raw animal food is healthy, but a large portion of us still have our doubts, and I think it is wrongheaded to close out discussion on any and all views to the contrary of raw dogma (science in some cases, other times, not so much). As the principal moderator of this forum, you set tone, and in my humble opinion you are not setting the right one. I feel that you should be encouraging Nicola to look for answers and think for herself rather than demand that she subscribe to your orthodoxy or else clear thing with you before posting. The responses to this thread are evidence enough that we members generally embrace this sort of input. So long as you create a hostile environment closed to reasonable contrarian ideas, you will loose some of the most thoughtful, intelligent and charming members of your forum--Nicola being one of them.
Thank you for writing this s thoughtfully; I am following to forums - this one with raw meat and fat and Charles forum with mostly cooked or "half" cooked meat and fat. It's like two different worlds - the raw being very isolating and causing vomiting...and the other more social but "toxic".
What about when it's -20 and you have snow and ice; raw meat and fat may just be a bit unpleasing?
Nicola
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Is there a raw pemmican recipe? I've never tried pemmican. Is it better than jerky? Jerky makes me sick.
My understanding is that pemmican is make with tallow, which is a rendered (cooked) fat, so by definition, there is no such thing as raw pemmican.
As for cooking with fat or cooked fat, Since I still eat some cooked food and bake bread, I have most confidence in highly saturated fats because they are more stable than mono- or poly- fats. Other fats I eat only raw.
I only bake with coconut oil and ghee, but I mostly make french bread, which contains no fats at all.
I have ordered a small portion of pemmican from USWellness Meats to try. It would be a bit of variety for packed lunches. Tallow and lard are highly saturated fats. However, I haven't really reached a comfort level with them. There is so much conflicting information. The Weston Price Foundation embraces them as healthful, but social conditioning against them is still strong.
USWellness Meats also has muscle and organ sausages that are grass-fed and additive (include nitrate/nitrite) free. They are cooked, except for one braunsweiger. I will investigate the link posted in the recent "sausage" thread.
Of course, I'm still trying to minimize cooked food when possible. If it takes a few potato chips to get down a plate of raw spleen, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, though! I think stress is far more damaging than a few portions of carefully selected cooked food once in awhile.
As for craving twinkies, unless you have a blood-sugar imbalance or starvation, that is a mental craving. The body does not instinctively want twinkies.
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In answer to various concerns:-
First of all, I do think it's misguided to claim that there is insufficient evidence to indicate that cooking is bad for you. I've already posted a small summary of scientific studies and reports showing how cooking destroys nutrients and produces toxins:-
http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/important-info-for-newbies/info-on-toxins-in-cooked-foods/
There are now 100s, perhaps 1000s of studies on the harmful effects of toxins in cooked foods such as AGEs etc., many of which are shown online,to the point where most responsible nutritionists admit that all severe forms of cooking(eg:- barbecuing/broiling/baking/frying/grilling/roasting/pressure-cooking/microwaving etc.) are, to some degree, harmful to one's health. The only forms of cooking that SAD-diet nutritionists are willing to defend as being supposedly healthy and not harmful in any way whatsoever are:- boiling in water(assuming that you drink that water, afterwards as it contains water-soluble vitamins leached from the food), simmering,steaming and poaching. This basically means that the arguments in favour of cooking are already 2/3 lost, before even raw-foodists can put forward their own points.
Secondly, we already have plenty of proof of how healthy being 100% raw is in the form of wildlife - we're the only species that cooks its food and suffer from all sorts of health-problems that wild animals don't have . As regards claims re 100% raw being bad, I believe that's a Beyondveg.com statement applied to 100% Raw Vegans. Since Raw Vegans are liable to incur various nutritional deficiencies due to certain nutrients not being fully accessible in plants etc., that's understandable. However, I know several families on 100% raw(with animal foods), who have no health-issues. I, on the other hand, have to occasionally eat cooked-food for social reasons and have incurred awful, though thankfully temporary, side-effects as a result - a good example, being, very recently, where I thought I could get away with eating an organic Christmas Pudding which was free of vegetable-oils - as a result, I've been vomiting for the last couple of days and feeling like I'm on drugs. A very stupid thing to do - I'll have to be more careful next Christmas.
As regards Nicola's remarks etc., my concerns are as follows:- this is a rawpalaeo forum, and therefore while it's perfectly OK to discuss highly controversial topics, these should all be discussed in the Hot Topics section, which is meant for that purpose(anti-raw and pro-vegan ones, that is, as other topics are generally less controversial and can be discussed elsewhere). Not only does this help generate posts in a different corner of the board(I don't much like the idea of just 1 sub-forum(general discussions) being used for most of the discussions) but also any rawists get to hear all sorts of anti-raw comments in the real world, invariably not backed by any real evidence(according to my own experience), and come to this forum for support not to have their diets attacked constantly - so, having controversial topics put in the Hot Topics section allows people to avoid them should they choose to, while still allowing plenty of controversy.
My other concern was that Barry Grove's points were shown by Nicola without waiting for my answer to appear on the other group, which was a bit one-sided. It's always a bad idea to lift arguments from one different diet-discussion board to another, as the people on the new forum are often not aware of the whole issue(especially since, often, only selected passages are quoted). I note that Nicola has even posted Barry's comments on the zero-carbage forum, without my own side being shown).
One last point:- The report I cited studied the creation of toxins in cooked foods, with foods highest in cooked animal fats being cited as the ones with the highest amounts of toxins in them. Since the foods were cooked on their own, not with carbs, the issue cited re eating fat with carbs is irrelevant to the discussion. After all, the toxins cited have already been directly implicated in many modern diseases.
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Well, here's Barry's answer, for what it's worth:-
">
> I see. So, just as they tend to lump benign saturated fats together with harmful trans-fats to confuse the unwary, they are now lumping AGEs together with ALEs.
>
> It's clever subterfuge. They would make good magicians.
>
" and mine in response:-
"In that report, they cook the foods individually on their own. It's only in industrial mass-processing that large amounts of trans-fats are created. While cooking does create tiny trace amounts of trans-fats(in itself hardly an endorsement of cooking), one cannot solely blame such tiny trace-amounts for the mass of toxins created by heating animal fats, in general. In short, the only benign fats are raw ones(preferably from animal sources).
As for the issue of AGEs/ALEs, that's beside the point. They're all toxins, one way or the other, leading to such modern diseases as diabetes etc., and, as shown in the report, foods high in saturated fats,such as butter, are not immune to the formation of toxins via heat/cooking."
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Well, Tyler, I guess that's not all so unreasonable given this is a "raw paleo" forum. I guess I was mostly bothered by the acrimony of your earlier post, since clearly Nicola had not intended to stir up trouble. But to get back to my point about keeping an open mind to things, my biggest frustration with internet health-related forums is that invariably they entail individuals in charge of setting the tone and content of the forum and these individuals invariably attack and call unsubstantial any article or point of view, however substantial or unsubstantial, that strongly deviates from their strongly held views, usually justifying their attacks, derision (and even deletion in some cases--though not here of course) as necessary to protect their membership from bad ideas. Furthermore, they are usually able to support their polarizing opinion with reams of scientific data and articles which they claim are somehow the only substantial data while all to the contrary is hogwash. Interestingly, each of these forums seems to have a unique axe to grind, and frequently supports as true beyond a shadow of a doubt what others regard as questionable or even downright false. I, along with many others I am sure, came to the internet because I didn't trust the orthodoxy of conventional doctors and nutritionists, only to find that the internet is chock full of more of the same--different orthodoxies, but orthodoxies nonetheless. If orthodoxy were what I was after, I wouldn't be here. Moreover, given my bad experiences following various individuals and communities orthodox views, I immediately begin to regard as suspicious everything idea you push when it begins to wreak of unquestioning one-sidedness. Furthermore, my observation has always been that one who is most secure in his beliefs will be very open to new ideas.
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In answer to various concerns:-
I note that Nicola has even posted Barry's comments on the zero-carbage forum, without my own side being shown).
Tyler, Dr. Barry Groves is a doctor and many are interested in his "Second opinions" on Charles forum. I can not post your comments with out getting a slap in my face - you have already told me some very encouraging things so that will do for me.
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TimmyPatch, the reason why I got so worked up is that I've heard the exact same sort of arguments to Barry Groves' a 1000 times before, and it gets very boring when I have to provide the same old answers to debunk such notions, especially when people like Groves blithely dismiss my references without a decent counter-argument. As regards the issue of toxins in cooked-foods, that's something that even SAD-diet nutritionists admit, albeit grudgingly, and there's plenty of scientific studies out there to back this up. On the other hand, almost almost all of the Weston-Price-oriented claims are based on vague, anecdotal accounts by Dr Weston-Price made decades ago, without the rigorous accuracy that genuinely scientific studies require - and which, in some cases, are contradicted by other experts' accounts. The only exception I can think of was that Pottenger experiment, and even that was flawed as all the various experiments involved feeding cats on raw or pasteurised milk - they should have had 1 test involving just feeding them their natural diet of raw meats and organs.
Same goes for Vilhjalmur Stefansson - he made all sorts of claims re the Eskimoes hardly ever eating any organ-meats. Yet, every other source I've read makes it clear that the Eskimoes/Inuit did indeed eat plenty of organs. and so on and so forth.
Now, of course, we have our own Aajonus as a rawist guru who's somewhat dodgy, but I wasn't even referring to his claims in that rebuttal. My point is that god is on the side of the big battalions - in other words, for every study claiming that cooked fat is very healthy, there are a 1000 studies stating the opposite. That's how science works, some studies can be flawed, but when the number of studies overwhelmingly favour one side, then one can draw certain conclusions. I'll agree that criteria can be wrong, for example, I pointed out that while the relevant studies did correctly condemn cooked animal fats, that they then used a false premise by claiming, therefore, that ALL animal food was bad, rather than just cooked animal food.
As for me, the issue is decided not solely because of scientific studies but also because of mine and others' experience. Due to my past health-problems I had to endure endless extremely painful stomach-aches after eating any cooked animal food and had to then endure the effects of nutritional deficiencies as a result of going raw vegan - the rawpalaeo diet was the only diet which worked for me.
