Daniel Vitalis on cooked meat

[Raw Kyle]

To be more full adapted to cooked than raw, we should have some sort of immunity to heat-created toxins in cooked foods - we do not have any such immunity.

Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."

[goodsamaritan]

Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."

Depends on the timeline and how thoroughly cooked things turn out to be.  It was only in the 20th century when people really cooked their meats to death thoroughly all the time.

Look at the demographics today.  It sure seems like people are failing to reproduce.  Total fertility rates in the biggest cities at 1.0 ? Nationwide fertility rate of Japan or Italy at 1.2?  Population pyramids are reversing.

Just look at our own forum.  How many of us are so un-paleo like, not reproducing, late in reproducing, not reproducing enough.  We got weak females who can't give birth without the medical industry and infertility treatments are in full swing.  Weak females who refuse to be pregnant and are afraid to be pregnant.

Give me a break... what other animal in this world is afraid of getting pregnant?  Afraid of having real sex.  Humans these days are a sad shadow of its original design.

[cherimoya_kid]

So you were eating a raw wild vegan diet for a couple months at a time?

Yes.

[TylerDurden]

Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."

  I disagree that being able to reproduce implies adaptation - indeed, the very fact that people are usually able to breed before they start getting long-term health-problems from eating cooked foods, would imply a steady, dysgenic effect on the human race in the long-term. One thing that would really interest me is how many more birth-defects there are in the human population compared to wild animals in unpolluted areas. I strongly suspect that, as a result of cooking, the human birth-rate defect is much, much higher than for wild species. Certainly, cooking seems to have led to a reduction in jaw-size/tooth-size.

[Hanna]

I ate mostly wild coconuts and mangos, and some wild greens (greenbriar, which grows wild throughout the Americas).  I also had wild figs and wild almonds. I got it all from foraging. 

I did have a friend who was with me for about 6 weeks of that time.  He was eating a very similar diet.

Aren´t wild almonds toxic?

Wiki says:

The wild form of domesticated almond grows in parts of the Levant; almonds must first have been taken into cultivation in this region. The fruit of the wild forms contains the glycoside amygdalin, "which becomes transformed into deadly prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) after crushing, chewing, or any other injury to the seed."[6]

However, domesticated almonds are not toxic

[RawZi]

Aren´t wild almonds toxic?

    The wild almonds I collected, ate and shared were skinnier than commercial almonds, but otherwise they were exactly the same, only fresher.

[cherimoya_kid]

Aren´t wild almonds toxic?

Wiki says:

You shouldn't eat them in large amounts.  Certainly I never ate more than 2 or 3 at a time, and the edible part is very small.

[Löwenherz]

Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."

In fact they are reproducing like rats.

Cooked food causes sexual overstimulation first and a "few" years later all kinds of problems including infertility.

Löwenherz

[Löwenherz]

    The wild almonds I collected, ate and shared were skinnier than commercial almonds, but otherwise they were exactly the same, only fresher.

Then they weren't wild.

Really wild almonds taste extremely (!) toxic, you have to spit them out as fast as possible.

Löwenherz

[Löwenherz]

...
I strongly suspect that, as a result of cooking, the human birth-rate defect is much, much higher than for wild species.
...

We are now at the beginning of a HUGE wave of serious human genetic defects, a scientist told me recently.

Löwenherz

[RawZi]

Really wild almonds taste extremely (!) toxic, you have to spit

    Do you have a picture of the extremely toxic tasting almonds, or its fruit or the trees they come from?  The fruit from these almonds are stringy, look like an almondish shaped peach, are semi-edible from my experience and are fairly hard.  You chop them in half with a machete, and there's an very skinny almond inside, same for the whole tree and all the trees pretty much all year round, never fatter almonds.  What are yours like?

[PaleoPhil]

Truly wild almonds are called "bitter almonds" (Prunus amygdalus amara). Unsurprisingly, they reportedly taste bitter and contain enough cyanide to be deemed lethal to an adult human who eats 50 unprocessed bitter almonds in one sitting:

http://homecooking.about.com/od/cookingfaqs/f/faqbitteralmond.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond



I'm guessing that before the domestication of almonds, people probably soaked or blanched them (maybe in lye water, like with acorns), and maybe dried and pounded them, to make them edible.

[RogueFarmer]

I LOVE your last post Good Samaritan!
So sad, but so true. I was so F'd up, I feel so blessed to have discovered raw foods before I finished growing up.

