My comments:- first off, I'm not happy with the author's mention of paleolithic nutrition since his diet is clearly not palaeolithic as it seems to involve plenty of dairy.
Then there's his claim that there is no sufficient evidence against cooking. Actually, it's the other way around, there is virtually fuck all evidence in favour of cooking. The only one I can think of is the remote possibility of getting a(human-oriented) parasite via raw meat from a sickly animal. Yet, reports of such are extremely rare in the RVAF community.
Firstly, it took us several million years to adapt to a diet of motly raw animal foods. And this was an adaptation to natural, RAW foods. Adaptation to such a radically different food such as cooked food is not even guaranteed, therefore, and, even in the unlikelihood that it was, would have to take far longer to adapt to than any equivalent raw food.
Secondly, for the claims that we are fully adapted to cooking to hold up at all, one would have to accept all of the following scenarios:-
1) Humans are either completely adapted to the heat-created toxins from cooking such as AGEs(advanced glycation end products), heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons etc, or we actually need to consume these toxins. Given that such heat-created toxins have been shown, by study after study, to be extremely harmful re human health, it becomes clear that we cannot possibly be adapted to a cooked diet. So that claim is dead-in-the-water.
2) Humans don't need enzymes in raw foods for digestion. Given the frequent need for older people on cooked diets to go in for enzyme supplements to help heal their weakened digestive system, that claim is very difficult to prove for pro-cooked-foodists.
3) Humans don't need the bacteria in raw foods. Again, many older people require bacteria in the form of probiotics to make up for the harm done to their digestive systems by the lack of bacteria in their mostly-cooked diets. So, again, this claim is difficult to prove.
For those who're interested in the intellectual debunking of the archaeological claims re cooking foods, here's a couple of links:-
http://old.rawpaleodiet.com/advent-of-cooking-article/http://old.rawpaleodiet.com/non-wrangham-theories-of-cooking-debunked/But I agree, overall. The main criteria is that we ourselves do very badly on cooked diets and do far better on raw. After all, the vast majority of RVAFers only do such raw diets because they've failed, healthwise, on every other kind of diet, beforehand. Few people would willingly go rawpalaeo otherwise, given the social stigmas involved.
