Wrangham's name is on the python paper but I have no clue how much work he actually did on the project.  It is very common in academia for supervisors who have done no or little work to have their names put on papers above their subordinates.  I do not know if that is what happened in this case or not.  How is it that you are aware that he was "intimately involved?"  If you're basing that on anything other than the position of his name in the citation I'd love to see it.

This is just quibbling. The fact is that Wrangham is the one who's been interviewed concerning this paper, not Conklin-Britton or any of the others, so he must have been intimately involved in the whole process - scientists who claim credit for work they haven't done tend to get blacklisted, so it's a career-killer for them to to do so. Granted, you may claim that Wrangham set the conditions/requirements of the test and some junior scientist did the actual experiment, but, even so, that means that Wrangham still had a major influence on the experiment, one way or another. So, really, it's up to you to prove that Wrangham had no control or influence over the various cooked-food studies he cites, despite his writing about it, being the main one interviewed about it etc.

As per what I know of the Oste study (mainly what is reported by Beyondveg), it is perfectly plausible, absent evidence to the contrary, that enzymes and some nutrients are destroyed at 40 degrees Celsius but that no significant changes to the digestability of the protein take place until temperatures of close to 100 Celsius are reached.  Just because charred, well done meat is significantly less digestible than raw does not require that meat cooked rare be at all less digestible than raw (yes, some nutrients are destroyed, but that is entirely a separate question.)

This is a mere technicality. Here's another study which proves my point:-

http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/7/4/367.pdf

The above is a comparison between raw meat and 3 types of cooking at various temperatures, 1 of which involved cooking at 66-75 degrees Celsius for a period. All 3 cooking-methods showed a decrease in nutritive value and a clear drop in digestibility of meats after heating:-

"By the criterion of growth promoted among young rats(table 3), quite parallele differences are deduced. The raw meat is superior to all the cooked products, since each gram of raw meat protein eaten produced 0.78+/- 0.7 gm greater gain(i rats) than did that auto-claved 1 hour, 0.17 +/- 0.6 more than the boiled and 0.14 +/- 0.06 more than that autoclaved 7 minutes.

The other aspect is that since enzymes start getting destroyed at c.40 degrees Celsius, digetibility of meat is reduced. Yes, I know, that pro-cooked-advocates deny the uses of enzymes in raw food, but given the above facts re digestibility of protein being reduced at only slightly higher temperatures, it's clear that they are quite wrong.

As per the creation of AGE's and other toxins, in all things it is the dose that creates the poison.  While these substances are arguably detrimental in large quantities and probably never beneficial it is still an assumption to believe that in small quantities the body is incapable of dealing with them without lasting harm.  Dr. Eades has pointed out that no evidence exists that the consumption of AGE's in ones diet causes any increase of AGE's to be stored or formed in the body.  I don't know if he's right, but I haven't seen any evidence to contradict him.  This point on AGE's seems applicable to both vegetables and meat.  Your other point on phytonutrients versus antinutrients seems to me to be a question solely of quantity consumed without regards for preparation method.

As regards AGEs, Eades is merely expressing an opinion, based on no real data. All the studies show, unequivocally, that the more AGEs you ingest via cooked-food, the worse your health becomes(eg:-

http://www.circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/110/3/285

)

The very fact that it takes time for people to get diseased from the accumulation of AGEs implies, by definition, that the AGEs are stored in the  body until a critical point is reached. So, Eades is clearly wrong. Besides, there are plenty of studies focusing on the formation and accumulation of AGEs in tissue:-

http://www.jleukbio.org/cgi/content/full/71/3/433

http://www.springerlink.com/content/rwm8p2pyb4kj3q5w/

As regards the toxicity of AGEs, yes, of course,it's all a matter of degree - boiling is better than frying which is better than microwaving etc., but raw is far better than any cooking-method, on an overall level. I am not suggesting that AGEs are as toxic as cyanide but they are clearly a cause of physical degeneration of the human body as a result of eating cooked-foods. It is true, that extremely microscopic traces of AGEs can be found even in raw foods, which the human body can easily handle, but the amounts of AGEs in cooked-/processed foods is so much greater, by comparison, that the body is not equipped on an evolutionary level to deal with those much higher amounts. To argue that humans are adapted to the amounts of AGEs we consume(ever since the invention of cooking), you would have to prove, unequivocably, that we need to eat AGEs in order to live(that is, if you support Wrangham's and others' claim that cooked food is "better/healthier" for humans than any raw food) or(if you believe that there's no real difference between raw and cooked food) you have to prove that the human body can tolerate the amounts of AGEs present in cooked-foods - something which has been disproven by numerous scientific studies, detailing the links between AGEs and diabetes/macular degeneration etc. etc.:-

http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/important-info-for-newbies/info-on-toxins-in-cooked-foods/



Re phytonutrients:- Heating reduces phytonutrient levels. But, yes, it's a matter of how many there are:- too many, and they cause harm, too few and there's no benefit(unless one believes the zero-carbers, that is).

