Greetings folks. As some of you might know, earlier this summer I started a podcast called A Worldview Apart. Episodes have explored a range of topics, and I'd love to add raw food to the list. I'm on the lookout for someone who I can engage in a conversation with on raw foods who meets the following criteria:

1. They speak fluent English (accents are okay).
2. They can participate in the conversation without cursing.
3. They will not go off on tangents about conspiracy theories (not to say I don't think some conspiracy theories have merit, just that I want to keep my episodes focused on specific topics and I want this episode to focus on raw foods).
4. They have been eating raw foods for at least 5 years, ideally at least 10. They don't have to be 100% raw, but raw foods, including raw animal foods, need to be a substantial part of their diet.
5. To reiterate part of #3, they must be omnivores. I'm not interested in interviewing a raw food vegan for this.

If anyone on this forum meets ALL of these criteria and would be interested in coming on, let me know. Also, if you know of someone who doesn't participate in this forum anymore who might be interested, I'd be grateful for an introduction to them.

Cheers folks,

Eric

I think sabertooth is probably correct in his association between lactofermented vegetables and a largely cooked food diet. I think the main thing that lactofermented veg provides is at least some uncooked vegetable fiber. Some of the fiber in fermented vegetables is obviously broken down by the bacteria, but not all of it. I think uncooked vegetable fiber is a very important part of a healthy diet, especially from alliums (onion-family, which includes garlic, onions and leeks) and from non-nightshade roots and tubers.

One way to get the swelling down is to make a saline solution and warm it up on the stove so it's hot to the touch but doesn't scald. Then soak a rag in this solution and press and hold the hot, saline rag over your eyes for a while. I had an eye infection several years ago that got bad enough that I went to a doctor. This is what they told me to do, and it really worked well. Now if I feel an eye infection coming on (that dry, scratchy feeling along with redness and a little swelling), I just start doing a hot saline compress every couple of hours and that always stops the infection in its tracks. It's usually gone before the end of the day.

Butter is made by skimming the cream off of unhomogenized milk, then churning it until it solidifies into fat that is solid at room temperature. There is some processing involved in making butter, in the most basic sense of that term, though the processing doesn't have to involve cooking. That said, if you bought butter from a store in the United States, most likely it will have been made from milk that was pasturized, so its fats will have been altered and some of its polyunsaturated fats (omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids) will have oxidized a little. Although raw butter made from raw (unpasturized) milk from 100% grass fed cows is tasty, it's terribly hard to find and when you can find it it's often very expensive. I just buy raw back fat or suet from beef cattle, or from goats or sheep. It's completely unprocessed and so much cheaper, often less than $3 per pound.

Ground meat is usually cheaper, as are certain cuts like skirt steak or stew meat. Organs are usually very cheap. You can probably find liver or heart from a grass-fed animal for under $5 per pound.

You'll get a variety of opinions regarding your questions. Those of us who have stuck with a raw omnivorous diet over the longer term have all diverged from one another in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. I for instance avoid dairy entirely, and never recommend it to people even if it's unpasturized.

To your question on finding grass-fed beef, it might be harder where you're at. You might have to gravitate towards a different type of animal for meat, like lamb or goat. I've not visited Florida for decades, so don't know what it's like down there. Do you have a Whole Foods near you, or a health food store? Those are the places I'd check out. You might also look out for farmers' markets. You might find a vendor there who sells naturally-raised meat.

Looks like Van beat my post by a few seconds. At any rate, my take is about the same as his. My first guess is that you're eating way to much protein, given the diet you listed. When we eat more protein than out body needs, our kidneys turn the excess into sugar. When we have sugar in our bloodstream that we don't need for fuel, our bodies can turn it into fat and store it. If we don't get much exposure to cold, this will likely be white fat, which is slow to disappear because it's not metabolically active.

My advice, as unpleasant as it might sound to you, is to make some substantial changes to your daily diet. I'd first suggest adding in a little carbs, as they can help convince the body you aren't about to starve and keep your metabolic rate up. Eating carbs from raw root vegetables like Jerusalem artichokes, onions, sweet potatoes, beets, etc. will add a lot of fiber to your diet, which your gut bacteria will turn into short chain fatty acids. These make great fuel, and will help to coax your body to burn more fat as fuel. My next suggestion is to reduce your protein intake to just barely what your body needs to replace/repair muscle and other tissues. There are equations you can use to estimate what this is. My guess is that for you it is probably no more than 6 ounces of meat/organs per day. The rest of your calories should come from fat.