But that's by the by. I don't mind people posting stuff about other diets, praising the nutritional value of processed trans-fats or of sugar or whatever, but please keep it on the Hot Topics forum, not elsewhere.
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My POV regarding the issue of cooked fat vs raw fat is from the healer's point of view.
If my parents or my children were really sick, which kind of diet would I bet their lives on?
Raw Paleo Diet of course.
The variant of Raw Paleo Diet would depend on what they were sick of in the first place.
Would a healing dietary variant have any cooked fat in it?
I don't let my children run around with a loaded gun. ;)
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TimmyPatch wrote:
Moreover, given my bad experiences following various individuals and communities orthodox views, I immediately begin to regard as suspicious everything idea you push when it begins to wreak of unquestioning one-sidedness. Furthermore, my observation has always been that one who is most secure in his beliefs will be very open to new ideas.
Wow! The wow is for your other posts as well. A good wow. I've come to believe, and I've written this elsewhere, that 'The Lord of the Flies' is alive and well on the Internet.
I've learned so much my brain bleeds! Everyone is right! Everyone is wrong! This study! That study!
What Proof! There is no proof! Perhaps, let me clarify, there is individual proof. One feels better eating a certain way, healed by eating a certain way. But a global proof? Too many disagree on too many subjects. Too many people eating differently for hundreds of years, who knows what might cure and not.
That said ;) I do remain open and willing to learn! I do think cooking (not all foods- vegetables mostly) might be one of the most important things we've ever done. I don't mean SAD cooking. I mean traditional cauldron soups and stews and broths... sorry rambling now am I...
Anyone- including all Doctors, who say they know the absolute and only truth about nutrition- lose me immediately as a potential pupil. Doesn't mean I don't take what I do believe, but Nutrition is in its infancy. We, are in our infancy as time-lines go on this planet.
oh anyway best wishes Avalon -X
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It is ridiculous to argue that cooking was the most important invention as there is no clear benefit from it(the argument re cooking leading to bigger brains has been totally refuted by now, so there's no other justification for it). However, there's a pretty good case for fire being the most important human invention, though that is by no means the same as cooking. I think you're just confusing the two.
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It is ridiculous to argue that cooking was the most important invention as there is no clear benefit from it(the argument re cooking leading to bigger brains has been totally refuted by now, so there's no other justification for it). However, there's a pretty good case for fire being the most important human invention, though that is by no means the same as cooking. I think you're just confusing the two.
"You're out of order!"
"No! You're out of order!"
To be specific, I wrote the word 'maybe' on purpose. There actually is a difference when saying "was the most" or "maybe".
Hey, for over a year I lived the Wai diet, believing raw, living it most of the time. I did on occasion saute some Spinach and garlic in Olive Oil! I can still taste it... but the more I learned and thought about it, the more I believed that Cooking, or, the eating of seafood along coastal waters was responsible for our larger brains, or hell if I know really. But we aren't like other animals. The argument that we are the only creatures cooking our food, might be the very reason we ARE different. Now, like most things, humans are great with abuse. We've abused cooking methods and now eat SAD.
Where has it been refuted "by now". Hogwash! Boulderdash! Gefilte fish! I'll pay you a penny, right now if you can prove any of what you claim as a global/population thingy. I'm not even sure how you can prove it scientifically on yourself without spending lots of money with tests and publicity and medical neverminds... You feel better! Your tests are good! So are those on McDougall! So are those on Atkins! So are those simply cutting out the crap. Will we live longer? Who knows!
I turn to Luigi Cornaro sometimes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Cornaro
Why? because it was the 1500s. Because not many people lived to 102 back then- if you believe the story. Vegetable soup, egg yolk, mutton and wine. Simplicity.
Sardinia! Cooked meat and Cheese and Wine! This is what we know. Okinawa! Rice, soup, seaweed, fish, pork- another longest lived culture. But when they move here they get sick like Americans.
Were we Monkeys? Was it an Alien intervention? We don't know how we got to be US! Or, if some of us do, it hasn't been proven, or, the man with the envelope was driven off the cliff by the illuminati!
See, I want to believe the believe. What are people really doing here? You? Me? We are all experimenting as best we can with the paths we've chosen and that's that. There is nothing ridiculous about arguing at all. If you are unwilling to argue, then you know the truth, and I immediately discount you :o Because I believe the truth is not known, yet... if ever... or something.
People should experiment. We should be doing what we are doing and for the first time in History it's happening on the Internet! When has that ever happened? Nicola in her neck of the woods sharing with Avalon. Amazing! It's fraking Amazing and wonderous!
I think our best shot at a long life seems to be Calorie Restriction. It comes up again and again and even back with Cornaro. Unless you're inbred like the Sardinians, ehh, so I've read... don't shoot the messenger ;)
San Dimas High School Football Rules!
Best wishes,
Avalon -v
P.S. OMG! I didn't address your no clear benefit from cooking. WHAT? Imagine an organism, for the first time able to throw carrots and meat and leaves and bark and leaves and dirt and bugs into a pot with water and being able to eat it!?! It was the first real science experiment! Man, this tastes good! This doesn't :( This tastes hood! This doesn't :( What we must have cooked! Over-load nutrient city! It makes fraking sense to me. Is it/was it true? Who knows? But I can see it happening :D
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Oh ehh, how dare you belittle all the Women who have cooked for Centuries on their knees in the kitchen, or standing, like with hot metal all around! Don't you know what they went through to get you here?!!! Don't you! ;) -\ :'( :P What? Plucky comic relief?
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don't shoot the messenger
Yes, I agree, don't shoot Tyler the messenger.
And this is the RAW paleo forum. Where advocacy of raw everything is encouraged. RAW fat over cooked fat being one of them. Of course in a raw paleo forum it will be natural to encounter people who have experienced and read studies that convinced them that raw paleo is the way to go... that raw fat is the way to go.
The only thing I can see in all these arguments so far is that those who are pushing cooked fat only do so because they have the opinion cooked fats taste better (because of the condiments and the cooking they are used to).
I have yet to see someone push that cooked fat is BETTER -HEALTHIER than raw fat.
In my opinion, cooked fat will always be inferior because:
- molecular structure has changed because of cooking
- condiments are not necessarily beneficial and may in fact be harmful sometimes
- most cooking introduces pollutants from the flame, from the wood, from the gas / fuel, from the cooking pot / utensils, from the method of cooking... some cooking styles are more harmful than others...
Many sick people today are just plain sick and die because they are genetically not adapted to cooked food and the surprises that come with the cooked food industry. Nature / evolution takes its toll and weed out these unadapted people... or these people discover the nature recommended fuel of RAW FOOD and fight back to survive in this world.
Like Pottenger's cats... the cooked eating cats can only go so many generations... until they are exterminated, humans just the same. In my case, I just want to live, and so far raw everything / raw paleo including raw fats has been working best for me. Now I can see a future for myself... instead of death at 40... maybe a good strong healthy life at 120.
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Reply: Blah blah blah the messenger Tyler-PLEASE!
At least I responded where I was supposed to. Yes? In the HOT TOPICS! Far away from unsuspecting eyes :)
Pott's cats- good point! Not definitive however! Not the end all be all truth! Do you think? Do you? Really?
I've been feeding my Cat Raw Home-Food for a couple of years now, honest truth! Yet, here he is with an oral Cancer- terminal weeks to months to live. No Joking around. Frak! I had a friend in New York with a Cat at 15 eating standard food! My Cat on raw dieing at 10 years old! I deliberately tried to feed him right. Didn't matter! Now, though I am trying the baking soda mix I just don't have the hope I should... I'm essentially watching him die. After feeding him raw. Do you get that? Frak it all!
You think you know the truth? Think again!
Avalon
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I agree, that whole Pottenger cat thing. There are so many cats in the world that live in doors that only eat cooked that go on to reproduce generation after generation. It doesn't make any sense to me, what his results showed. But then I did have a cat, a Siamese, when I grew up. It got old and wouldn't eat anything. My mom, for some reason, tried feeding it frozen lake smelts from the great lakes area. Before the lakes became really polluted. That cat went from scrawny, dull thin hair, lifeless ect.... to the most amazingly pretty thick shiny haired alive creature you could imagine. It was a real testament to rawism. The smelts had the head removed as well as the guts, but had the spine intack. She lived to be well over twenty. And then there's the dog issue. Ask anyone how their dogs died, and they will almost always say cancer. That one also speaks of the dead crap they feed dogs, plus all the cooked carbs. People will only feed their animals to the level that they eat. Cooked rice and chicken for me and my dog..... Sorry about your cat Avalon. But I'm sure your love will ease his transition.
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Thanx Van,
...and I'm sorry for getting a bit yappy last night. A bit too much wine I'm afraid -v Oy!
The Vet said weeks to months for Goopy my Cat. He's pretty much acting alright, right now. It's just difficult.
My apologies and yet... hang on -v
I know it's a Raw Forum. God bless Rawsome everywhere :D hold on -v
A price to be paid... hold on -v
-v -v -v -v -v -v -v -v
Best wishes everyone -d
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I agree, that whole Pottenger cat thing. There are so many cats in the world that live in doors that only eat cooked that go on to reproduce generation after generation. It doesn't make any sense to me, what his results showed. But then I did have a cat, a Siamese, when I grew up. It got old and wouldn't eat anything. My mom, for some reason, tried feeding it frozen lake smelts from the great lakes area. Before the lakes became really polluted. That cat went from scrawny, dull thin hair, lifeless ect.... to the most amazingly pretty thick shiny haired alive creature you could imagine. It was a real testament to rawism. The smelts had the head removed as well as the guts, but had the spine intack. She lived to be well over twenty. And then there's the dog issue. Ask anyone how their dogs died, and they will almost always say cancer. That one also speaks of the dead crap they feed dogs, plus all the cooked carbs. People will only feed their animals to the level that they eat. Cooked rice and chicken for me and my dog..... Sorry about your cat Avalon. But I'm sure your love will ease his transition.
