Pottenger's Cats and Weston A. Price. My Inspiration For Raw Food!

[surfsteve]

If there's one thing that motivated me to eat raw food more than anything else it was this video!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxlhVfWkzRQ&t=747s

[dariorpl]

Thanks! One can't help but wonder how so many people explain this away by saying that those foods lacked nutrients that modern catfood contains. Which it may or it may not, but it fails to explain how feeding the cats the same foods raw solved the problem.

Also, I know very little about cats, but the 3rd generation cooked food cats look a lot like modern domestic cats to me.

Another question would be why cooked food cats haven't gone extinct. I suppose the main reason would be mutations that allowed some cats to still reproduce on cooked foods. Another possible explanation would be if plenty of cats go out and hunt regularly even when living in cities where there isn't much for them to hunt except pidgeons, bats and rats. I suppose from those, bats are the most nutritious (being that they feed entirely on raw insects). but they're likely also the hardest ones for cats to find and catch.

Another surprise was the mention of the fact that the plants grown in the pens filled with the urine and fecal matter of the cats fed raw foods thrived, whereas the plants grown in the pens of cooked fed cats struggled. I think even AV was under the impression that plants will do well on any sort of minerals, this would suggest otherwise.

[surfsteve]

Wow. I kind of feel stupid for not knowing but just like TylerDurden said,it looks like my inspiration for raw food is all for the wrong reason and that podenger's cats that were fed cooked food died because of lack of taurine and not because they ate raw food. Also. Humans can manufacture taurine on their own and wont die if they don' t get any in their diets, unlike cats. Also unlike cats humans need vitamin C because their bodies can not manufacture it on their own the way cats can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Pottenger,_Jr.

http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-1h.shtml
http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-1i.shtml
http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-1j.shtml

http://www.petful.com/food/debunking-pottenger-cat-study/

[TylerDurden]

I once debunked beyondveg's hopelessly fanatical, and overly-biased anti-raw diatribes  quite well. They changed their bullshit in response and, unfortunately, I haven't yet had the time needed to do a 2nd critical analysis. Mind you, the argument that "all the cats needed was extra artificial  taurine supplements" is not good enough as the fact that a cooked diet could not help cats survive without requiring extra artificial nutrients is, in itself, a case-argument against cooking.

Weston-Price had a lot of good ideas re HG tribes, actually, BUT he did subscribe to the Noble-Savage myth far too much.

[surfsteve]

Certainly there is no proof that we need to eat a raw diet to survive or that we can not survive on an entirely cooked food diet. If anything it proves "there is more than one way to skin a cat". One thing I've noticed is that raw food on this forum seems to be more of a religion than strictly for health. I see plenty of talk of “don't eat this because it's not paleo” but little saying “don't eat this because even though it's paleo it's not good for you”.

[van]

each has to determine for one's self what is ideal.  And as to whether one actually wants something ideal in the first place.  We tend to believe what we want to and thus create our own realities.   For someone to test whether cooked is the same as raw, one would truly have to have an open mind, and be willing to test each for quite some years.  And even then it's immensely difficult because as we age the tell tale signs of one way of eating over another can be hidden. 
   For instance in Instincto practice, there's the beliefe that cooked molecules collect in the body.  Thus that accumulation happens over time and wouldn't necessarily be evident immediately ( although body smells can be detected relatively soon ).  Another example is eating a diet high in sugars and the long term effects with insulin resistance and an ever increasing tendency towards diabetes over time,, something that shows up over a long term way of eating. 
    One thing that does happen if one is truly interested in health is that eventually one will have to learn to truly listen to one's body without all the mental arguments getting in the way.  We so much want to Believe that the choices we currently are making are the RIGHT ones, and that gets sticky and in our own way.

[surfsteve]

Well yeah. Aside from taurine being destroyed by cooking the food we know, many other substances are destroyed as well. The taurine is necessary for the cats to survive but it would be silly to believe that a cat can eat nothing but cooked food with a little synthetic taurine to it and be just as healthy as if it ate what it was supposed to. Just as it would be silly to believe that you can eat anything you want as long as it's raw paleo. Our diets today are far from perfect and I doubt our ancestors that thrived on raw paleo ate perfectly either. All I can do is my best which includes listening to my instincts as well as combining them with rational thinking and collective knowledge and hope that the path that is revealed leads to the right place. A raw paleo diet seems to coincide with what I've learned and yet I've gotten kidney stones in the short time I've been on it so obviously there is more to it.

[surfsteve]

I kind of feel like I need to say I do not blame my kidney stones on raw paleo. Going back and reading my post it kind of sounds that way or at least could be interpreted like that but that is not what I meant. Obviously people on cooked diets get kidney stones as well.

