Another issue is that I need to buy a another (bigger) freezer soon, and need to decide between a freezer and fridge/freezer combination.  If thawing outside of the fridge is not an health risk, I would not need a fridge/freezer combination, but only a freezer, which would be less expensive.  I would not even need a freezer if Lex is correct, I could just leave the meat lying around on the floor.   That would save me some money.

Certainly no disrespect to you or anyone else intended. 

Actually, I was not referring to you.  But never mind, I don't want to press the issue, as I would like to remain on good terms with everyone on this forum.

Yes, Wikipedia also mentions studies that E.Coli is more common in grain-fed cattle in its raw foodism entry.  But also mentions other studies with conflicting results.  However, I think you are right about grain-fed meats having bacteria in dangerous amounts, though Kristelle also mentioned elsewhere that she also has eaten supermarket meats raw without problems.  I take it you have never eaten grain-fed raw.  Too bad that I can then only eat beef, as I would prefer also to eat other raw meats, and not to rely on a single company. 

So this wasn't a problem with a tainted food supply?  This was a known human pathogen passed from one person to another?

EBV can be passed through kissing or sharing kitchen utensils.  Point taken about the fact that there is a difference between putrefactive bacteria and pathogenic bacteria.

Not sure what difference refrigeration makes when I clearly stated (as others did) that bacteria continue to grow and multiply even when the meat is frozen.  Refrigeration barely slows it down.

I have read that refrigeration slows bacteria to a crawl, while freezing stops bacteria action completely.

My post was about asking you WHY this was an issue for you at all, and then gave some support for my belief that it is both futile and probably unwise to be overly concerned about putrafactive bacteria in our food as we easily handle these common bacteria and that in most cases they are important to our health.

It is an issue because the company from which I order wants to deliver organs as a whole, but a lot of organs are huge, and way too much for me to eat in a few days.  I have eaten fresh or recently thawed raw meat (steak tartare) or fish (herring) before, but have no experience with eating raw meat that has been in the fridge for long periods of time / weeks.  Everything I have read suggests that this is dangerous.  So, for reassurance and to gather other viewpoints, I wanted to ask others about how long they store their meat in the fridge and so on.

(Also, sometimes there is a gap in their delivery, and I need to have something else to eat in the meanwhile.  I do not know what would be good, should I eat grain-fed and take the risk?)

I do not have "germ phobia".  However, I contracted a case of mononucleosis apparently after sharing a glass of water with someone.  After a week of horrible fever and flu-like symptoms, this little thing called Epstein-Barr virus has caused me to be ill for almost an entire year, suffering from intense headaches, throat pain, neck pain, chest pain, tiredness and concentration problems, on a daily basis.  I am still not recovered, and things are not getting better.  When (my) gums bleed, this also caused by bacteria (this is a known fact).  So for me, the existence of germs is very real and in-my-face. 

Nevertheless, this thread was not about if humans can withstand germs (I am already eating a 100% raw beef diet and do not need convincing), nor about the putative dangers of freezing (like I wrote already, I am not concerned now fearful about freezing), but mostly about what conditions and time spans it takes for germs to reach a dangerous level after thawing.  Or do you believe there is no such level and would you therefore also eat for example months old meat, say, with flies, mold, maggots and what have you (serious question)? 

(Aged meat, as far as I know, is hung in cold temperatures.  Chicken meat is different apparently, in that it has a different (porous?) structure than beef meat that allows bacteria to enter inside without grinding it.  I was already avoiding all of the cultured or fermented foods you mention.)

I am not sure, but I think the idea that early hunter-gatherers were scavengers is still a minority opinion.  The word is "hunter-gatherers" for a reason.

I am fully aware about the health dangers of carbohydrates, as I am now following a raw beef diet.  Empirical evidence is also what I mean by science:  the ill health of people following carbohydrate-based diets is also science.  But there is a difference between anecdotal evidence and large-scale evidence.  I fully understand that you are pissed-off by previous scientific results, but that just means science can make mistakes and needs correction, not that anecdotal evidence is preferrable (after all you can also find anecdotal evidence in favor of veganism).

If the feeding of grain to grass eaters is indeed the main cause of germs, that poses quite a restriction on my diet. This is the reason I am only eating beef at the moment.  I only have access to grass-fed beef from one company, no other grass-fed meats.  Even getting them to deliver organs or suet is a whole ordeal.  Since you are also doing a similar beef diet with great results, I have great hope this is still a healthy diet for me.  But still I am curious, have you (often) eaten raw grain-fed chicken, raw grain-fed pork, and so on, and do you think it would be safe for me to eat such things?