Pottenger's results were A-OK. What Pottenger showed was that feeding cats just cooked meats would lead to horrible deficiencies. The reason why modern cats can survive(albeit with il-health) long enough to reproduce further generations is only because processed-cat-food-suppliers deliberately supplement their cat-feeds with artificial doses of taurine - if they didn't, the cats would get taurine-deficiency, much like they did in Pottenger's Experiments, with the inevitable results.
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I get the impression, Avalon, that you must be "on something", judging from the above!LOL!
As regards cooking, all I will say is that humans have done many stupid things over the last million years or so, with no real justification for them - cooking could well be one of those things. As regards cooking itself, the argument re taste is only 1. Other points have been made that cooked-food is addictive, due to its opioid content, so that that explanation is as good, if not better, than the taste aspect, and taste, anyway, is , to a large extent, determined by habit.
Anyway, my point is that cooking could not possibly have contributed to science in the way that fire did. I believe the lamest possible excuse, given by pro-cooking-advocates, is that cooking forced people to sit around and socialise more, because they had to waste so much more of their free time cooking their food, once cooking became a widespread practice.- and this is claimed to have been "a good thing".
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Tyler yea a lot of people view cooking as something they can socialize about.. People invite each other for dinner and everyone can do part of the cooking (because it's so difficult.. you have to put the meat in a hot pan with vegetable oil and you have to "know" when it's ready, maybe even use one of those meat thermometers LOL).
People inevitably socialized when hunting down and killing an animal.
Eating part of the animal on the spot, or taking parts of it back to the "camp", no doubt a tribe would do it together. And they could still eat together around a fire without actually cooking the food. Maybe fire was first used for thawing frozen meat..
In recent history cooking might have been advantageous during famine and lack of food, as grains and plants such as potatoes are easy to grow, are calorically dense and can be stored for a very long time, and they are foods that have to be cooked to be edible.
Eating cooked food is at least better than starving to death.. I hope you all agree on that one :p
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When I went 'raw' on Wai, my cat went raw too. He was being fed raw chicken ground by me sometimes with bones, some times with egg shell for calcium- to the best of my knowledge and ability, from hours of cat nutrition study... and here he is with oral cancer after a few years of eating raw foods. The tumor was not visually present 8 months ago.
Was Pottenger's cooked diet detrimental because it was "dead" or simply deficient? One might argue in response here that commercial feeds are not simply cooked food--they are supplemented as well. But this, then, simply demonstrates it is not that the food is somehow "dead" (as raw-fooders often term cooked food) that is the underlying problem, but rather that the diet fed by Pottenger was deficient in some way. And we shall see later that cooked diets--in humans, at least--are not necessarily more deficient than raw ones. Moreover, one cannot compare pet diets--particularly cat diets--with cooked human diets, which are less monotonous and hence provide a larger variety of nutrients. (Cats are true carnivores, humans are omnivores eating a much wider range of foods.) To put it plainly: cats are cats, humans are humans, and there are significant differences between the two.
Such considerations, therefore, suggest that--since domestic cats reproduce prolifically on today's cooked-food pet diets (to the point that everyone is urged to spay and neuter their cats to prevent severe overpopulation)--Pottenger's cats suffered not due to some magically bad toxic effects of cooking, or because the food was "dead," but rather from nutritional deficiencies in the diets fed by Pottenger.
Obviously I thought I was doing right by my cat by feeding him a raw food diet. Maybe I did do him right. I sure hope so. I cared enough to try. And yet he's only 10 years old...
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I hate to preach the evils of chicken, but again, chickens are fed corn and soy. The so called free range one get the same, just barren ground to walk around each other one. Those chickens are horribly out of balance and are only 'asked' to live several months till slaughter. My opinion is that many diseases would occur in them if asked to live a ripe old age. Their imbalance is passed along to whatever eats them. I used to feed my dogs raw chicken and then I learned about and experienced all kinds of skin lesions until I let go of using that 'convenient' food source for them.
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Sorry to hear about your cat avalon, I have a cat I am very fond of an would be very upset if he got cancer or some other disease. I usually feed him the beef cubes (stew meat) that I eat combined with the Slanker's Dog and Cat mix. Sometimes I give him sashimi and rarely turkey or chicken or an egg yolk. He's only about 3 or 4 (not exactly sure) but he's doing very well.
Maybe diet isn't everything in disease as your case seems to show, but I believe it is the single most important factor. Maybe the chickens weren't healthy, or maybe there is some other mystery reason to your cats cancer that can't be explained in terms of raw paleo diet. I would maintain though that your cat would have been less healthy and probably sick sooner if on a less raw paleo diet; a diet of Fancy Feast would not have saved him/her.
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Kyle wrote:
I would maintain though that your cat would have been less healthy and probably sick sooner if on a less raw paleo diet; a diet of Fancy Feast would not have saved him/her.
I want to believe that. But I'm not so sure anymore. He didn't eat only chicken. He had beef too, but I admit, none of the meat he ate, including fish, was organic.
What I was on was good old Merlot. I should really be chained to a tree when I taste of the fermented grape. Yet, I stand by what I wrote, ehh I think :o hold on -v
Best wishes,
I am right and you are wrong,
Avalon ;) What?
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I hate to preach the evils of chicken, but again, chickens are fed corn and soy. The so called free range one get the same, just barren ground to walk around each other one. Those chickens are horribly out of balance and are only 'asked' to live several months till slaughter. My opinion is that many diseases would occur in them if asked to live a ripe old age. Their imbalance is passed along to whatever eats them. I used to feed my dogs raw chicken and then I learned about and experienced all kinds of skin lesions until I let go of using that 'convenient' food source for them.
Even if Avalon's cat was fed grain fed chicken, the meat was still raw and not the same as the processed industrial garbage that's labeled as pet food today, which is still is an advantage. I would say eating meats fed grain is better than eating the grains themselves (especially if we are talkin about corn and soy).. When you eat an animal fed grain, the grain has been metabolized into the respective proteins of animal flesh, so you are not actually eating the grain itself when you eat a grain-fed animal (which is why people with gluten intolerance can eat chicken meat and eggs from chicken fed wheat).
What's there left to eat if you exclude everything fed grain/soy? You can eat organic 100% grassfed beef and wild fish. That can be expensive and very limiting (you can't find grass fed beef everywhere)
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chickens are what they are, unless raised on pasture, rich pasture.
Even cows that are fed grains put on their first 800 or so pounds eating grass.
But chickens from day one get mashed grains that are already oxidized from a bag filled many months prior. I have experienced several times allergic cold symptoms using goat milk that included grains used during the milking process, and zero reaction when the grains were not fed. It is easy to see the effect of cows or goats eating large amount of grains, the amounts necessary for a farmer to increase yield. Those animals have mucous running out of their noses. Not a natural condition for animals. Also you can learn about cows fed a high grain diet which causes their foot structure to collapse due to the high protein low mineral ratio of grains compared to grass. These 'perfectly good' milkers are then sent to slaughter and not because they aren't producing, but because they are no longer mobile. The minerals are suspected to be leached out to supply them to the milk for their 'young'. There are many sources of naturally raised animals and products on the internet. I think the problem is that we are used to doing something or believing in something and shifts sometimes are hard to assimilate. But then who really knows?
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http://www.lavidalocavore.org/showDiary.do?diaryId=322
yeah and there's the whole m&m potato chip thing. I did watch a video about this not long ago and now I can't find it. Imagine that? ???
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http://www.lavidalocavore.org/showDiary.do?diaryId=322
yeah and there's the whole m&m potato chip thing. I did watch a video about this not long ago and now I can't find it. Imagine that? ???
Wonder which new cattle disease will arise out of something like that..
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Yes, a number of grain-sensitive people have noted a nasty reaction to grainfed meats or eggs from soy-fed chickens etc.
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re. the cooking vs raw issue, here's what i just posted in another thread:
in his the tender carnivore & the sacred game paul shepard writes that for the cro-magnon warming up the meat -- to match body temp, i take it -- was more important that either cooking it or eating it fully raw
he adds that specific meat cuts were considered more appropriate for specific people
unfortunately, shepard does not elaborate on any of this & now he's passed away
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Just checked the top, it still says "Raw fat".
My definition: fat is what is found on meat.
There is no fat on/in corn, soy, peanuts etc.
I will not eat raw fat with my ground raw jerky because it tastes repulsive, and it is supposed to go rancid, so I render the fat.
I do not believe that paleoman was stupid enough to eat rancid fat, so must have rendered it.
AFAIK there is no evidence that rendered fat is bad for us.
I test everything by eating it, this works because I have weak digestion caused by one of those ugly incurable modern diseases that is supposed to have killed me years ago.
My own experience is that it is the meat that must be raw, whether or not the fat is rendered does not seem to matter.
BTW the meat tastes a lot better dried.
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Nothing wrong with eating so-called "rancid" raw fat - after all the eskimoes loved eating rotting meats.
Actually, I've found that raw suet can last forever - I've kept very dry raw suet for weeks out of a fridge on a couple of occasions and all that happened was that it got a little greeny-brown on the surface, with the fat tremaining white underneath. And it tasted fine, after all that time.
As for the whole issue of cooking, the Palaeolithic era lasted from c.2.5 million years ago to c.10,000 years BC, and it was only in the last 200,000/300,000 years that cooking was even invented, so the eating of raw fats is necessary for real health.
Here's a scientific report which shows definitively that heating raw fats causes a huge buildup in toxins:-
http://www.newcastleyoga.com.au/links/Food%20AGEs%20text.pdf
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Have you tested the rancid fat? It's okay to follow the Eskimos examples in this regard, but not in the fact they make soups and broths?
You might like this pdf also
http://cjasn.asnjournals.org/cgi/reprint/1/6/1293
The article you cited concludes high AGEs primarily from dry-heated protein foods.
http://andersonclan.us/andersonclan_top/ages.html
To note also it seemed that a Lacto-Veggie diet is best regarding AGEs.
