I made some cherry juice from fresh cherries last night thinking it was paleo but when I woke up this morning I was thinking about it and there obviously wasn't any practical way to juice fruit in paleo times. Ok maybe from fruits like fresh squeezed orange juice in the tropics or just a couple of drops from squeezing a cherry or some other fruit but by and large I don't see any way it could have been a significant part of their diets.

More than likely most of the excess fruit that existed in those days was left on the trees and vines till it fell off and/or rotted. I remember a video one time of monkeys eating fruit that rotted and turned to alcohol and actually getting drunk from it. I've tasted fruit myself that had gone bad and had a slight alcoholic taste. This makes me think that alcohol from fruit is paleo. Though it was only available in low concentration, for a short time when it was in season. It wasn't till man had made vessels that things like grain were fermented so I don't believe all alcohol is paleo. Only under rare conditions in low concentrations.

I suppose grain could have been fermented in an animal bladder or something before pottery so I could be wrong. But then grain isn't really paleo either. Is it?

Any thoughts?

The Science of Lying
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX3Hu8loXTE

I am starting this thread to get to the bottom of the saying "like cures like". For me I would like to find out if eating raw kidney would be specifically good for my kidneys. I strongly dislike the taste of kidney and am almost hoping it isn't true, even though I believe it. It would be easy to dismiss the notion and state that it is absurd to think if I had a problem with my left arm that eating the left arm of animals as opposed to the right would cure my left arm. Obviously this isn't a fair assessment. I'm just trying to make a point by carrying it out to the extreme.

Upon googleing the term, like cures like, is mentioned in the context of homeopathy in about half of the search results. Homeopathy is complete bunk in my mind.

What do you guys think? Is there any validity to the saying or is it bunk?

http://www.rain-tree.com/chanca.htm#.WWE-dVGQyM8

1949 Pro. Mr. America and the 1950 Mr. USA

Bodybuilding and physical culture has, at its core, always been about pushing the limits of nutritional consumption. After all, no other sport promotes periods of intense dieting in the manner of the iron game. The quest for new nutritional approaches has led to some rather interesting diets, Armand Tanny’s raw meat diet being a case in point.

For those of us too young to remember, Tanny was a highly influential name in the bodybuilding business of yesteryear. An accomplished bodybuilder in his own right (Winner in the 1949 Pro. Mr. America and the 1950 Mr. USA competitions), Tanny also spent many decades writing on bodybuilding for the various Weider magazines.

Unlike his fellow iron game compatriots however, Tanny followed an almost entirely raw diet. That meant raw milk, raw vegetables and of course, raw meats.

So what prompted Tanny to follow this diet, what did the diet entail, and what can the modern lifter learn from it?

Going Raw

Given that raw food consumption was and  is such a taboo topic in today’s food circles, it is incredible to think that Tanny, a man who spent the bulk of his life in the United States, came across such a rare eating plan. So how did Armand stumble across this way of life?

According to old interviews and Randy Roachs’s Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors, Tanny owed his raw food conversion to a wrestling trip around America’s peripheral states. An accomplished wrestler and weightlifter in his own right, Tanny spent several months on tour in 1947 inHawaii where he squared off against the local wrestlers.

The impressive bulk and strength of his Polynesian opponents led Tanny to question the origins of their strength. For Tanny, these men were well built, strong and incredibly healthy. His desire to learn more soon brought him to their food source. The local Polynesian wrestlers consumed an almost entirely raw diet. That meant raw fruits, fish, meats and vegetables. For the young American man, it was an entirely new way of eating. One which promised big results.

Interested but unconvinced, Tanny returned to the United States eager to learn more. Having already spent one year at a medical school, he had some rudimentary knowledge of the body, but not enough to make an informed decision on raw food diets. Through months of research however, Tanny eventually stumbled across the works of Weston Price, the controversial dentists who had written extensively on the diets of traditional societies, many of whom shared the Polynesian’s perchance for raw food.

Armed with Price’s nutritional opus (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration), Tanny began his raw food journey.

So what did Tanny’s diet entail and what results did it have?

Like many trainers of his era, Tanny didn’t follow a strict dieting plan but rather ate whenever he felt necessary. That being the case, in later years Tanny estimated that he ate between ¾ (0.34 kg) to 1.5 lbs. (0.68 kg) of raw meat daily, an amount he believed supplied him with creatine in its purest form.

Generally speaking Tanny consumed ample amounts of raw fish such as tuna, lobster and even clams that he would collect at the Santa Monica Pier. Additionally he consumed beef, liver and a healthy amount of nuts, fruits and vegetables to round out his diet.