Why would I refreeze meat? 
The most I would do is put leftovers in the refrigerator.
Then eat it.

Because another health warning that I have read accompanying the previous two is:

3. You should never leave meat in the fridge (meaning at < 7°C (45 °F)) for longer than two days.  Cooked meat can be stored longer, 3 to 4 days, ground meat shorter. 

(If this is true, this might explain why Tyler's bag ruptured after keeping it for weeks in the fridge.)  I have never eaten meat that has been in the fridge for weeks for this reason.  At most meat of a few days old.  At this moment I am eating thawed raw meat and I am willing to consider that the health risks of eating fresh or unfrozen raw meat are overblown, but I am still dubious about eating meat that has been lying in the fridge for days, let alone weeks. 

The problem, as I described, is that the leftovers might be very large, if the farm only wants to deliver whole organs:  a cow liver for example weighs about 5 kg (11 lbs), too large to eat at once.

Assuming a primitive tribe had 150 to 200 people, a whole cow contains an amount of edible material that could have been eaten in at most a day or two.  Even the Native Americans used smoke to drive off the flies when drying jerky for pemmican, as flies are what happens if you leave meat lying around, an image which is hardly appetizing and does not suggest to me that eating weeks-old meat was normally done.

(By the way, be warned vacuum-sealing while useful is not a guarantee against spoilage!  Some air always gets trapped inside.)

So do people here refreeze their meat?  And how many days do people here store leftovers in the fridge? 

In various places, I have read the same two health warnings about thawing meats:

1. The first is that you should always thaw meat in the fridge, never at room temperature. 

2. The second is that you should only thaw raw meat once, so you should never put raw meat that has been thawed back into the freezer.  (This even means the time in between buying frozen meat and placing it in the fridge should be short enough that the meat does not thaw in transit.)

One reason given was that both thawing slowly in the fridge, and thawing only once, retains the meat juices better, making the meat less dry, more tasty and more nutritious.

But I only want to focus on the second reason, which is that bacteria have less chance of proliferating.  Outside of the fridge the proliferation of micro-organisms occurs extremely quickly.  When you thaw large pieces of meat in the open air, it is possible that the outside of the meat is already at room temperature, while the inside is still frozen. 

And when freezing meat a second time, the meat has to be frozen quickly.  If the inside of the meat does not freeze quickly enough, micro-organism can keep multiplying in the core until all the meat eventually freezes.  When thawing again, this increased biomass can grow larger once more.  That is why freezing must happen extremely quickly, and must occur at a temperature of at most -24 °C (-11 °F), which is a temperature lower than what most freezers can handle, -18 °C (0 °F).

Now on this forum the dangers of micro-organisms are generally downplayed.  Still, I would like to eat my meat with as little proliferation of micro-organisms as possible.  I am not yet convinced by the benefits of "high meat".  Also, in paleolithic times the entire animal would normally be eaten almost immediately after it was hunted.  Even if raw meat was eaten after several days in the paleolithic era, after freezing the cellular structure of meat is completely damaged by the expanding ice crystals, so decay of frozen raw meat should happen much faster than fresh raw meat. 
 
What are your thoughts? 

I would prefer scientific arguments over anecdotal evidence ("I eat refrozen meat all the time and nothing bad ever happened"), but if the latter is all you have that would also be useful. 
 
(This issue is very relevant at the moment:  I only have access to frozen grass-fed beef, and from one company only.  They package muscle meats in small portions, but I just ordered organs.  Because delivering organs is unusual for them, they want to vacuum-seal the organs as a whole, as they said it was easier for them.  But a lot of organs such as liver are huge, and way too much for me to eat in a few days.  This would mean I would have to refreeze the organs again, something of which I doubt the safety.  I will try to arrange if thet can deliver smaller portions, but would like to hear your thoughts.)

Nicola, I have not the faintest idea what you are talking about.  Please elaborate.

In any case, Dr.Rons Ultra-Pure sells freeze-dried bovine organs in capsule form:
http://www.drrons.com/grassfed-new-zeland-organs-glands-intro.htm
I bought some of them.  It is possible to split the capsules, and poke out the powder contents: I found the supplements are quite tasty when eaten this way, even though they are freeze-dried. 