When I make a Salmon soup, when not eating Salmon raw, I don't even bring the broth to a boil. I bring it right up to before, then remove from the burner and add the Salmon. The meat is delicious that way and I never popped a bubble.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ATnxmCpq-DU/R63syH5CeBI/AAAAAAAAAQY/_JKtQkX_YsM/s1600-h/000_2364.JPG
I think of course there needs to be more testing. Most of these results are about highly cooked foods. I don't think that barbecuing or pan searing any food is a good thing. I do believe for now, that an old fashioned pot of soup or broth on occasion isn't deleterious to ones health and has been consumed by Human kind throughout history. AND I'M NOT TALKING PROGRESSO OR CAMPBELLS!!!! -d
Best wishes,
Avalon ;D
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Nothing wrong with eating so-called "rancid" raw fat - after all the eskimoes loved eating rotting meats.
Here's a scientific report which shows definitively that heating raw fats causes a huge buildup in toxins:-
http://www.newcastleyoga.com.au/links/Food%20AGEs%20text.pdf
Rotten (or high) raw meat is not rancid fat. Many eat high meat, I know of none who eat rancid fat.
That scientific report is junk science in that it considers fat to be: "almonds,roasted oil,olive butter mayonnaise". Nowhere in that report is beef suet or hide fat mentioned, and I am surprised that you did not notice.
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Good stuff, Avalon.
I note the line: "Heating food, over 120 C (~245 F), causes a very rapid increase in AGEs, and generates damaging fat and sugar oxidation products."
http://andersonclan.us/andersonclan_top/ages.html
My suet is rendered in an electric oven in enameled pot at 225°F.
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Hi William, It is interesting just how delicious dripping, melting fat tastes!!!! I can't say who's right about what, but man, when I do eat rare steak, the fat is tops! When I was eating raw beef, the fat was well, sticking to the roof of my mouth -[ not the same at all. I can taste it just writing about it.
May raw foodists do heat their food, just not beyond 120 degrees and still consider themselves raw. What do y'all feel about this?
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I think that the delicious taste is a message from our immune system, saying that this is the right stuff.
Or a message from God, if you prefer.
Merry Christmas to all.
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A few points:- Just because the Eskimoes used broths doesn't make that healthy, in and of itself. It's an obvious fact that all humans are prone to error, so that no one group is perfect. Therefore it makes sense to take into account another group's good points while discarding dodgy stuff such as the broths/soups.
As regards the dry-heating and temperature(120 degrees) citations, I should add that even boiling meats in water produces toxins such as AGEs. Granted, boiling doesn't produce as many toxins as frying or grilling do, but it still causes some harm. And then there's the fact that enzymes and bacteria get destroyed at 120 degrees Celsius.
As regards making broths throughout history, that's irrelevant. Besides, the amount of time our ancestors spent eating raw(millions upon millions of years) rather dwarfs the number of years we've been eating borths/soups(200,000 to 300,000 years).
As regards suet/hide-fat, there's no evidence to suggest that they are somehow magically protected against heat-treatment, by comparison to other meats. The report didn't include those two items simply because they're not very common ones. I suppose one could argue that foods high in saturated fats, such as suet, aren't as affected by heat, but this is easily debunked by the fact that butter is very high in saturated fat and was also one of the foods with the highest amounts of toxins in it, as a result of heating.
As regards the issue of taste/immune-system, it should be pointed out that Koutchakoff and others noted that an increase in white-blood-cell count that occurred after eating any cooked-food(without any raw added). This is the same bodily reaction that occurs when one is feeling ill.
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A few points:- Just because the Eskimoes used broths doesn't make that healthy, in and of itself.
Just because the Eskimos ate rancid? fats doesn't make that healthy either, in and of itself. And I'll go as far as to say A soup or broth immediately sounds more appealing than anything with the word 'rancid' in it... to me specifically of course. ;)
Believe me when I say to thee, I've read about enzymes and good bacteria. But yey I am not convinced that Human life cannot flourish with good old mommy's slow cooked Chicken Soup. Join me and we can end this destructive conflict and bring Soup to the Galaxy!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
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Re 1st sentence:- that wasn't what I was saying.
It is a fact, though, that the Eskimoes had astonishingly good health by comparison to other hunter-gatherer tribes, and, given that they lived in the harshest possible environment on the planet, that is quite impressive. The fact that they ate more raw animal food, and therefore less cooked-food, than other hunter-gatherer tribes and the fact that the Eskimoes didn't touch dairy or grains(pre-Contact) is also of interest. Since there are plenty of other populations which eat/ate broths and soups, and are extremely unhealthy, it's unlikely that broths and soups are useful re health.
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I know you are but what am I :P
http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-3a.shtml
Natural "Garden of Eden" simply a myth. The conclusion of this is that the cooking of some foods, by saving time and effort and extending the range of the diet, would have enhanced survival in a significant way, even in more supposedly "ideal" or tropical environments, but especially in areas where edible raw foods are scarce. That lack of ease in obtaining food occurs only in temperate zones and higher latitudes is not true is shown by the examples of the Australian Aborigines [O'Dea 1992], the Bushmen [Bicchieri 1972 and below] as well as many others [Bicchieri 1972], including the tropical rainforest Ache of Paraguay [Hawkes et al. [1982]. (Note that even in the case of the Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay, one of the few examples of a primitive people that have been extensively studied who subsisted in a dense rainforest habitat--the type of environment considered ideal by raw-fooders--significant amounts of their food were cooked; and fruits, a typical raw-foodist staple, were not as easily obtainable compared to other foods in their diet [Clastres 1972, see esp. p. 156; also Hawkes et al. 1982, and Hill et al. 1984].)
The Garden of Eden is a myth--or, if you like, doesn't exist on Earth. The bottom line then, is that--however cooking may have gotten started--it's use conferred significant (evolutionary) survival advantages, or it would not have eventually become part of the regular repertoire of that most opportunistic of all animal species: human beings.
I'm not trying to change your mind. We can see you have your ideas set and I am aware of where we are... but as I've read time and time again, none of this is simply black and white.. unless it's like a ying and yang thing and in that case, okay, you got me.
The fact that they ate more raw animal food, and therefore less cooked-food, than other hunter-gatherer tribes and the fact that the Eskimoes didn't touch dairy or grains(pre-Contact) is also of interest. Since there are plenty of other populations which eat/ate broths and soups, and are extremely unhealthy, it's unlikely that broths and soups are useful re health.
What ????
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Re broths/soups comment:- That's pretty clear. I mean, there were plenty of populations in ill-health such as the Egyptians who used broths, so it's unlikely that broths are such useful food. The only factors that Weston-Price noted were that the healthiest tribes both ate high amounts of animal food and also ate some of their food(animal and plant-based) raw.
Re garden of eden comment:- This statement is aimed at Raw Vegans/Fruitarians(for some strange reason, beyondveg.com doesn't akcnowledge raw animal foodists, except in 1 side-article on Aajonus). At any rate, the statement is based on a false premise, naemly the idea that if humans have been eating cooked-food for years, that it must somehow benefit their survival or they wouldn't do it. First of all, humans(and animals) do all sorts of stupid things, which are anti-survival. Monkeys in the wild go in heavily for fermented fruit, for example, because they're adicted to the alcohol in it. Secondly, a practice that harms survival can still be passed on to the next generations if the person doing the harmful, stupid practice manages to survive past the age of breeding. Since cooking (mostly) leads to slow deterioration of health(particularly after the age of 40), it doesn't prevent breeding. This easily negates the argument that humans would have died out if cooking was harmful. Plus, after the invention of fire for warmth, it has been argued that humans were no longer in danger of dying out, regardless of what other harmful practices they had, as fire could be used to drive away predators etc.
Lastly, humans increased the amounts of cooked-foods in their diet in the Neolithic(ie grains), in order to compensate for the scarcity of wild game around that time. The result is that they became extremely unhealthy leading to a decrease in height, dental caries and many grain- and dairy-based diseases. These Neolithic humans turned to grains/legumes/dairy out of desperation because of a lack of animal foods, not for any health-reasons, so there's no reason to assume that humans' incorporation of cooked-foods into their diet 240,000 years before, was any different. Indeed, other non-health-related reasons exist, such as the fact that addictive opioids exist in cooked-foods(they also , interestingly, exist in dairy and grains), or the claim that humans needed to warm their frozen, raw meats in ultra-cold environments and that the habit simply caught on in other climates.
Besides, the fact that a multitude of wildlife has existed on raw foods for millions/billions of years should indicate that cooked-food consumption is not necessary.
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Re broths/soups comment:- That's pretty clear. I mean, there were plenty of populations in ill-health such as the Egyptians who used broths, so it's unlikely that broths are such useful food. The only factors that Weston-Price noted were that the healthiest tribes both ate high amounts of animal food and also ate some of their food(animal and plant-based) raw.
It's not clear at all. It may be clear to you, in your head and that's fine, but it's not clear at all and your argument that the Egyptians were ill because of broth is almost laughable. Scratch almost. I'm sorry but it's true. If you picked a particular broth- say cream of toad soup I'd have to look into it before responding.
http://www.westonaprice.org/foodfeatures/broth.html
Hmmm Brooottthhhhh!!!!! :D
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Not laughable at all - just look at any online sources re egyptia ill-health and you'll see what I mean. The fools at the WAPF such as Sally Fallon would have us all believe that dairy is healthy to consume as long as it's raw or that grains are OK to eat as long as they're fermented or that cooked meats are fine as long as they're boiled but the example of the Ancient Egyptians (and many ohter Neolithic-era peoples) kind of debunks such absurd claims.
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Here is a very nice piece about our friends the Egyptians. I don't see broth mentioned as something bad though I might have missed it l)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/health_01.shtml
I don't think they are fools over at WAPF. I don't agree with everything they say, but I do believe their approach to traditional eating habits is one of the best around.
I certainly don't mean to imply that an all raw paleo diet is a bad thing and won't achieve the results sought by it's followers. At the same time I don't think properly prepared soups and broths of vegetable, meat or bone should be demonized (yet). I'm not saying one should live only on soups and broths either(yet).