Owing to the advice of Gaylord Hauser, an nutritional guru of the time, Tanny later added brewer’s yeast, desiccated liver, yogurt, black strap molasses, and wheat germ oil. All of which were relatively standard bodybuilding supplements of the time.

The effects of this approach? Within two years, Armand had substantially improved upon his already impressive physique to the extent that he won the cobeyed 1949 Pro. Mr. America and the 1950 Mr. USA competitions before turning his hand to writing and gym management. Furthermore, Tanny’s health remained robust for several decades until his death at the age of 90, suggesting that for Armand, the raw food approach stood him in good stead.

Such an extreme eating style, did of course, have its drawbacks. Several years into his new eating approach Tanny encountered a moment of considerable embarrassment  on a stop-over in St.Louis on a trip from Los Angeles to New York. According to Tanny,

    I was hungry and needed to get something to eat. I bought a raw steak and thought I could hide it in a newspaper wrapping while I ate it on a park bench. I sat there sneaking little bites when I was joined by a woman who sat down beside me. On one of my bites, the steak pulled out of the wrapper and I was sitting there with a big hunk of raw meat hanging out of my mouth. It wasn’t long before I was sitting alone again!

His dating life aside, that Tanny boasted a lean 200 lbs. physique on a 5 feet 9’inch frame, was testament that his eating style did have its benefits.

So what can be learned from Tanny’s raw food diet?

Well I think first and foremost, a clear message from Tanny’s experience is that one has to experiment with their eating approach. Tanny’s diet was far from the mainstream, but it made him stronger, healthier and happier to eat raw food. For modern lifters, this means forging your own nutritional path.

That being said, Tanny spent months meticulously researching the raw food diet, a reminder that monitoring key health indicators and educating oneself are important for every aspiring muscle head.

Finally, Tanny’s diet reminds us to try out new things every once in a while. While a raw steak from a paper bag is perhaps a bridge too far, why not try steak tartare, raw milk or some sushi every once in a while. For Randy Roach, who incidentally is another raw food enthusiast, occasional or frequent (depending on your disposition) raw food meals present higher amounts of vitamins and minerals than their cooked counterparts. As always, exercise caution and try to consume the highest quality food available.

So who knows, mayby raw food bodybuilding will become the next fitness fad. Lord knows it will be tastier than the low fat meal plans we suffered through for many years!
https://physicalculturestudy.com/2016/08/02/armand-tanny-and-raw-meat-bodybuilding/

The recipe I used was the same spices as I used for hamburger jerky except that I only used half the meat and a lot more vinegar to marinade the surface of the liver rather than mix it all in like I do for the hamburger.

Here's the ingredients according to my best guess. I say guess because I didn't actually measure them:

One and a half pounds of calves liver
3 to 4 tablespoons Celtic sea salt
1 and a half tablespoons black pepper
1 tablespoon of cayenne pepper
4 teaspoons oregano
2 tablespoons dried cilantro
2 to 3 tablespoons cumin powder
4 or 5 ounces of raw cider vinegar

Cut the liver into jerky sized strips and mix all ingredients together and marinade for one hour.

Pull strips out of marinade, leave them wet with the spices attached, distributed as evenly as possible and place them on the Jerky rack

*Set dehydrator to 107 degrees and dehydrate 24 to 48 hours. Rotate the trays occasionally so that they dry evenly or don't bother and take the lower ones out first and eat them! I don't dry them all the way but leave them soft enough to bend with my hands but stiff enough so they don't flex under their own weight.

*At  the 107 degree setting, on my dehysrator, the meat in the bottom tray ranges between 96 and 102 degrees F. While the top tray ranges between 89 and 96 degrees according to my infrared thermometer gun. Yours may vary.

I'm not going to post my recipe till it's done but as a primer here is someone's youtube video on making hamburger jerky.

If you're a health conscious raw paleo you won't want to follow this guy's recipe at all but I think there's some valuable tricks in there that definitely make it worth watching!

World's Easiest Beef Jerky! No Jerky Gun? No Smoker? No Dehydrator? No Problem!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIOkRWgjUgs

If there's one thing that motivated me to eat raw food more than anything else it was this video!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxlhVfWkzRQ&t=747s

Anybody got any advise for giving up caffeine? No matter how many times I give it up I always seem to come back to it. I tell myself one cup a day is ok but eventually it leads to two and three and a caffeine headache. The headache seems to be a symptom of withdrawal and usually comes on at night and is alleviated somewhat by drinking a cup of coffee.

Ok I haven't tried this one yet but I'm feeling bold after my success with the liver and onions and am looking for new ways to prepare organ meats other than putting them in the blender with water and chugging them down.