[TylerDurden]

Certainly there is no proof that we need to eat a raw diet to survive or that we can not survive on an entirely cooked food diet. If anything it proves "there is more than one way to skin a cat". One thing I've noticed is that raw food on this forum seems to be more of a religion than strictly for health. I see plenty of talk of “don't eat this because it's not paleo” but little saying “don't eat this because even though it's paleo it's not good for you”.

Hardly. Most of us here are  well aware that diet is not the only important issue, as there are many other aspects such as exercise which need to be addressed as well. Most of the latter are anyway also of a "palaeo" nature  in that we usually find that emulating our palaeolithic ancestors is more effective than modern methods.

As regards cooking, the anti-cooking argument is easily proven in that no one can survive on a diet of food cooked to the point of being charcoal.In other words, even the most rabid pro-cooking-advocate has to at least admit that the more one cooks one's food, past a certain point, the more harmful it becomes.

[surfsteve]

Cooking destroys both nutrients and antinutrients. Foods low in antinutrients don't need cooking but I suppose if you're going to eat foods high in them like grains and legumes you will need to get the antinutreiens out by cooking or sprouting. Seems like the idea is to cook these foods to the point to get rid of the maximum amount of antinutriends verses destroying the minimum amount of nutrients. Saying that cooking all foods including these to the point that they become charcoal and virtually nutritionally void can not sustain life and drawing the conclusion that because this can be done that all cooking processes are bad seems like faulty logic. That is like saying if too much of something is bad then any amount is harmful. Just because a person can drink too much water and die from it does not mean water is harmful and should be avoided!

[surfsteve]

Since there are no antinutrients in meat, other than killing off germs I think everyone agrees that cooking meat destroys nutrition and has no other use than to make it taste different or keep longer in processes like canning.

I see cooking only necessary to be able to survive on foods that were never meant to be eaten in the first place. I also believe that consuming those foods leads to addiction to them and is probably how cooking got started in the first place. Though that doesn't explain why barbecued meat tastes so good so I'm open to suggestions!

[a_real_man]

"Though that doesn't explain why barbecued meat tastes so good so I'm open to suggestions!"

Why do you need suggestions on this? Plenty of things taste and feel good and will kill you. Just look at the obesity epidemic, cigarettes, drugs, computer games. Your taste buds were evolved in a previous period of time and are not suited for modern foods. That's why they are not a good indicator. In time, those who are not suited to their environment, i.e., those who listen to their primitive taste buds in a modern time, will die off and our taste buds will evolve. The question is whether you want to be one of the culled?

[TylerDurden]

The notion that cooked foods taste better is highly dubious. For one thing, taste is determined largely by the sense of smell. Those who lack the sense of smell cannot usually taste foods well.Most of the lure of cooked foods seems to come from the fact that it provides addictive opioids which influence the brain like drugs do. One only has to look at how often cooked-foodists have to season their cooked foods with sauces and spices to see that cooked foods don't have any real taste in them. By contrast, RPDers usually eat their foods without condiments after some time on the diet.

[surfsteve]

I don't think that cooked food tastes better than raw at all. To me, raw meat tastes better than cooked meat but I've always liked the taste of a rare steak that is burned on the outside and still cold or only slightly warm in the middle. Same thing when cooking vegetables. I like them crunchy in the middle but seared over high heat briefly so that the outside is almost burned yet the middle is still barely cooked. Other people seem to like my cooking as well so I know it's not just me. I was just trying to figure out why and wasn't looking for a lecture or to have my question culled like it was forbidden to talk about by someone that doesn't have an answer! Also I don't think it has to do with addictive opioids. Don't those substances come from bread and are actually very low in cooked meat?

[a_real_man]

Sometimes I wonder if a lot of the cooked/artificial foods are appealing because they resemble some actual, natural raw food. For example, maybe soups simulate blood, chips simulate insects.

[TylerDurden]

I wasn't "forbidding" anything, merely providing an alternative explanation. In my own case, my sense of taste for cooked foods diminished to 0, even long before I went raw vegan/fruitarian and then rawpalaeo, suggesting that my body was, on an unconscious level, trying to tell me something.

As regards addictive opioids, they are present in both dairy and grains(however raw) and also in cooked foods, even cooked animal foods:-

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2315439

the above study seems to suggest that when the opioid reward to the brain is reduced, the less incentive people have to eat cooked animal food.

Cooked animal foods, especially cooked animal fats, contain much higher levels of heat-created toxins derived from cooking compared to cooked plant foods, but that is another  subject.

[surfsteve]

I wasn't implying you were. I guess I was overreacting to the post before yours. I didn't realize that opioids were in cooked meat or that they were increased in foods by cooking. I was under the impression that they were either there or they weren't and that cooking just enabled you to consume more of those types of foods that had them. I would like to learn more about that.