It's easy for people to read The Bear and go wow, check this guy out! Look what he's saying! How exciting! Well, think for a moment of living in the 1500s and hearing of Mr.Cornaro who again- lived to 102! Talk about that! What did he eat? A Calorie Restricted diet of mutton, soup, egg yolk and wine and he wrote a book about it! Which you can read for free!
http://soilandhealth.org/
http://soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020105cornaro.html
If you could back up your claim, with any kind of documentation other than Potts cats, I'd be very interested to read it. And I would read it with an open mind. I like to learn. And as I said, my learning has lead me to believe that some cooked food, is not a bad thing. Like I have learned that carbs are not evil. It's what we do to them. Your learning has brought you hear with your beliefs. And you know, you might be right about a lot of things... ehh... uhm... -X
It's too bad we can't all get together in a pub somewhere and have a great argument over a cold Beer or Raw Egg!
Best wishes,
Avalon ;)
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There's extensive online info on the Ancient Egyptian diet such as the mention of Melokhia soup which is basiacally a herb mixed with chicken-broth and/or other meats:-
http://originalrecipes.com/node/3190
Seems the broths didn't save them, nor did the fermentation of grains aid them, nor did raw dairy help the health of the Ancient Egyptian royalty, even though those are all WAPF staples. This is the whole problem with the WAPF, they cite many unnatural foods which are typical of many very sick Neolithic-era populations. Now, I might concede that the consumption of broths wouldn't have harmed as much those Palaeolithic-era peoples who started eating cooked-meats, after the time cooking was invented, since they weren't consuming dairy or grains or legumes, but it wouldn't have been as effective as an all-rawpalaeo diet, given the levels of toxins created by heat(even low heat).
As regards the whole issue of cooking, there are already a multitude of scientific papers showing the harm done by toxins in cooked-foods, most of them easily accessible online, some of which I've already referred to in previous texts and on the child boards of the general discussions forum. Like I said before, the only "proof" that the WAPF have re broths/soups is that they are "less worse" than more heavily-cooked foods, not necessarily better. Sure, if one cooks in water(AND drinks the water , afterwards, to get the leached-out vitamins), then it's less harmful than grilling/frying but you're still consuming AGEs which will leads to conditions such as diabetes etc. in later life. In the same way, someone might view smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes a day as not as harmful as smoking a full pack a day, but it'll still have an effect.
As for the age of 102, that's meaningless as plenty of people, in ill-health or otherwise, have lived till 120 or so. It could also be argued that if one ate all-rawpalaeo from birth that one could live till 150.
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I have the book from the Weston A Price foundation: Nourishing Traditions.
And Sally Fallon explained the need for making STOCK.
She said that RAW FOOD was hydrophylic (?) attracts water / digestive juices, while COOKED FOOD was hydrophobic (?) repels water / digestive juices.
So making STOCK / SOUP / BROTH is a recommendation for non-rawists... cooked food eaters.
RAW FOODISTS would have no need for STOCK.
RAW FOOD rates best.
and STOCK is 2nd rate.
STOCK / SOUP / BROTH is useful for cooked food eaters. I bought the nourishing traditions book and turned to making these things for my children who I am still transitioning to a more raw diet.
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I am glad you two are living up to your morals; that of saying what you believe. Many good points have been raised. Please excuse the following if it rambles a bit. First there may be no perfect way of eating. For the concept includes the idea that a particular food(s) is what sustains us. When probably there are many factors, like love, hope, intuitive guidance, maybe even God. Hence the mind is only one facet of knowing, and so it may be true with diet. A crazy for instance; those monkeys, if they chose to forgo the fermented fruit, might not have the delight in life as much as those that didn't. Might cherish their own life more, might make up for it in other ways. Silly, I know, but how we take in life seems very important to our health.
The person who forgoes a hot bowl of soup and spends the evening wishing they hadn't probably suffers more than if they hadn't. The point is that mental restrictions may not always lead to perfect health. Once every month or so I shop at whole foods. I would almost always sample in a little one ounce sample cup their soups. I at one point really liked them, but denied myself. Now, they have little attraction for me. When I had to deny myself, I noticed there was inner conflict. Hard to describe in detail, but it caused a slight discomfort.
It didn't last long, for about 15 minutes later, the taste of the soup had gone bad in my mouth and repeatedly I was glad I hadn't eaten more. But that may not be true for everyone. For it seems that from having been raw or various sorts for over thirty years, I have lost the ability to handle cooked foods, maybe an enzyme thing. Others do seemingly well with cooked.
And then from the rational point of view, I can't imagine anything 'good' happens to the ingredients in the soup from having been cooked. Just like explaining 'raw' food to a newly interested person. I always say, what do you intuitively think is healthier, an apple just picked from a tree or one that has been baked for an hour? Pretty much the same is true with anything you could put in a soup, unless you wanted to breakdown grains or bones. I made a Sally Fallon soup for my daughter. Lots of bones, etc, slow cooked. And then I tried it. Wasn't bad as soups go. But from a perspective of having eaten raw for so many years, I knew it wasn't right for me. And that's where I'll end it here, because for some, I am sure It may have been.
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That was a very nice post Van.
Tyler wrote:
As for the age of 102, that's meaningless as plenty of people, in ill-health or otherwise, have lived till 120 or so. It could also be argued that if one at all-rawpalaeo from birth that one could live till 150.
Argued for sure as it hasn't happened yet. And in favor of Cornaro, he wasn't in ill health. Actually he was in ill health at 40, changed his ways and lived a very healthy life. If you live a very healthy life to 102, I think that will be just grand. I hope you do.
But I'm afraid to say that your 'arguments' are more smooth talk than anything. There are papers and studies contradicting everything and they aren't hard to find. Your Egyptian Soup was meant to show what? It was the cause of Egyptian ill health? 'the broths didn't save them'? Were they specifically making broth to be saved? And as with all things, it could have been a combination of foods, lack of certain foods- any number of things! Sand and pebbles in their food (no joke)! Why do some people swear by raw milk? And don't get me wrong- I'm not arguing that it's always a good thing. I'm arguing that there are people who believe differently than you in countless different ways.
Is your way of eating the only true way of eating for everyone to experience good health and a long life?
While growing up all the vegetable water was thrown down the drain. Boiled broccoli, green beans and on and on thrown down the drain! OMG! The horror! And people who don't know better continue this practice. It took me to 49-50 years of age to learn the atrocity of pouring away the green water. Now, if I do boil Bok Choy or Green pepper, and they aren't used in say a soup, I'll drink the water as a tea which I find quite delicious. Asparagus tea is a favorite of mine. I also like those veggies raw.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/nutrition/20well.html?ref=science
It's my belief that the evidence isn't there regarding the certain cooking methods and human health. It's my belief this makes for great arguments on the subject. What you can't do and haven't done is find the proof you need to convince me otherwise- because it doesn't exist, yet. Make a balance sheet in excel or something and show me how the balance tilts in your favor. I'll bet without smooth talking, you won't be able to do it. Because the scientific evidence isn't there. What you will have is a band of diet explorers- like Geoff and AV and The Bear and Stefansson and yourself perhaps and your neighbor all living better healthier lives than you were before. But there are countless McDougallers with the same results. There are traditional Okinawans living healthy old age lives.
I support your raw quest. I support the possibilities!
But your way the only way bunk is bunk IMO -d (for now at least)
P.S. I'm not sure I can explain what I'm about to try and explain but since I've come to believe that some cooking is okay- I just have this sense that if you don't throw the water away... if you still retain the veggies and their broth and haven't cooked it for days, then the essence of that food is still there. You can't see the air, but it moves things, erodes mountains. Things freeze and thaw and grow and rot and it's all still here, perhaps in a different form. Throwing the water out is a crime. I no longer do that. And if you haven't tried Bok Choy or Asparagus tea
they are quite tasty ;)
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Hi William, It is interesting just how delicious dripping, melting fat tastes!!!! I can't say who's right about what, but man, when I do eat rare steak, the fat is tops! When I was eating raw beef, the fat was well, sticking to the roof of my mouth -[ not the same at all. I can taste it just writing about it.
May raw foodists do heat their food, just not beyond 120 degrees and still consider themselves raw. What do y'all feel about this?
I think the enzymes are destroyed in Neolithic and plant based foods at 120 degrees. I feel it's destroyed in RAFs at much lower temperatures, depending on which food we're talking about, fat at maybe 104, honey at maybe 96. I intuit the difference is a good thing, that Paleo foods are more sensitive because they can give more nutrition. My body can tend to be hypersensitive, and I'm best staying away from heated and dehydrated foods, and yes heated grilled fatty meat I have found tasty too, but it's not worth it for me. Maybe it's tasty because it's 'addictive', which does not work well for me.
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Here is a very nice piece about our friends the Egyptians. I don't see broth mentioned as something bad though I might have missed it l)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/health_01.shtml
I don't think they are fools over at WAPF. I don't agree with everything they say, but I do believe their approach to traditional eating habits is one of the best around.
I certainly don't mean to imply that an all raw paleo diet is a bad thing and won't achieve the results sought by it's followers. At the same time I don't think properly prepared soups and broths of vegetable, meat or bone should be demonized (yet). I'm not saying one should live only on soups and broths either(yet).
It's easy for people to read The Bear and go wow, check this guy out! Look what he's saying! How exciting! Well, think for a moment of living in the 1500s and hearing of Mr.Cornaro who again- lived to 102! Talk about that! What did he eat? A Calorie Restricted diet of mutton, soup, egg yolk and wine and he wrote a book about it! Which you can read for free!
http://soilandhealth.org/
http://soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020105cornaro.html
If you could back up your claim, with any kind of documentation other than Potts cats, I'd be very interested to read it. And I would read it with an open mind. I like to learn. And as I said, my learning has lead me to believe that some cooked food, is not a bad thing. Like I have learned that carbs are not evil. It's what we do to them. Your learning has brought you hear with your beliefs. And you know, you might be right about a lot of things... ehh... uhm... -X
It's too bad we can't all get together in a pub somewhere and have a great argument over a cold Beer or Raw Egg!
Best wishes,
Avalon ;)
I feel it would be nice to get together and do that too.
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Good Morning ;D
Here's a nice piece in defense of Raw Food, but tackles the 'live enzyme' myth.
http://www.ecologos.org/lenzyme.htm
Among raw-food enthusiasts, there is a very popular myth that enzymes are "alive" and these so-called "living enzymes" somehow (never supported with biochemistry) assist the body in digesting food.