The Native Americans ate choke cherry pits which have a similar cyanide problem as wild almonds. They pulverized the pits with the fruits and that eats the poison.

[Hanna]

Then they weren't wild.

Really wild almonds taste extremely (!) toxic, you have to spit them out as fast as possible.

Löwenherz

Yes, this seems to apply to all wild almonds (except for mutations):

"...not even the most ardent nut lover among us will eat wild almonds; their lousy taste keeps us away, which is fortunate, since just a few dozen of the wild nuts contain enough cyanide to kill us."

http://discovermagazine.com/1994/sep/biologyandmedici422

BTW, this is an interesting article:

"... occasional individual almond trees have a mutation in a single gene that prevents them from synthesizing the bitter- tasting amygdalin. Such trees die out in the wild without leaving any progeny, because birds discover and eat all their seeds. But curious or hungry children of early farmers, nibbling wild plants around them, would also have sampled and noticed those nonbitter almond trees, and the non- bitter almond seeds are the ones ancient farmers would have planted, at first unintentionally in their garbage heaps, and later intentionally, by 3000 B.C., in their orchards."

Truly wild almonds are called "bitter almonds" (Prunus amygdalus amara). ...

http://homecooking.about.com/od/cookingfaqs/f/faqbitteralmond.htm

Interesting, Phil, so the toxicity of wild almonds is destroyed by heat.

[RawZi]

    Although the fruit was fibrous and barely edible, I was mostly into fruit anyway, and ate mostly fruit with the rare nut. Nice to have the fruit for kids, rather than candy or other garbage. Lol we Didn't call them wild, but they were different than the almonds you know more than in freshness.

[zbr5]

And how do you guys relate to this part of DV quote?:

"A brief survey of those humans we call the “Indigenous” of the world, especially those who were Hunter/Gatherers reveals a diet that, while varying in the ratio of animal to plant food, still always contains both in ample degrees.  These people are always cooks, in that they are never found on “Raw Food Diets”.  They eat a mix of raw and cooked foods"

[TylerDurden]

And how do you guys relate to this part of DV quote?:

"A brief survey of those humans we call the “Indigenous” of the world, especially those who were Hunter/Gatherers reveals a diet that, while varying in the ratio of animal to plant food, still always contains both in ample degrees.  These people are always cooks, in that they are never found on “Raw Food Diets”.  They eat a mix of raw and cooked foods"

Well, first of all, Inuit and the Nenets of Siberia hardly eat plant foods at all, just a very few berries or seaweed, and then mainly only seasonally. More to the point, these hunter-gatherers are not trying to practise the "Perfect Diet", despite what DV lyingly tries to claim - they are just trying to survive as best they can, with the limited food-resources they have, so they will just eat whatever they can get hold of - if the Inuit could only ever find plant foods in their habitat within reach, that's all they would eat etc.. That's why hunter-gatherers so often opt for tubers, despite the fact, as I showed to PP a long while back re refs, that they find the taste of tubers to be  the most repellent of all foods and the least nutritious.

Then there's the issue of cooking. Cooking is useful for making otherwise inedible foods like cyanide-rich cassava tubers more edible, and also for quickly thawing foods that have been left frozen in the snow(usually meats). Since it is well-known that cooking creates opioids which have an addictive effect on the brain(see similiar articles on junk foods and their addictiveness), it would explain why cooking was, eventually, also used on wider varieties of foods over time.

Then there is the truly arrogant, Noble-Savage-like nonsense that DV peddles, though he is not the only blackguard to do so. The unspoken implication he makes is that these hunter-gatherers were somehow near-perfect examples off humanity who somehow always magically "knew" what was healthy and what was not, regardless. Fools like DV don't want to recognise that HG lives were nasty, brutish and short, as that would ruin their overly romantic, quasi-utopian vision of HGs.

[KD]

TD raises good points about expecting contemporary HG diets to mirror the health of HGs or even expect it was perfect to begin with, but I'm not totally convinced DV is saying that eating every type of raw diet here is bad or unnecessary, only saying that it has no real precedent to point to. That in the end they are largely experimental and should be seen as such. That there is a possible nutrition people can miss out on or other unknown variables when people choose limited diets that very well might not line up at all with how our ancestors ever ate.