To me rocky mountain oysters don't taste that good so I'm planning on disguising the taste with lots of hot sauce , fresh minced garlic, salt and pepper and a little cilantro. If I had fresh I would use it but I only have dried. I will maybe add a little worchestershire sauce to it but plan on tasting it first. 

I have all my ingredients except the "oysters" sitting on my counter and plan on making it for my next meal tomorrow, as it's already pretty late. Everything is raw except the hot sauce and W sauce. I suppose I could just use some vinegar and cayenne pepper instead. I will have to see how I feel at the time I decide to make it.

My prairie oysters are already peeled, sliced, and put into 4 oz individual sandwich bags; pressed out and frozen. (Hint: the easiest way to skin them is to throw frozen ones into hot water for a couple minutes, slice down one side and grab the skin with a pair of pliars. You can also filet them with a knife if they are fresh or once they are defrosted but that takes a lot more work.) I bought 20 pounds and my butcher gave me a deal if I would buy the whole case because I am the only one that orders them.  So all I have to do tomorrow is take out a prepared bag, defrost it a little and add my ingredients; and presto!

I will report back on how it goes once I give it a try.

I'm looking forward to discovering new recipes for my organ meats I'm getting tired of just putting them in the blender with water and chugging them down.

Wish me luck!

I haven't sprouted anything for at least a year and then it was only pinto beans. When I was really into sprouting hard core my favorite thing to sprout was Vernal alfalfa. It used to be the most available seed you could buy from the feed store but now other varieties have taken it's place. I always got an incredible amount of energy from sprouting vernal alfalfa that I never got from any other kind. It also tasted different. It was much more bitter. Other varieties were sweet. I read one website that said "vernal alfalfa will make your horses run like the wind!" I swear it's true. I can't swear to the part about horses but it did make me run like the wind!

I was also into sprouting wheat grass but didn't care for it. Oh I forgot I did make some sprouted wheat bread about a month or two ago. It was actually sprouted organic rye. I bought a 25 pound sack of rye a few years ago and still got most of it.

I don't think most people think of sprouts as paleo but I bet a lot of tender young shoots of all kinds of stuff were eaten in the spring by our paleo ancestors.

Making your own mayonnaise can be very rewarding. It lets you use your own healthy oils, is free of preservatives and forms the basis for all thick salad dressings. Plus it's almost like magic when you are able to combine two watery substances together into a thick mixture without cooking them.

Mayonnaise is basically an emulsification of raw egg, water (or vinegar), oil and spices. But when you mix all those ingredients together you normally wind up with a gooey mess. The trick to making it is mixing it in such a way that it becomes emulsified into beautiful thick mayonnaise.  To do this successfully is more of an art than a process which is so delicate that superstitions have developed over generations that a batch will fail if it is made with someone in the room with the wrong vibe. It has almost become a religion.

I've made hundreds of batches of mayo and I've done it successfully for so long that hardly any of my batches ever fail but when I first started making it I had a hell of a time getting it to emulsify. Forget about making it by hand or even in a food processor. That is for experts. The trick I've learned is to use a stick mixer but even that often led to "mayo fail".

To sum up the tricks I know into one paragraph: Use a stick mixer. Find a tall thin jar, just big enough to get the stick mixer in. Crack the egg yolk into the bottom of the jar, add your oil and little water or vinegar and wait about fifteen minutes for the temperatures of the oil and egg to equalize before mixing; don't forget the water at this stage. If you wait to add the water after you start mixing it will be too late and no matter how long you mix it will not thicken into an emulsification.  Hold the stick mixer over the egg yolk and begin with slow pulsating mixes. Do not move it! Start with tiny slow bursts and make them longer once you see mayo beginning to form at the bottom of the jar. Once that happens you can hold the trigger on the mixer continuously but do not move it from the bottom of the jar till you see a glob of thick mayo form. Once that happens slowly rock the mixer and pull it up ever so slightly to see if you can feel the thickness sticking the mixer to the jar. Once that happens slowly pull the mixer up and down a little at a time, increasing it as it thickens till you go all the way to the top. After that you can add spices and more water or vinegar or whatever you want.

Hopefully this video will be of more help to anyone desiring to make their own home made mayonnaise. Good luck!

She makes it look so simple but really it's not. Well it is but it's kind of like riding a bicycle. Don't give up if you fail. Don't forget to let the temperatures of all the ingredients equalize and don't forget to add a little water or vinegar before you start mixing! (you can ignore this step if all your ingredients have already been sitting out on the counter.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwz6jknw574