This is a fascinating conversation. Makes me very grateful to live in Vermont, USA, where high quality food is fairly accessible.

Nobody tells the animals what to eat, or how much to eat or at what time of day to eat and yet they have developed an instinctive ability to not poison themselves and maintain their health so long as the environment is capable of supporting their basic needs.....though it should be obvious that the malnourished Indian children who Overdosed on raw unripe fruit, were far from the instinctive ideal. Likely lentil and rice gruel consumers who where near starvation and never developed an instinctive stop mechanism.

Sometimes this is true, but not always. Take, for instance, the plant belladonna. It's very toxic, but tastes sweet and has coevolved to use birds as a seed dispersal agent. The birds eat the sweet berries, which kill them after a short period. The birds fall dead, and the seeds sprout from amidst their decomposing bodies and use the fertile soil around the carcass to nourish themselves. The plant specifically uses birds' instinct to propagate itself, killing the birds in the process.

I read through the questionnaire. I suspect I would be considered 'healthy'. You are acting like an ass though, and treating people who are quite knowledgable about this poorly, so you will have to look elsewhere for your donor.

I second the idea of a water fast. When my digestion isn't working as well as I'd like, the best antidote I've found is to take 3-5 days -- or more if I think it's needed -- off of eating to let my GI tract rest. Once I've rested for a period, I gradually break the fast with easily digested foods like raw organ meats from herbivores, raw ocean fish, raw oysters, raw shellfish or insects, small amounts of fermented vegetables to introduce pre-digested fiber, and perhaps olive oil if I can find some that's of very high quality.

I don't attempt to eat 2,000 kcals the day I break a fast. I've found it best to eat 500 or so kcals that first day, then ramp up gradually to a more normal intake over a few days to ease my GI tract back into its normal level of function.

As someone who works in the academic realm, I wish you the best of luck Derek but it's a tough nut to crack. Research is largely driven by the potential to commercialize a patentable therapy or drug. A researcher can't very well patent some aspect of a raw diet, or even commercialize it. Without the promise of a profitable product down the road, it's hard to get a company (or a government) to invest in research trials, and they are quite expensive. Even relatively simple trials with a few research subjects might cost a quarter million dollars.

Have you ever considered doing a podcast, either an audio podcast hosted by iTunes or a video podcast on YouTube? Seems to me that would be the best platform to talk about your lifestyle, uninhibited. I'm gearing up to start my own podcast come early 2017, though it won't focus exclusively on diet.

It doesn't surprise me at all that IQ varies as described. It is measured in a way that privileges people of European and Asian descent, due to the way schools in these regions teach.

And I will further add that after a bit more research, I've found a few sites that suggest elk are both grazers and browsers, so it appears that both I and RF are correct on this front.

I've long since given up on the idea that there's a perfect diet, either in general or for anyone in particular. The human body is very adaptable, and any individual person could probably live well on multiple different diets. Finding a diet that renders us free of disease is a useless ideal, in my opinion. This isn't to dismiss the value of eating clean, whole food, obviously. Just that it's important not to view diet as a perpetual work-in-progress rather than to turn it into a dogmatic ideology.

I honor Derek's pursuit of a better relationship with the landscape one inhabits. That's a huge driving force behind my dietary choices too. The healthy diet that one piece of land can provide might (and most likely will) be very different from the one another can, though.

Here in Vermont, for instance, there are a lot of farmers growing grass to feed cattle. But is the northeast really the place for cattle? Cattle are grazers, and prior to the introduction of domestic sheep and later cattle with the Europeans there were no large grazing animals here. None! Perhaps a wood bison wandered into the state once in a blue moon, but they were never here frequently enough for the resident indigenous peoples to even create a word for them. Given this reality, I don't think cattle have a place here. They're only here now because farmers force the landscape to be something they can inhabit, force the land to be pasture when it wants to become savannah or forest. What did live here? Browsers, like caribou, elk, deer and moose, all of which do very well in forests and savannahs. A grazer is very different, ecologically, from a browser.

Perhaps what Derek means by "beyond grass fed" is to rekindle an awareness of the ecological appropriateness of food animals?

I'd consider buying some of the beef from you Derek, if you're game to ship it up north. What do you expect the cost per pound to be? I'd primarily be interested in organs, but would consider buying muscle too of the price were reasonable.

Tyler plz move to america and help me to grow the weed so we can afford to grow the best animals. I am not authentically raw paleo enough either.
 

Grow weed so you can afford to grow the best animals? That's awesome...

Cheers Eric, sounds good. Out of interest do you really enjoy the taste of raw potato, or just eat it to get the extra carbs?

Originally it was for the carbs, but as I've been eating them for a while the taste and texture have actually become appealing. Have you ever tasted them? Depending on what variety you get, the taste can vary tremendously. Some of the heirloom varieties are not only pleasant in taste but also add visual appeal to a prepared dish with their red, blue or purple flesh, and variously colored skins.

Many of my root vegetables, including onions, potatoes and sweet potatoes, are chopped into small cubes and mixed into a 'salad', which might have some greens in it but not many. I will usually mix olives into these root veg salads to add some healthy fat, and might also add some fermented vegetables and raw meat too. One raw meat that works particularly well in these recipes is raw fish, especially wild-caught salmon. Meat and olives add some protein and fat that makes it easier to process the raw carbs and lets me tolerate the high fiber easier. I sometimes add a splash of vinegar too, for the taste.

I've said this within other threads, but I think that Derek's approach to marketing himself by allowing others to write or talk about him is extraordinarily risky, and doesn't seem to work out so well. A YouTube channel or self-produced documentary would be a better choice.