http://www.zerocarbage.com/

So when you said tasty dog you were just kidding?

No, I was not kidding, just making an assumption based on dog's presence in many other cuisines (the Koreans and Inuit were mentioned as an example).

Plants may not fit our paradigm of what is intelligent or sentient, but they do seem to be incapable of suffering in the way that animals can, which does seem a worthwhile distinction (though I do leave open the possibility, unlikely as I think that it is, that plants do suffer and we just haven't been able to determine this or communicate it).  Also, there are plenty of examples of plants that require destruction in order to thrive and pass on to the next generation.  Fruits are an example, as are the regenerative nature of grasses that need to be grazed.  An even better example are the species that are dependent upon wildfires to burn them before they can release their seeds or have their landscape rejuvenated.

I absolutely see your point about the circle of life and I accept that intellectually 100%, but that doesn't make it easy for me to get rid of the part that wishes it were otherwise.  Of course, I don't spend much time or energy on these wishes, but that does not make them go away entirely.  Maybe it's just something hardwired into my biology or maybe it is acculturation, but I suspect that I will always have more sympathy for the death of the tasty, tasty dog, cow or chicken that could have experienced life and emotions for many, many more years then I will for the near catatonic carrot that was near the end of its life cycle when consumed anyway.

Trigger point therapy can possibly provide some relief.  Trigger points are small points in the center of muscle fibers that bunch up tightly and can cause pain either locally or referred to other parts of the body.  If you have sensitive enough fingers then they can be felt in the muscle tissue as little bumps.  The way to self treat a trigger point is to massage across it with a short, 1-2 inch (3-6cm) stroke, 6-12 times at a pressure that you would consider about a 7 on a pain scale of 1-10.  Massage in one direction only and use a tool, if possible, to save your hands.

Trigger points may not be the cause of all your problems, but some have almost certainly been created by the stress and are contributing to the pain.

I'm not sure where the appropriate trigger points for your pain will be located but they're probably in either your back or your buttocks  The best resource that I've found for self treatment of trigger points is

http://www.triggerpointbook.com/

Which may be available at your local library and can certainly be ordered at Amazon.com

AFAIK gluconeogenesis has nothing to do with the amount of ketones produced.  The end result of that process is glucose and you would need to be measuring your blood glucose levels to learn anything about that.  Take a look through Lex's well documented journal and you will see evidence of both his producing ketones at the same time as he is creating glucose from protein.

Lex produced many more ketones 80% fat routine than on his 65% fat routine.  It's impossible to estimate from the diet you've listed what the total amount of fat was that you consumed or what percent of your calories it was.  As I see it, it remains possible that you either a) are well adapted to using ketones for fuel and utilized all of the small amount that you created or b) consumed enough carbs that no ketones were created at all.  I realize that these are substantially similar to your options, but they do not mention gluconeogenesis.  I suspect, but by am no means certain, that you could discriminate between the two options by increasing your fat consumption while leaving the carb intake the same and keeping the protein content similar or slightly reduced.  If option A is accurate and you increase fat enough then you should see an increase in urinary ketones as more are created than you utilize.  If B is correct then you should not see any increase in ketones at all.

As I said, I'm not certain that the above scenarios accurately describe what would take place and why, but it is consistent with my current understanding of the biochemistry involved.

OK.  That shows up just fine for me.

It used to be thought that the brain ran exclusively on glucose, but Barry Groves claims that this study shows that assumption to be erroneous and that the brain is just a s capable of running on FFA's as any other cells.  I have not read the study myself.

Takenaka T, et al. Fatty acids as an energy source for the operation of axoplasmic transport. Brain Res 2003; 972: 38-43

It could be that the body chooses the more efficient fuel, or it could be that the body wants to rid itself of the more damaging and troublesome fuel first.  For example, if the body is fed large amounts of fat, carbohydrates and alcohol it will process the alcohol for energy first, thus getting it out of the system.  It is conceivable, though not proven, that carbohydrates are processed second in that line because they are less damaging than alcohol but worse for the body than fats.

I've come across the claim, which I have no idea if it is accurate or not, that you can vacuum seal raw suet in .5 - 1kg packs and that it will stay fresh for months, even at tropical temperatures.

On the Secor/Wrangham python study I think that we'll have to just agree to disagree.  As I see it, I think that the study gives us a limited amount of information about python digestion times and the energy required and you think that it gives us no information at all.  Either way, I think that we can agree that the results are practically irrelevant to humans.

As for the Goldberg study on AGE formulation I contend that, like the other studies mentioned thus far, it does not actually tell us anything about meat that is cooked only to bleau or to rare.  To start, it does not give us a true control by not telling us how many AGE's are in raw beef.  It may be similar to the raw breast milk, but there is no law saying that it needs to be.  Second, while they state that they boiled the meat for 1 hour they do not tell us what the final internal temperature of the meat is.  We cannot duplicate the experiment ourselves, cooking meat for an hour and then measuring the temperature, because they do not tell us the mass of the beef, a factor that could have a significant impact on the final internal temperature.  Speaking just from limited experience, I have never had a pot roast (the closest thing to true boiled beef that I've ever consumed) that has not been cooked to well done.  The sample probably never made it all the way to 100C, but how close, who knows?

Just as there is no enzyme damage at 38C but there is at 40C it remains possible, based on the data presented so far, that there is no significant AGE formation or reduction in digestibility in food heated to (to pull hypothetical numbers out of a hat) 58C but that they do show up at 60C and start increasing rapidly after that.