The expiration date is more than a year in the future, and they contain the whole organs (which would include the fat, I assume), so I wonder how freeze-drying preserves the fat for so long.  This would contradict Lex's statement that you had to heat the fat above boiling point to let the water out, because that is not how freeze-drying works. 

One could add this powder to pemmican, the only disadvantage being that the supplements are highy expensive. I calculated $65 per kg of original organ (in the case of Organ Delight), plus shipping.  But for an occasional travel food such as pemmican that might be acceptable.

Bottom line, it's only time before you'd get two different types of worms from Fresh pacific Salmon.  One, the worm shown in the video, and a the other a tape worm that an grow to 30 feet.

Wikipedia has this to say about Anisakis (the first worm you mention):

For the worm, humans are a dead-end host. Anisakis and Pseudoterranova larvae cannot survive in humans and eventually die. Treatment therefore in the vast majority of cases is symptomatic, with a heavy dose of re-assurance.

So that does not sound very harmful.  What is the other worm?

Farmed/atlantic salmon also has the disadvantage that it contains much higher levels of mercury than Alaska salmon, as I mentioned previously:
http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694
In any case I will not not eating wild fish (too expensive). 

Vegetables and fruits also contain fiber and oxalate, both of which bind calcium and inhibit its absorption. 

I almost forgot, but enlarged gums can also be the result of inflammation (which might explain your bleeding gums), see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gingival_enlargement

anyway, oilpulling  has helped me get my gum line completely reattatched to my teeth  and has 100% eliminated all tooth pain from at least 3 patients of mine who were getting ready to have teeth pulled.

I started oil pulling with olive oil just to try it out.  What kind of oil do you use?

Your recovery sounds miraculous; how do you explain the reattachment of the gingiva?  Normally this requires new ligament tissue to be formed, and this only happens early in life.  After that, it requires flap surgery with tissue transplants from the palate and application of growth factors (such as those in Emdogain), but this does not always work.  Did you also have receding interdental papilla?  These are even harder to correct surgically.  How large were your recessions; have they been measured by a periodontologist?

I wanted to have such a surgery done, but the periodontologist refused, saying I should just live with it, as he considered the recessions to be too small to warrant surgery.  However, I also have large diastemata between almost all my teeth, and consider them very unsightly.  So I am now looking into a second opinion, but I fear I cannot be helped.

A bee is not just an animal, but an insect; and all it does is break down nectar (from flowers) into simple sugars. 

It is not really a problem, but I had just expected the meat to taste better, but I will see how it goes.  I want to avoid acid foods (onion, fruits) in my mouth, but I sometimes used a bit of red pepper and garlic in the beginning.

Raw fruit only gets me bloated, especially pears, grapes, melons, and pineapples.

Hello,

I don't like unnecessary self-disclosure on the Internet at all, I am only on this forum out of desperation and because I feel there is a lot of expertise on this forum.

I bought Cordain's "Paleo Diet" book several years ago out of curiosity.  I tried it out half-heartedly, but was never able to follow it consistently, so I mostly ate the SMD (Standard Modern Diet, not everyone is from America you know! )  The book then mostly collected dust on the shelf.

Now I took a renewed interest in the diet, as I suffered from several health problems: 
- Beginning stages of hair loss, diffuse alopecia, for some years.
- Weak immune system and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, almost a year now, after contracting mononucleosis
- Receding gums (this is actually due to brushing too hard, but my gums also bleed sometimes, which must be bacterial)
- Dental caries
- Translucent / eroding teeth
(I had become increasingly frustrated about the ongoing incapacitating CFS, but the discovery that I had receding gums, especially that it is permanent, has made me really depressed. So I was very surprised that some people here mention return of their gums. I would like to ask others some question in other threads.)

After some Internet research, I concluded that some of the food traditionaly considered Paleo (especially fruits and other plant foods), perhaps were not as healthy as I once thought.  I ended up at some of the Raw Paleo sites, and then after reading this forum for several weeks, decided that I wanted to do a 100% RAF diet.  I (thankfully) found what is probably the only farm around here that delivers grass-fed beef meat and organs (except brains, due to BSE-laws).  I neither have the desire nor the time to go in gradually, so I have gone cold-turkey meat-only for two weeks, and now cold-turkey raw-meat for several of days.  I have lost some weight around the middle on the cooked-meat diet, that's it so far as positive results go.  I also had muscle fatigue after one week of cooked-meat (perhaps ketosis?), and a cold on the day I started raw meat (coincidence I hope).  I have no food cravings, I just find the muscle meat very bland-tasting and hard to chew.