Whether we have adapted to cooked foods the one thing most people now agree with is this raw vegan notion that cooked food contains 0 nutrition or whatever is false. That even if one can point to problems with cooked foods that people will end up living healthier with them than eating totally inappropriately - and this is what history shows. That some dietary decisions and restrictions are worse than damage done by cooked foods and the obvious that some cooked foods are way worse than others. With DV, In regards to the foods that need to be cooked being less nutritious or with information on toxic cooked foods I don't think these are argued entirely and that it is more a view of an entire approach. Its an approach not a 1:1 dissection of toxicity or  saying raw celery is less bad to cooked celery or whatever. or arguing that a piece of fruit (and not 20 pieces of modern fruit) is not surely better than a potato.
 
I know partly the concern he's always expressed is these raw 'diets' are seen as holy grails of which people don't have to examine the other unnatural and unhealthy conditions they can take control over or might do more harm than a somewhat imperfect diet of HGs. He has alot of useful information on everything from spring water to medicinal plants..which of course gets constantly pushed under the rug from raw foodies whose 'purity' trumps such things.

I do agree that there is some naivety to admiring HGs as perfectly healthy but I think often enough its contrasting to which programs are working right now as well as putting up trends in the only known examples we have. He may be guilty of saying his type of approach is 'enough' (when coupled with other lifestyle and factors such as clean water, clean household etc...) and preferable to many raw food diets or ideas like ZC, vegans or perhaps primal, paleo for maintaining health, but I don't see why this is wrong if it matches his or others experience. Perhaps if he was saying that raw food diets have no place in healing (not maintaining) I would be more in disagreement. I know in the past he's brought that up as having value (even raw vs cooked meat)...just not being the MOST important thing ...unless he changed his tune further.
 
I'm sure alot of people here will disagree with that on the individual level - about which health programs are 'good enough' but personally I don't think this qualifies as being deceptive if this lines up with his and other people experiences.

[Raw Kyle]

  I disagree that being able to reproduce implies adaptation

Here's the problem, that is actually exactly the definition of adaptation. If a species can successfully reproduce throughout the generations in a certain environment then it is adapted to that environment. It's not really a point to argue.

What you're referring to is "optimization" not "adaptation." I just kind of made that term up for this situation, but being "healthy" and "feeling good" aren't really things that can be measured objectively, especially for non-human animals.

[Raw Kyle]

Look at the demographics today.  It sure seems like people are failing to reproduce.

Just look at our own forum.  How many of us are so un-paleo like, not reproducing, late in reproducing, not reproducing enough.

Give me a break... what other animal in this world is afraid of getting pregnant?

I don't reproduce because of the cost associated with raising children. I'm referring to the cost in time as well as money. I see that as more of a reflection of laws and fiscal/monetary policy than a measure of my health. By your standard the poor obese woman I see walking down the street with 5 kids in tow all screaming at each other is healthier than I, and her children (statistically very much more likely to reproduce sooner and more often than myself) as well.

[PaleoPhil]

To be more full adapted to cooked than raw, we should have some sort of immunity to heat-created toxins in cooked foods - we do not have any such immunity.

Why? People don't fail to reproduce from "heat-created toxins in cooked foods."

  I disagree that being able to reproduce implies adaptation

Here's the problem, that is actually exactly the definition of adaptation. If a species can successfully reproduce throughout the generations in a certain environment then it is adapted to that environment. It's not really a point to argue.

What you're referring to is "optimization" not "adaptation." I just kind of made that term up for this situation, but being "healthy" and "feeling good" aren't really things that can be measured objectively, especially for non-human animals.

By your definition, we are "adapted" to the SAD, since humans have continued to reproduce through the generations for thousands of years while eating it and actually started reproducing at a faster rate with the advent of agriculture, to which there had not been any genetic adaptation at all since it had just started, than at any previous time in human history. I'll take good health over your "adaptation" any day, thanks. Most people try diets like raw Paleo because they are interested in health improvement, not increased reproduction. It's about thriving, not surviving. Who cares if we can survive or reproduce while eating something if it makes us sick?

Dr. Loren Cordain's definition of dietary adaptation is reestablishment of "relative genetic equilibrium" and he recommends adopting a diet to which we are "most ideally adapted," not just one we can survive and reproduce on:

When or if environmental conditions again change significantly, most individuals in the population experience what can be termed in plain language as "evolutionary discordance"--the negative results of having genes not as well-suited to the new environment (which again includes diet) as the former one. Such discordance results in poorer survival rates and less reproductive fitness for the majority of the population.

Those individuals whose genetic variability is better suited to the new conditions survive and reproduce better, thus leading to another round of evolutionary/genetic adaptation.