The data on the fats I find a little more confusing.  Did they actually cook them at all, or are they just measuring them as purchased from the supermarket?  If the latter then the butter numbers probably tell us something quite interesting about pasteurization.  I'm also curious about the olive oil.  I wonder what type they used.  If they did not heat them at all then I would expect there to certainly be a difference between cold-pressed extra virgin and the heat extracted, second press Pure olive oil garbage.  If they did not heat the fats in any way themselves and they did use good quality fats (both assumptions that we can't confirm from this paper) then it actually tells us nothing about AV's claim that the best food raw is the worst cooked.   The AGE's might be endogenous to the fats themselves.

I don't understand what you mean when you say that destroying phytonutrients by cooking plant matter is deemed good by zero-carbers.  Since zero-carbers don't consume plant matter why would they have an opinion on whether or not cooking it is a good thing?  As for whether the creation of toxins is worse than the destruction of anti-nutrients I think that this would be dependent upon both the quantity of the substances created and destroyed and the relative effects that these substances have on the body.  Without knowing the levels of the various substances and their effects I don't think that we can say with certainty which method of ingestion is ultimately better.

This might interest you, as it exposes flaws in The China Study conclusions:

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

Yes, I think that Masterjohn supports my contention perfectly, as it uses the data from the original monolith, Diet, Life-style and Mortality in China: A Study of the Characteristics of 65 Chinese Counties to disprove the distortions and lies that Campbell puts forth in his commercial book The China Study.

I have a few small quibbles with the information presented, the main one being that I don't think that it is the responsibility of the government to take care of us, but overall that was pretty awesome.

T. Colin Campbell, whose name appears second on Diet, Life-style and Mortality in China: A Study of the Characteristics of 65 Chinese Counties is certainly the most well known figure associated with this study.  He is the one who's been interviewed concerning it and has been promoting it.  I think that we can agree that in doing so he has greatly distorted the findings of that large and comprehensive epidemiolgical paper.  I think that it is fair to criticize Campbell and his interpretations of the study, particularly that work of propaganda/fiction that he published as "The China Study" but I have come across no one who has impugned the data from or execution of the original study (other than the normal limitations of epidemiological research, of course, and that some of the questions were poorly worded).  The fact that he has been misusing and perverting the data to his own end does not mean that the original data is flawed.

I think that this is analogous to Wrangham.  We can accept the data of the python study without having to accept any of Wrangham's far-fetched conclusions.  It would be a career-killer for Stephen Secor, who has studied and published more about the digestion of pythons than anyone else, to publish research that could be so easily falsifiable by anyone else who is willing to do the experiment.  I do not claim that Wrangham set the conditions and that some junior scientist did the work.  As reported by Science and Health journalist Rachael Gorman, http://www.rachaelgorman.com/article_full.php?article_stamp=1202161241, Wrangham sought out Secor because he already had experience studying the evolutionary design of the digestive system.  Yes, the research found what Wrangham wanted it to find and he uses it to prop up his theories, but I don't think that that indicates the data to be erroneous any more than I think that the data actually supports his theory.  As I've said before, I find it very hard to believe that the snake data in isolation tells us anything meaningful about the human digestive tract.  I also don't think that this study tells us anything about the quality of the nutrition that the snake is absorbing.  It just tells us that the snake can absorb cooked food more quickly and with less energy than it can raw food.

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.

I do not think that this study proves your point any more than the Oste one does.  The Morgan Kern study is a comparison of raw meat along with 3 samples cooked in different ways.  One sample was boiled until an internal temperature of 84C was reached.  The second was autoclaved at 15 pounds of pressure for 7 minutes, giving a temperature of 84C.  The last was autoclaved at 15lbs of pressure for 1 hour.  The authors did not measure the temperature of this sample, but admit that it probably exceeded 85C.  84C is equivilent to 183F and is far beyond well done.  At no time did the authors of this study examine lightly cooked meat.

The reference to a sample cooked from 66-77C is not from this study but is mentioned as the author discusses all previous studies done in this area of research.  This number came from the work of Jarawussa in '29.  Jarawussa's study found absolutely zero difference in biological value when comparing the raw substance with the cooked.  I say substance instead of meat because Jarawussa used a mixture of "100 gm. of meat, treated in one of the ways given above, with 40gm. of potatoes, 20 gm. of cabbage and 10 gm. of carrots."  Even if the Jarawussa study had only looked at meat and had come to a conclusion that the raw meat showed a difference in biological value it still wouldn't tell us anything about cooking meats to Rare (46-51C).  66C (151F) is considered medium rare by the USDA, but any chef in a kitchen will tell you that their numbers are wacky and that 66C is more Medium to Medium-Well.

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.

If by "the above facts re protein digestibility being reduced" you are referring to the Oste, Morgan and Jarawussa studies and not something else that I've overlooked then I hope that I have demonstrated that they do not tell us anything about what happens between, say, 40C and 60C.  The question about whether enzyme rich foods actually benefit us or if the enzymes are all broken down into basic amino acids in the stomach seems to be still up in the air.  It is still possible that the enzymes are deactivated at 40C but that there is no change in protein digestibility until 58C, to pick a random number.

The issue of the AGE's is more complicated and one where I will have to spend much more time reading through the references that you have provided before I feel that I'll be able to comment intelligently.

On phytonutrients and plants it seems that if too many cause harm and too few give no benefit then cooking which, depending on the method chosen and how it is executed, reduces but generally does not eliminate these compounds and which, according to Oste, makes the plants more digestible might be the preferred way to prepare and consume them.