There is also a myth that foods are "alive" and therefore contain "living enzymes". Well, foods are rendered quite dead upon chewing, and certainly the food's being digested would also certainly kill any living cell that was not killed by chewing. If you think that foods are alive, then chew some seeds and plant the mush thus prepared, and wait for it to sprout and grow - does anyone really believe chewed foods can be "alive".
I don't dare assume this to be true, but I can't be the only one to feel that the argument that we are the only species to cook our food may actually explain why we are who we are and do what we do. And I don't mean kill each other and destroy the planet kinda thing. I mean every time I see a giant Hollywood explosion on film I expect the earth to shake free from its axis and spin off into space :o What if cooking and say fish eating were the catalysts needed to spark an evolutionary change, but then as Humans often to do- we messed it up. Took it too far. Invented Twinkies and Pop Tarts and Jelly Babies. Maybe it's as simple as some raw, some cooked. Not all cooked. Or, not.
Time for breakfast!
Best wishes,
Avalon :D
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First of all, the time when cooking was invented did not coincide with a massive evolutionary change. The only times when brain-size was significantly boosted out of all proportion was when our hominid ancestors started eating more meats, each time(which were raw as these two events occurred long before cooking was invented).
Secondly, it's pretty clear that you won't accept any evidence no matter how many scientific papers I show you re Advanced glycation end products, links to diabetes etc.. Fair enough, but the evidence is there, regardless, and most responsible nutritionists, as a result of such a multitude of studies, already recommend against extreme forms of cooking such as grilling/frying/microwaving/baking so that already 1/2 to 2/3 of the pro-cooking argument is already lost.
The claim re some people thriving on cooked-foods is dubious. Sure, there will always be some people who are better adapted re tolerating toxins, whether in the form of arsenic or nicotine or advanced glycation end products, but it's rather difficult to believe a claim that one could not only tolerate a toxin but also thrive on it. After all, technically, all that cooked-foods are is treated raw food that has fewer levels of vitamins(due to heat), with some toxins added to them. And since wildlife has survived perfectly well on raw foods for billions of years, it's unlikely that cooked-food is somehow "necessary" or "useful" and it's difficult to find anything about cooked-food that makes it superior to raw foods, other than that it can expand the range of diets by reducing antinutrients thus allowing people to eat several more foods that do a lot of harm to many people(eg:- grains and legumes).
As for the other mention re quality of life, I'm a devotee of Schopenhauer and disagree with that world-view. Schopenhauer pointed out that we all, like animals, seek to attain a higher state of being re increased happiness etc. The trouble, as Schopenhauer pointed out, is that that renders us slaves to things that have no intrinsic value in themselves (eg:- money, alcohol, drugs etc.) So, it's best to not be dependent on such material things and focus on the more important things in life such as health etc.
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As the following article suggests, it can only be speculated. Meat? Fish? I tend to lean more towards fish.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34056671_ITM
There's this also
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/38009.php
According to Dr. Stephen Cunnane it was a rich and secure shore-based diet that fuelled and provided the essential nutrients to make our brains what they are today. Controversially, according to Dr. Cunnane our initial brain boost didn't happen by adaptation, but by exaptation, or chance.
Tyler wrote:
Secondly, it's pretty clear that you won't accept any evidence no matter how many scientific papers I show you re Advanced glycation end products, links to diabetes etc.. Fair enough, but the evidence is there, regardless, and most responsible nutritionists, as a result of such a multitude of studies, already recommend against extreme forms of cooking such as grilling/frying/microwaving/baking so that already 1/2 to 2/3 of the pro-cooking argument is already lost.
Some believe some of this AGE business to be a natural reaction. Perhaps as- I repeat again, we go too far. I agree that grilling and frying and baking are quite possibly a bad thing. You have shown me no scientific evidence regarding Soups and Broths. And the Salmon Soup I posted never reached the boiling point.
Show me your scientific paper regarding AGEs and Vegetable Soup.
http://www.ccmhi.org/StarchBasedDietsNoAnswerforDiabetics.htm
Exposure to advanced glycation end products
Another reason why typical vegetarian diets are not ideal for diabetics is they are not designed to avoid exposure to advanced glycation end products (AGEs). There is a huge body of literature documenting that the high sugar in the bloodstream in diabetics promotes the formation of AGEs in the body as the sugars react with body proteins. The formation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) on connective tissue and within cells stiffens and ages your blood vessels and accelerates aging throughout the body. AGEs are a significant causal factor of the horrible side effects of diabetes, such as blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, and strokes.The chemical modifications of cells that occur as a result of the accumulation of AGEs are one of the primary hallmarks of aged and diseased tissues.
But the accumulation of AGEs in the body does not result solely from increased sugar in the bloodstream. AGEs also are formed when starchy foods are cooked at higher temperatures, causing molecular rearrangement. Acrylamides are an example of AGEs that occur from cooking carbohydrates—such as potatoes and grains—in the absence of water. The higher the temperature, the more these toxic compounds are formed. Neither acrylamides nor other AGEs are formed when vegetables are steamed or cooked in soups.
Yeah I know, Dr. Joel Fuhrman M.D. what does he know. What does Dr. McDougall know. What did Atkins and Eades know. I don't know.
The frightening new news is that eating foods with these advanced glycation products raises blood and tissue levels and increases nerve damage. Cooking with water prevents sugars from binding to proteins to form these poisonous chemicals. Cooking without water causes sugars to combine with proteins to form these advanced glycation products. So, baking, roasting and broiling cause the poisonous advanced glycation products to form, while boiling and steaming prevent them.
oops, sorry, Gabe Mirkin, M.D. (another Doctor)
I'm asking you- Show me the Evidence. Help convince me. I'm not kidding. I'm not talking about frying, grilling or nuking. I'm talking lightly cooked soups, even bone broths. How do you know that these kinds of cooking might, I say might, I'm allowed to be uncertain... where was i? ehh, might not simulate, as has been argued a kind of pre-digestion process??? Because of the liquid food combination thingy...
If you don't think I'm serious then you're off the hook. Actually, you might start sounding like The Bear- never finding those papers he'd lost. Sorry, that was a dig. My bad -d
Best wishes,
Avalon :D
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Here is one of the best pages I've found on our friends the AGEs :D
http://qualitycounts.com/fpadvanced_glycation_end_products.html
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Last Post of the Day, yeah maybe...
Here's a very interesting list from Jeff Novick
http://www.jeffnovick.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=493:starchy-foods-ages-and-you&catid=97:newsletter&Itemid=349
AGE Amounts In Food (per serving)
Starchy vegetables
Corn, 20
Sweet potato, roasted, 72
White potato, boiled, 17
White potato, french fries, homemade, 694
White potato, french fries, fast food, 1,522
White potato, roasted, 45 min, prepared with 5 mL oil, 218
Grains/legumes/Cereals
Bean, red kidney, raw, 116
Bean, red kidney, canned, 191
Bean, red kidney, cooked, 1 h, 298
Pasta, cooked 8 min, 112
Bran Flakes, 10
Corn Flakes, 70
Frosted Flakes, 128
Oatmeal, dry, instant, 4
Oatmeal, cooked, instant 25
Bread
Whole wheat, center, 16
Whole wheat, center toasted, 25
Whole wheat, crust, 22
Whole wheat, crust, toasted, 36
Pita pocket, 16
Fruits
Apple 13
Apple, baked, 45
Banana, 9
Cantaloupe, 20
Raisins, 36
High Fat Plant Foods
Almonds, roasted, 1,995
Avocado, 473
Cashews, roasted 2,942
Olive, ripe 501
Peanut butter, smooth 2,255
Walnuts, roasted 2,366
High Fat Animal Products
Cream cheese, 3,265
Mayonnaise, 9,470
Butter, 1,324
Beef
Frankfurter, boiled 7 min, 6,736
Frankfurter, broiled 5 min, 10,143
Hamburger, fried 6 min, 2,375
Hamburger, fast food, 4,876
Meatball, boiled in sauce, 2,567
Shoulder cut, broiled, 5,367
Bacon, microwave, 1,173
Deli ham, smoked, 2,114
Pork chop, pan fried, 4,277
Chicken breast, skinless cubes
Steamed 10 min and broiled 12 min, 5,071
Pan fried 10 min and boiled 12 min, 5,706
Chicken breast, skinless cutlet
Raw, 692
Boiled 1 h, 1,011
Broiled 15 min, 5,245
Fried 8 min, 6,651
Roasted, barbecue sauce, 4,291
Roasted, breaded, 4,102
Roasted, breaded, microwave, 1 min, 5,157
Fish
Salmon, raw, 502
Salmon, smoked, 515
Trout, raw, 705
Trout, roasted 25 min, 1,924
Cheese
American, processed, 2,603
American, processed, low fat, 1,425
Brie, 1,679
Cottage cheese, 1,744
Feta 2,527
Mozzarella, part skim, 503
Parmesan, grated, 2,535
As you can see, it is not the unrefined unprocessed starchy foods, like a potato, a sweet potato, or a bowl of oatmeal, let alone a slice of whole wheat bread that is contributing to the AGE load of most people. The real culprits to the high level of AGE's in the American diet are the high fat foods, fried foods and animal products that most Americans cosnume.
Boiled white potato 17
Raw Salmon 502
Raw Chicken 692
Avocado 473
And who eats raw fruit?
duhnn duhnn duhnnn...
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First of all, the notions re aquatic ape theory or the shoreline theory are considered extremely fringe, with most scientists dismissing the theory given the lack of evidence and faulty points. Here's a page criticising the more basic faults in the aquatic ape theory:-
http://www.aquaticape.org/
and this one:-
http://www.aquaticape.org/aahbook.html
The other problem is that there's plenty of evidence of wild-game being slaughtered in the Palaeolithic such as the famous bones of horses at the bottom of certain cliffs in France, not forgetting the images of wild aurochs and other large herbivores on the cave walls. It is extremely unlikely that they would eat fish in any serious amounts if they didn't depict them on the cave-walls.