Such genetic adaptation, however, takes time, that is, many successive iterative generations to achieve. Evolution is conservative, and relatively permanent changes in the genetic makeup of a population do not take place without sustained changes in environment, which--once again, in the context of this paper--includes diet. The time span for relative genetic equilibrium to be reestablished can span many thousands of years for a species (i.e., humans) which reproduces a new generation approximately once each 20 to 25 years.

...the human genome is most ideally adapted to those foods which were available to pre-agricultural man....

Simoons classic work on the incidence of celiac disease [Simoons 1981] shows that the distribution of the HLA B8 haplotype of the human major histocompatibility complex (MHC) nicely follows the spread of farming from the Mideast to northern Europe. Because there is strong linkage disequilibrium between HLA B8 and the HLA genotypes that are associated with celiac disease, it indicates that those populations who have had the least evolutionary exposure to cereal grains (wheat primarily) have the highest incidence of celiac disease. This genetic argument is perhaps the strongest evidence to support Yudkin's observation that humans are incompletely adapted to the consumption of cereal grains.

http://www.beyondveg.com/cordain-l/grains-leg/grains-legumes-1a.shtml

Even the cooking advocates don't claim that not failing to reproduce is a sign of full adaptation to cooking. Instead they point to signs of "reduced digestive effort (e.g., smaller teeth) and increased supply of food energy (e.g., larger female body mass)." (Wrangham et al, The Raw and the Stolen. Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=wrangham%20pilbeam)

What you are talking about is partial adaptation, not the full adaptation that Tyler was talking about. Sure, humans have partly adapted to agrarian foods, and maybe there has even been some adaptation to industrial foods, but that doesn't make them the best choices for health or body fat loss, which is what's important in the real world for most people interested in dietary change.

[TylerDurden]

Here's the problem, that is actually exactly the definition of adaptation. If a species can successfully reproduce throughout the generations in a certain environment then it is adapted to that environment. It's not really a point to argue.

What you're referring to is "optimization" not "adaptation." I just kind of made that term up for this situation, but being "healthy" and "feeling good" aren't really things that can be measured objectively, especially for non-human animals.

No, again, I disagree, adaptation, according to the dictionary is simply:-

  " An alteration or adjustment in structure or habits, often hereditary, by which a species or individual improves its condition in relationship to its environment."

So far, we have no real scientic evidence that our bodies have been permanently altered to absorb cooked foods more effectively. Nor is there any scientific evidence that we have even partial immunity to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods, let alone full immunity.

Now, of course, cooked foods do not kill instantly, but that does not per se imply adaptation, just that cooked foods are only toxic to a limited extent, nothing more.

[TylerDurden]

The other thing is that "adaptation" to a particular type of food can involve nasty side-effects. Take the Neolithic era, for example. Cooking allowed us then to consume lots of grains(and thereby eat less meat) - the result was that our average brain-size decreased by 8 percent!

[sabertooth]

The other thing is that "adaptation" to a particular type of food can involve nasty side-effects. Take the Neolithic era, for example. Cooking allowed us then to consume lots of grains(and thereby eat less meat) - the result was that our average brain-size decreased by 8 percent!

Don't forget  to mention the mass insanity and widespread plagues of the populations that lived off of grains during the dark ages.

There are people alive today that seem well adapted to processed, chemical laden foods. But when you measure the overall wellness of such polluted populations in comparison to those of more paleo leaning diets, the differences in health and wellbeing are evident.

I have seen flowers, sprout,bud,and  bloom in some of the most polluted and nutrient deficient soil. That in no way proves there is an adaption to pollution. All it proves is that life is resilient and will find a way to survive even in harsh environments. Though life does sprout and blossom in such harsh environments, it doesn't prove the adaptions that do take place to ensure survival are Ideal.

The seeds of such a flower that blooms in the wasteland would grow and bloom much more magnificently if it were transplanted back to the prairie lands of its own evolutionary origin.   

[Inger]

Yeah.
Maybe it is like tobacco and such, you get used to it, survive,  but sure feels better without.

I do feel better with raw (I do not really care why, I just feel it), even if I occasionally eat something lightly cooked - I tolerate it quite well if it is just lightly cooked and otherwise "healthy".

I want to feel great, every day  . Not only okay. Not just survive.
I just feel more alive with raw, believe me!

The dark ages really was horrible. Never come to think of that, what they ate back then. No wonder it was as it was...

Inger