Cool! Where is it?

You wouldn't be interested. It's only a science-fiction-vintage-book-oriented-page at the moment, so I haven't have the courage to show it for another year or so, until it's fully indexed etc, at which time  I hope it will become more influential and a first of its kind. I may branch out to include a separate raw-diet-sphere to the blog, but that will take a long time. For now, I have to conquer my innate horror at writing any form of diary.

The only study that I'm aware of that comes anywhere close to addressing this question is one where they fed four pythons identical amounts of beef, one raw, one cooked, one raw and ground, one cooked and ground.  They came to the conclusion that it took less time and energy to consume the meat when it was cooked or ground than when it was raw with even greater reductions when the meat was ground and cooked.
http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:17827047

How applicable this information is to humans is anybody's guess, as is the question of which snake received the most nutritive benefit.

The above study was made by Wrangham, as I recall, who is a notoriously biased,anti-raw chimp behaviourist, and the study has not been corroborated by any other studies.Wrangham's claims re cooked-food leading to bigger brains and his laughable claim that no human can survive for long on a  raw food diet, even one including mostly raw meats,shows that he's never once met any Raw Animal Foodist at all. Plus his claim re humans needing to chew raw meats  for 5 to 6 hours a day in order to get adequate nutrition is not only absurdly extreme but based on a ridiculous comparison to chimpanzees(who are an entirely different species and who are not as adapted to meat-eating as humans are):-

http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/advent-of-cooking-article/

Here's 2 scientific studies which prove Wrangham dead-wrong and show that raw meat is actually easier to digest:-

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1897402

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3748129

Anyway, Wrangham's pro-cooking views are held in ridicule by most palaeoanthroplogists as he continually makes the same mistake of many amteur scientists:- he makes up a really nice-sounding theory and then looks around for anything whatsoever, no matter how dodgy, to back it up. Real science works by starting with the facts/details of experiments  and only then forming a theory from it, rather than the other way round. Well, it's just as well we have someonas dodgy as Wrangham as the main anti-raw proponent, I suppose.


http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/advent-of-cooking-article/

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This guy on Youtube has a different Youtube video promoting raw, palaeolithic diets, which I've referred to, elsewhere. Here is one of his other youtube videos, which has quite a lot of insight in it:-

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=MDej3riTOS4&feature=channel

This should go in the Hot Topics section. I'll do that now.


Also, as the above link was already duplicated on the rawpaleodiet yahoo group, I think I should post my previous debunking of the above link, here, as well(more or less):-


First of all, length of time to adapt to a different diet would only
apply to raw foods(eg:- switching from eating raw fruit to eating raw
meat). Even in this case, dietary changes take a very long time to come
about, judging from the Palaeolithic diet timeline:-

http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/hb/hb-interview1c.shtml


http://tinyurl.com/yb3aw7

(some geneticists think at least 1 million years is needed). However,
since cooked-foods are so radically different from raw foods and no
other species has ever gone in for cooking its food, over the last few
billion years, it is extremely questionable as to whether humans can
ever fully adapt to a cooked-food diet. To become fully adapted to
cooked-foods, humans would have to not only be able to tolerate the
toxins created by cooking, such as advanced glycation endproducts,
nitrosamines, heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
(PAHs are also a byproduct of fuel-burning, incidentally, and labelled
as a pollutant), but, arguably, one would also have to prove that those
very toxins were needed by the human body(at least if one was trying to claim that cooked-food was "better" for humans than raw food), as the primary difference between raw and cooked is that cooked-food contains less nutrients(usually) per kg, and has toxins in it which raw food doesn't) - unfortunately, current
scientific studies show, very clearly, that humans do suffer from those
toxins:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_foodism#Potential_harmful_effects_of_co
oked_foods

shortened to:-

http://tinyurl.com/49744t

Re the 790,000-fire-claim made in the first post of this thread:- This is actually quite an old claim, not
new at all, and I've  debunked it, previously. I do wish the media wouldn't state such
things as a certainty, as most archaeologists all agree on one thing,
that it's impossible to pin down the exact date of the invention of fire
(whether for warmth or cooking), due to inconclusive evidence.

Most archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists point out that the
evidence for the invention of cooking is much stronger for c.250,000 to
300,000 years ago,

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Pennisi_99.html

as there's plenty of evidence around for it, yet anthropologists, such
as Wrangham, who make vague claims for earlier times, generally only
have 1 or 2 sites that they can point to - it is extremely unlikely
that cooking or fire for warmth would only be invented in 1 or 2 areas
c.790,000 years ago or whatever, and not transmitted to other tribes,
to any extent, until c.250,000 years ago, when hearths were produced en-
masse.