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Re AGEs list:-
It's amazing how one can find almost anything that supports any old theory if one googles enough. In the case of Joel Fuhrmann's claims re broth, it's unsubstantiated(he's a highly dodgy pro-vegan researcher - ironically, the Palaeo guru Eades pointed, in his blogs, to a study
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/sugar-and-sweeteners/vegetarians-age-faster-2/
showing that vegans have higher AGE-levels than cooked-palaeos). Other, more honest , websites claim merely that boiling and similiar methods only produce fewer AGEs and other toxins:-
http://www.life-enhancement.com/article_template.asp?ID=1869
As for the selected mentions of raw chicken and raw salmon, this was already discussed in other topics on this forum. It was pointed out that many modern raw foods are derived from intensively-farmed animals fed on crappy AGE-rich,unnatural diets, so that it's understandable that farmed salmon or intensively-farmed chicken would have high AGE-levels. That's the trouble with such tables, if they, instead of detailing grainfed beef/farmed fish, showed data for much healthier raw foods, the kind that we rawpalaeos eat, such as grassfed beef, wildcaught salmon/swordfish etc., they would find far fewer AGE-levels.
As regards broths/soups, scientific papers, as you very well know, focus on foods that we currently eat, not the broths/soups that our ancestors used to eat centuries ago(well, unless very heavily processed). What we do know with certainty, however, is that food starts getting destroyed at c.40 degrees Celsius, with the (proteinous) enzymes being affected first, followed by the killing off of most of the bacteria(I believe there are some heat-resistant strains), then comes the formation of AGEs. Since you've even pointed out in the above tables(as have I in other reports), that boiling does produce toxins such as AGEs, albeit in smaller amounts than in grilling/frying, the best you could come up with is that foods heated, but nowhere near boiling point, are less unhealthy than boiled food. That is unless you can show that we need to consume small amounts of toxins such as AGEs in order to be healthy.
I've already pointed out how the body reacts by upping the white-blood-cell count when it eats cooked-food on its own. Since this is a reaction to illness/pathogens as well, that would indicate that things like AGEs aren't natural at all.
I'm impressed by your efforts so far, incidentally - at least it hasn't been boring. It's so much more fun debating with you than with some of the more vehement anti-raws out there.
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I think the enzymes are destroyed in Neolithic and plant based foods at 120 degrees. I feel it's destroyed in RAFs at much lower temperatures, depending on which food we're talking about, fat at maybe 104, honey at maybe 96. I intuit the difference is a good thing, that Paleo foods are more sensitive because they can give more nutrition. My body can tend to be hypersensitive, and I'm best staying away from heated and dehydrated foods, and yes heated grilled fatty meat I have found tasty too, but it's not worth it for me. Maybe it's tasty because it's 'addictive', which does not work well for me.
I think enzymes are the key, however maybe not needed in the food itself for the proper digestion of (rendered?) fat. If true, and my experience seems to indicate that it is, there should be no objection to pemmican. I read that the needed enzyme, lipase, is made in the pancreas. I don't know if this ability wears out same as those needed for meat digestion.
If broth is a clear liquid with maybe some fat on top, then there are no AGEs in it, and the nutrients will be all dissolved. I don't see any problem with that.
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I'm impressed by your efforts so far, incidentally - at least it hasn't been boring.
Thank you, I think. Maybe that's because I'm not anti-raw at all.
Your comment about Googling is an important one and one of the reasons I'm not ready to believe your all or nothing stance on AGEs. I like Eades sometimes. But he has come across more than once as a Vegan/Vegetarian hater. Okay, maybe hater isn't the word. He's made some nasty comments about the Vegans/Vegetarians he's met at his lectures, which in my opinion doesn't count for the many people living their lives and minding their own business. I incidentaly called Jeff Novick on a comment he made because as you probably know there are fractions within fraction of fractions, fractating all over the place. His comment was that 'MOST' Vegetarian even Vegans did not eat well. I offered that the word 'MANY' was a better way to go. I don't think you can say 'MOST'- but again he was going by those he'd met on the 'circuit'.
For you because it's good to know what the enemy is thinking:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-the-cold-truth-about-raw-food-diets.html
Cooking can be beneficial.
In many cases, cooking destroys some of the harmful anti-nutrients that bind minerals in the gut and interfere with the utilization of nutrients. Destruction of these anti-nutrients increases absorption. Steaming vegetables and making vegetable soups breaks down cellulose and alters the plants’ cell structures so that fewer of your own enzymes are needed to digest the food, not more. The point is that this “cooked food is dead food” enzyme argument does not hold water. On the other hand, the roasting of nuts and the baking of cereals does reduce availability and absorbability of protein.
One of the first thing I learned was about the white blood cell count rising upon eating cooked food. I remember the scary black and white photographs. Have you seen this particular beyond veg page? Do you know what's funny? When I was eating Wai they really annoyed me thos beyond people. Now, not so much :D
http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-1i.shtml
Even at face value, Kouchakoff experiments not an argument against cooked food when some raw foods are also eaten. However, for the sake of discussion, let's look at the Kouchakoff experiments upon which the raw-foodist claims are based. When we do, what we first notice is that Kouchakoff's experiments are not an argument against predominantly raw diets (versus 100% raw)--or even against predominantly cooked diets that include sufficient amounts of raw food--since according to Kouchakoff [1930]:
It has been proved possible to take, without changing the blood formula, every kind of foodstuff which is habitually eaten now, but only by following this rule, viz.--that it must be taken along with raw products, according to a definite formula.
My turn to mention missing info- and I could be wrong, but I do believe I read that cooked food, eaten after cooling does not present the same problem. I have to check into this. I do know factually that cooked potatoes- cooled in the fridge do not raise insulin like a cooked hot potato, but that's another story.
The problem we face is what is scripture and what is not. And I mentioned Furhman and those others on purpose. They may be right or wrong, but they are prominent in this whatever it is that's happening in Nutrition. People are following them- ooh, lets not forget the 80/10/10 Diet :) by Dr. Graham but he's a chiro right? Maybe?
It's hard to imagine that everyone in this Country, if you are in this Country, has a unique phone number. 7 numbers, switched around and around to achieve a different result. That's kinda how I see what's going on in nutrition right now. Anything is better than SAD. Then you have this combination that might work. It might work better than that combination, but wait! Add in some raw milk and you have a new convert! But wait! Take milk out and throw in Orange juice mixed with Olive Oil! But what if we went all fruit, nuts and leaves or just meat and leaves, or GOD! It could be anything! Some new combination that hasn't happened yet.
I'm as certain that you don't know the end all be all answer as you are certain that you do DOHHH!!! And I know I don't know, but I am totally enjoying the ride... hang on I'm not feeling so well heh heh.
I'm glad we cleared this up.
I'll try and find the cold cooked food thing just in case there's hope for you yet ;)
Best wishes,
Avalon :D
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I doubt that cooled cooked food wouldn't induce the leukocytosis effect.
The arguments used against Koutchakoff are highly dodgy as microwaving foods has been shown to induce luekocytosis - so Koutchakoff is vindicated. Secondly, beyondveg.com argues that Koutchakoff's point is irrelevant as the leukocytosis effect is negated if one eats 10% or more food , raw(at the same meal). Since most people, nowadays, eat things like pizzas, fried foods/ready meals , all 100% cooked in 1 meal, this point is irrelevant. Plus, it merely shows that raw food is so superior to cooked-food that it can negate the effect of coooked-food(in a partial way) if one eats 10% raw at every single meal.
I've actually addressed all of beyondveg.com's absurd points in that anti-raw thesis on this website:-
http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/anti-raw-bias-on-beyondveg-com-website-debunked/
Then there's BYV's point re luekocytosis and exercise. Yes, harsh exercise might induce leukocytosis, but there the point is that such stresses can overwhelm the body if taken to excess. That's why one hears so often about people suffering health-problems from overtraining. Similiarly, a rise in white-blood-cell count, in and of itself, isn't that dangerous, but, over a long period of time and if produced constantly via cooked-food-consumption, it weakens the body's resources, leading to physical degeneration over time.
As regards the other anti-raw essay, it's very flawed as it only focuses on raw vegans. Yes, vegetables get antinutrients reduced as a result of cooking, but cooking lowers the levels of nutrients in the first place, plus creates toxins in the process. The argument on that website claiming that boiling/steaming/simmering doesn't produce any toxins is an outright falsehood as shown previously.
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for the record:
any1 who has actually read cunnane's book knows well that the aquatic ape theory & cunnane's shore based scenario are not 1 & the same -- even though cunnane is friends w/ & seems to have learned from crawford & elaine morgan
while i learned a thing or 2 from my parents, i am not 1 & the same w/ them
perhaps we all can use some dietary dha to clear up mental cloudiness, misconceptions, dogmatic presuppositions...?
re. schopenhauer's philosophy:
where & on what grounds does he draw the line?
why appreciating money = bad whereas appreciating health = good?
is health nonphysical (sort of spiritual) in his view, whereas money is just paper or plastic?
why are money & drugs in the same category?
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OK, first of all, let's examine BYV's notion that since all human cultures eat (some) cooked-food and that that implies that we need it or have to have it. This is a false conclusion as the only way one could conclude that cooked-food is essential/necessary for human health and that raw food is unnecessary or toxic is if we could encounter a human culture that only ate cooked-food and no raw food whatsoever (no such culture exists, to my knowledge as all humans need to eat raw fruit for vitamin C etc., and the Eskimos on their 99% meat diets would eat some of their meats raw, also for the vitamin C among other nutrients) . I should also point out that since all non-human species do not cook their foods and thrive in that state, that humans don't need to cook their food, either.
There has not been an all Vegan Civilization either, but that's not stopping them from believing meat is necessary in Man's diet. Many claim to be thriving as you do. I don't think BYV's conclusion is false by any means. I think merely, it is their own conclusion and not yours.
Re BYV's mention of Maillard molecules in stored, raw food:- This is an exaggeration as the Maillard molecules in raw food are never anywhere near as high as those in cooked-foods.
After reading Jeff Novick's list, it appears your comment might not be true. Unless you can fins a different list- which I wouldn't mind seeing by the way. The raw Avocado was more than a boiled potato. Obviously it might be good to track down the origin of that list.
One problem is your claims are wide-spread and I don't think you can make such statements because so many people are eating so many different types of food- cooked and raw. Not everyone eats SAD. How many people eating a whole foods traditional God forbid Weston Price-ish diet have been studied recently?