Getting all of your daily calories from fat and carbs will likely involve eating a lot more fat than you're used to. It might mean eating a stick of butter every day if you're into dairy, or eating a sizable chunk of suet or back fat from a grazing animal if you can get it.

I would also suggest regular cold exposure, especially on your upper chest and upper back. This will turn your white fat into brown, metabolically active fat that has more mitochondria in it. The more brown fat you have, the easier it will be to burn fat and to reduce your body fat percentage. You can start with cold showers, then you will probably want to transition to ice water baths or swims in cold (under 50 degrees F) streams or lakes.

Good luck!

For larger animals like deer and sheep, I've had good luck using a hatched head to split the skull starting from the nose. This allows me to extract the brain whole if the split goes well. But Derek's method is probably easier.

You're obviously welcome to try ZC if you want to, but I'll echo Iguana and suggest that you avoid it. I've met some people who claim that it works for them, but they're outliers and not the norm (or they're just lying, which is always possible on the Internet as there's no way to make sure people are telling the truth about lifestyle choices).

If your goal is to lose weight, I'd switch to a 40-60 diet of carbs-fat, by calories. I would be selective on what sorts of carbs you eat. Sugar from wild or near-wild fruit is fine, like blueberries and raspberries. Complex carbs from raw vegetables, especially roots and tubers like Jerusalem artichokes, beets, sweet potatoes, burdock root, etc. is also fine. You will need to eat a fair amount of these each day to get your day's quota of carbs, but that's not a bad thing. Your gut bacteria can turn the indigestible dietary fiber into short-chain fatty acids, which work wonders for gut health and make great metabolic fuel.

Another thing I've noticed as I age is that it's important to eat enough calories each day. If I don't eat enough, my body thinks it faces starvation and slows my metabolism down. This slower metabolism seems to be coupled with turning any sugar I eat into fat, thwarting my attempts at burning body fat. I've found that if the total carbs + fat calories I eat is maybe 5 % more than I actually need, then my body relaxes its controls on my metabolism. With a faster metabolism I'm better able to burn that excess fat. Eating most of my calories from fat helps this too, as it trains my body to burn fat as fuel.

Exposure to cold on your chest and upper back helps too. This turns white fat into mitochondria-rich brown fat, and this brown fat is what metabolizes our body's fat deposits and helps reduce body fat percentage. In the winters I go swimming in lakes and streams near my home to get this effect. In summers when the water's too warm I take cold showers.

As far as protein goes, Iguana's warning against eating too much protein (from any source, not just mammals) is a good one to heed. Eat enough protein to meet your body's needs, but don't go overboard. Unless you weightlift like crazy, the equivalent of 6-8 ounces of animal food each day is probably plenty. Excess protein is turned into sugar in the kidneys, and just adds to the burden on these often already-stressed organs. Best not to overdo it, in my opinion.

Good luck!

I found what I'm pretty sure was a tobacco hornworm while walking home from campus just a bit ago. It was fairly large, about the size of my finger. I can report that it tasted pleasant, with a mild, sweet flavor and a slightly bitter and astringent aftertaste. It's skin was chewier than I expected.

The first thing you NEED to look for is that the insects were raised for human consumption. Most available for sale in the US are not. They are raised for the pet trade, and are fed low quality feed that leaves them so nutrient-poor that pet owners are generally advised to sprinkle mineral powders on them before feeding them to lizards, snakes, etc. If you can find some that are certified organic I suppose that's a start, but that doesn't mean they're worth buying or worth eating. It just means whatever they eat is certified organic. So a cricket farmer can feed cheap organic rice, and sell certified organic crickets, but the crickets will probably be malnourished and stunted, so they aren't worth buying.

Who were you planning on buying from?

Anyone have ideas for dissolving tartar and plaque?

I think the general idea put forward in this thread is reasonable, though we need to get a better sense of how much protein each person needs. I don't think about protein in terms of % of total calories. I don't eat protein for calories, I eat it for the amino acids it contains so my body can use them as building blocks. I estimate how much protein I need based on my activity level (i.e. if I'm actively strength training, I eat more), and eat that much. I then calculate how many calories I think I need, and make sure to meet that need from carbs, fiber, and fat. Much of the dietary fiber will be turned into short chain fatty acids in the large intestine by gut bacteria, so it's still useful as energy it just won't be digested in the stomach and absorbed in the small intestine like digestible carbs and fat. I try to get most (>60 percent) of my calories from fat.