The evidence from the 790,000-year-claim is also
labelled "inconclusive" by a number of sources, with a mention of how
the site has been partially destroyed etc, and there are a number of
skeptics of this 790,000-year-claim.:-

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/human-evolution/dn4944

http://tinyurl.com/6k2nse

Here's a quote from the web, showing how cooking was not in evidence at
Yaakov re the 790,000-year-claim:-

"
A 0.79 Myr old site in Israel [Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Science 304 (2004)
725)] has more credible evidence, though there does not seem to have
been any cooking or repeated fire creation. The earliest convincing
evidence of fire use for cooking appears at the 0.3-0.55 Myr old late
Homo erectus site at Zhoukoudian in China and the 0.4 Myr old presumed
early archaic Homo sapiens site of Terra Amata near Nice. In both cases
the evidence is primarily in the form of food refuse bones that were
apparently charred during cooking. Unfortunately, there still is not
sufficient evidence at either site to say conclusively that there was
controlled fire in the sense of being able to create it at will.
However, by 100 kya, there is abundant evidence of regular fire use at
Neandertal sites. By that time, they evidently were able to create
fires when they wished to, and they used them for multiple purposes."
http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_3.htm

While the above paragraph gives credence to the Zhoukoudian Caves
evidence, there are plenty of anthropologists who are highly sceptical
of the Zhoukoudian evidence:-


http://www.jstor.org/pss/2743299

(Quoted from the above page):- "The association of fire with faunal
remains, stone-tools and hominid fossils is far from conclusive and is
most likely the result of noncultural postdepositional processed
(Binford and Ho 1985, Binford and Stone 1986)".

Also re the weak evidence at zhoukoudian:- " The implication that h.
sapiens was the first in the line of mankind to control fire was
supported by evidence found at a site in Zhoukoudian, China. While it
had been believed for some time that Zhoukoudian was the first site of
controlled fire, evidence found through more exhaustive research
indicates otherwise. There are no hearths at the site in China. Nor are
there any food remnants. Such evidence leads to the belief that the
burnt bones found at the site are probably the result of a natural fire
(Wuethrich). The lack of strong evidence supporting the site as one in
which man's control of fire is displayed supported the belief that h.
erectus lacked technological prowess and culture." taken from:-

http://fubini.swarthmore.edu/~ENVS2/S2003/jloeffl1/envs_paper1dream.htm

http://tinyurl.com/5lusub

In short, any claims for much earlier dates for the invention of fire
for warmth or for cooking are highly suspect, which is why the
scientific community still sticks(roughly) to the 250,000-years-ago
date for the invention of fire for cooking(as opposed to fire for
warmth), as that's the only time when hearths can reliably be found all
over the place.

Geoff

Perhaps a higher-fat diet is needed for a colder climate, but I reckon I do better, exercise-wise , on lower amounts of fat.

goatmeat isn't so tough - well, unless you have very loose teeth like I had in the first few months of goign raw(due to the raw dairy).

I didn't feel much pain right after the fight, but my head did become pretty  sore up until today. I'd heard of such one-punch deaths, and was worried that I might suffer some sort of embolism, as I was hit pretty hard, but, the way I see it, with my diet and hence a much better circulation, there's zero chance of a brain-embolism or whatever.

But, yes,  I figured the whole business was too petty to worry about, and he didn't try to mug me for my cash, so it didn't seem worthwhile when he could have a knife(well he was a "hoodie").

I'm afraid this is a first. The few who do air high-meat outside, usually place it within a  plastic, sealed container, which is also within 2 plastic bin-bags, in order to ensure that the flies don't get at the high-meat(re laying maggots). I'm not personally bothered about the issue of soil bacteria, but I would be fascinated to see what your experience is - who knows, soil bacteria might be better for us than the usual bacteria within high-meat.

I've drunk blood quite often, as I get my raw organs/wild hares in vacuum-packed plastic, so there's always lots of blood in them. Trouble is, I only like the taste of blood from wild animals such as the wild hares - blood from grassfed beef etc. just isn't the same.

I find raw blood gives me a real lift energy-wise, perhaps because of the iron in it, among other trace elements?

I am in a surprised state, to say the least. Yesterday, some utter moron walked past me in the street, and, without stopping or looking back, thwacked me really hard across the forehead. I was pretty non-plussed, but decided it wasn't worth carrying on such  fight over such trivia - I mean I had never met the guy before nor spoken to him or done anything to this complete stranger - I figured he must have been either blind drunk(it WAS a Friday night, after all, or psychotic) - either way, in this police-state, I'd probably have been arrested for retaliating against him, so I decided to let it drop.