The claim that cooking either reduces or doesn't affect the allergenicity of food seems to be misguided. Here's a relevant quotation from the Wikipedia entry for AGEs:- Advanced Gycation End Products. This article is backed up by a reference to a study:- "AGEs may be less, or more, reactive than the initial sugars they were formed from. Foods may be up to 200 times more immunoreactive after cooking". This would seem to imply that allergenicity is worse as regards cooked-foods than the raw version.
Which foods though? Some foods shouldn't be eaten raw. Maybe some foods shouldn't be cooked or, too much. Lord, what if some foods can be cooked without incident? Are there any? Are we still talking grilling and all the nasty cooking methods or are we still talking 'boiling'?
The only genuine statement that BYV makes here is that eating some raw food (10% apparently) along with the cooked-food minimises the leukocytosis reaction. But since most people nowadays in the Western world don't automatically eat raw and cooked food at the same meal, this is meaningless.
This is hardly meaningless if one eats 30-50% raw/cooked. And how can you make the blanket statement that 'MOST' people don't eat raw and cooked at the same meal... ehh, okay don't answer that... but it is not meaningless! If people are uneducated about the issue, of course they won't know what they are doing is wrong. And why is that? Because, ehh OH FRAK! It's complicated. This Family raises that Family- God help me like the Bear said- Acculturation is a mighty force. And if you have read him, you'll know he says most will fail because of Acculturation. I detest people who tell people they will fail. It is not constructive. It is very possible that there are people eating raw and cooked and many are over at McDougall... and with out the meat heh heh.
Okay I'll be honest and say I read ¾ of the way down the page before collapsing from brain bleed exhaustion. I commend your rebuttal! I really do! Obviously it comes from the heart. But because there are so many variables that have not been tested, I still say nothing has been proven. In fact, some things may have been proven, but they should be listed and believe me the list will go on forever as I mentioned about the endless phone number possibilites.
As you now know, I do believe some cooking methods ARE dangerous. I am a believer in much of what you say :thumbs up:
For me to believe I would need to see studies regarding various meats in stews, soups and broths. I would need studies on various vegetables the same. Bone broths studied. I have not found these studies, Also how raw vs cooked AGEs affect the human body. Meaning a boiled potato in water vs an apple.
Let me ask you a question. If you have blood work done, do you believe the results- that you're okay within a certain range? If you believe them why? And if you can believe that certain numbers are okay- I mean over having a sttaight flat-line of 0, why would it be difficult to believe that certain numbers- say an AGE 17 of a boiled potato, might be within an acceptable range?
Do you believe the Cholesterol Myth? If you do, on so such information, why would it be a difficult leap to believe not all AGE levels are dangerous to human life, when most of the world has a different view on cholesterol.
What you've shown me does not tilt the balance away from soups broths with any concrete measure. It doesn't favor it for sure.
I do appreciate your input however.
Best wishes,
Avalon ;D
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Look, there are 1000s of scientific studies done on AGEs, with several focusing on how the amounts of toxic AGEs in the body are directly related to conditions such as type 2 diabetes. Just google for such, they're all over the place. So that link between AGEs and ill-health is proven. Like I said, though, it's all a matter of degree, with less AGEs consumed being less worse than lots of AGEs consumed.
As regards the comment re AGEs in soups/broths, that's meaningless as peoples' diets nowadays include a vast range of foods, not just broths/soups, and I doubt that even hunter-gatherer tribes soley ate broths and soups for their cooked-foods - indeed, they ate plenty of
meats cooked without water on spits.
As regards the raw/cooked issue, I made a good point, there. Very few people mix cooked and raw at the same meal, nowadays. The average restaurant meal will feature cooked meat and cooked veg, with a dessert involving pasteurised dairy or some such. Only rarely will people nowadays include a bit of raw fruit or raw veg at the same meal.
Re that list, I'm a little suspicious of the figures, as they don't seem that high in other lists. But, yes, I grant that raw foods from animals raised on unhealthy, AGE-rich diets are also harmful. Mind you, this is part of rawpalaeo POV, anyway. I think I addressed this point, later on in that article, but I'll add an addendum to that comment, at some stage.
Re Weston-Price:- unfortunately, most of Weston-Price's findings have been contradicted by many other anthropologists. I was not happy to find out, for example, that the Maori were decidedly NOT super-healthy, despite Price's claims, given evidence of skeletal remains.
As regards the whole cholestrol/saturated fats issue, it's been pointed out by various sources that the reason for all those studies condemning saturated fats/cholesterol/animal foods, is really only because they're focusing on cooked animal foods and are therefore not taking the levels of toxins in such cooked-foods into account, such as AGEs. Here's a relevant excerpt from the saturated fat wikipedia page:-
"Another confounding issue may be the formation of exogenous (outside the body) advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) and oxidation products generated during cooking, which it appears some of the studies have not controlled for. It has been suggested that, "given the prominence of this type of food in the human diet, the deleterious effects of high-(saturated)fat foods may be in part due to the high content in glycotoxins, above and beyond those due to oxidized fatty acid derivatives." The glycotoxins, as he called them, are more commonly called AGEs"
One could argue that eating foods very low in AGEs, such as always eating grassfed meats, cooked as little as possible, making sure to cook only in water etc. etc., might reduce the burden of toxins in the body to so-called "manageable" levels. But to suggest something like that one would have to come up with plenty of scientific studies showing that such toxins are indeed tolerated at such low levels. In practice, because even the diets of hunter-gatherer tribes will include some AGE-rich foods, it is highly unlikely that anyone on a cooked-diet could ever realistically reduce the amounts of AGEs in their diet to low enough levels.
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As regards the comment re AGEs in soups/broths, that's meaningless as peoples' diets nowadays include a vast range of foods, not just broths/soups, and I doubt that even hunter-gatherer tribes soley ate broths and soups for their cooked-foods - indeed, they ate plenty of
meats cooked without water on spits.
Soups and broths may not be meaningless if that is your only source of cooked food.
As regards the raw/cooked issue, I made a good point, there. Very few people mix cooked and raw at the same meal, nowadays. The average restaurant meal will feature cooked meat and cooked veg, with a dessert involving pasteurised dairy or some such. Only rarely will people nowadays include a bit of raw fruit or raw veg at the same meal.
But your point is mute. Why? Because you're totally dissing all the people! I guess only this forum can change their diet and be healthy when MOST people are out eating in restaurants and BADLY! We just pray and hope they stumble onto this site and save their sorry meaningless asses >D God forbid someone other than the people here at Raw Paleo should have the strength to balance raw and cooked foods beyond 10%. Hell, very few people eat Raw Paleo! Do you have any idea how what you say sounds?
Long Live Raw Paleo!
And everyone else who's doing well eating the way they eat and stuff ???
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for the record:
any1 who has actually read cunnane's book knows well that the aquatic ape theory & cunnane's shore based scenario are not 1 & the same -- even though cunnane is friends w/ & seems to have learned from crawford & elaine morgan
while i learned a thing or 2 from my parents, i am not 1 & the same w/ them
perhaps we all can use some dietary dha to clear up mental cloudiness, misconceptions, dogmatic presuppositions...?
Don't jump to conclusions. I mentioned the Aquatic Ape theory and the meat-theory as they are at extremes to each other. The shoreline-based thoery of human evolution is simply a compromise between the two. It's anyway problematic as it assumes that humans would have had to have mostly lived near shorelines for much of their evolutionary history - an unlikely prospect.
re. schopenhauer's philosophy:
where & on what grounds does he draw the line?
why appreciating money = bad whereas appreciating health = good?
is health nonphysical (sort of spiritual) in his view, whereas money is just paper or plastic?
why are money & drugs in the same category?
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The point is that if you're not healthy, then you can't really fully appreciate the other things in life.
Schopenhauer pointed out that we are constantly aiming at higher states of being/emotional arousal and that these are largely unnecessary. Those goals can take many forms such as money, sex, wealth, drugs, or whatever. But he pointed out that these things are illusions - for example, money actually has no intrinsic value except what humans give it. It's just pieces of paper and metal, ultimately.
If you look at it from Schopenhauer's POV, it all makes sense. Sure one can take drugs to enhance one's life(for example, my doctor uncle is effectively addicted to pain-killers to cope with the joints that he ruined as a result of his SAD diet), but it's better to control one's own emotional state without needing crutches such as wealth in order to feel good about oneself.
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The Vet said weeks to months for Goopy my Cat. He's pretty much acting alright, right now. It's just difficult.
...
Best wishes everyone -d
I hope everything went best with your cat and you.
The reason why modern cats can survive(albeit with il-health) long enough to reproduce further generations is only because processed-cat-food-suppliers deliberately supplement their cat-feeds with artificial doses of taurine - if they didn't, the cats would get taurine-deficiency, much like they did in Pottenger's Experiments, with the inevitable results.
RAW fat over cooked fat being one of them. Of course in a raw paleo forum it will be natural to encounter people who have experienced and read studies that convinced them that raw paleo is the way to go... that raw fat is the way to go.
The only thing I can see in all these arguments so far is that those who are pushing cooked fat only do so because they have the opinion cooked fats taste better (because of the condiments and the cooking they are used to).
I have yet to see someone push that cooked fat is BETTER -HEALTHIER than raw fat.
In my opinion, cooked fat will always be inferior because:
- molecular structure has changed because of cooking
- condiments are not necessarily beneficial and may in fact be harmful sometimes
- most cooking introduces pollutants from the flame, from the wood, from the gas / fuel, from the cooking pot / utensils, from the method of cooking... some cooking styles are more harmful than others...
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... In my case, I just want to live, and so far raw everything / raw paleo including raw fats has been working best for me. Now I can see a future for myself... instead of death at 40... maybe a good strong healthy life at 120.
Interestingly enough, from what I've been googling all evening, taurine helps us with fats, gall bladder, brain connections and choline.
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Interestingly enough, from what I've been googling all evening, taurine helps us with fats, gall bladder, brain connections and choline.
Enough taurine is also essential for normal heart beat rhythm in both humans and animals.