Cooking.

[TylerDurden]

The theory re taste does not make sense since taste is governed by habit to a great extent. For example, babies in the womb are more likely to prefer unusually sharp tastes, such as aniseed, if the mother is fed aniseed during pregnancy.

The real problem is that the first people who transitioned to cooked for the very first time would have started having various issues re the lack of water-content in cooked foods etc. in a sharper way than what happens when we transition to raw.  So, realistically speaking, the likelihood is that we turned to cooked foods at first  solely because  big game was disappearing in areas so that we hominids had to turn to eating plants which were only properly edible when cooked. After that, the opioids in cooked meats etc. could have made us addicted to cooked foods.

There is plenty of evidence re this addiction as regards junk food already:-

http://www.highlighthealth.com/diet-and-nutrition/is-junk-food-addictive/

And this article explains, indirectly in a way, just why so  many SAD-eaters are repelled by the notion of eating raw meats:-

http://www.naturalnews.com/029382_junk_food_rats.html

[TylerDurden]

Hmm, I do need to add an article re addiction to cooked foods on rawpaleodiet.com.I am already overdue for at least 5 or 6 essays.

[KD]

josh, my point was that I don't have to speculate really in re: cooked meat being objectionable by taste alone, because if it really was, i'm pretty sure it would not have taken off considering the detriments we also associate with it.

Its possible that like Golem, cavemen found cooking at first to be revolting and 'ruined', but given the effort involved I consider this to be wishful thinking.

as for people's tastes change (particularly away form raw tastes) that is very well true but doesn't really defeat what I am saying, since if people can noticeably measure their taste changes in raw fruit, veg, and perhaps meats, and possibly loose tastes for spicy over-processed things, the simple act of cooking - an egg like I said - still seems to stir up far more taste sensations than a raw one, even in one with large sensitivities towards raw tastes.

particularly since we as a community often reference the fact that many raw dishes are seen as delicacies around the world (among largely cooked eaters), and the two largest traditional consumers of close to a raw paleo diet - the Inuits and the Native American (guts and greasers) cooked some meats in addition to eating some raw - this also calls this idea into question. Granted perhaps many of these people had more lax goals about being 100% healthy all the time or in need of such a thing per their level of health, there seem to me - obvious - reasons as to why they cooked some foods and not others, even tho partly it remains mysterious.

While we do not know, the taste argument still seems fairly prominent, if we arn't to accept the 'traditional' digestibility and evolutionary claims made by cooked fooders. I consider addictive properties/sensations to be the same as taste, after all these are essentially the same kind of pleasure receptors.

[TylerDurden]

In the case of the Inuit, cooking is a hassle given the ubiquity of ice/water, unless in an igloo with cooking utensils. It makes more sense for them to eat frozen meats without cooking or to eat the carcass raw immediately after catching it, like they often do with fish. Purely a case of convenience, nothing to do with health.

[Josh]

josh, my point was that I don't have to speculate really in re: cooked meat being objectionable by taste alone, because if it really was, i'm pretty sure it would not have taken off considering the detriments we also associate with it.

Can you not imagine a situation where people ate whatever they had to in order to survive then their kids grew up used to it?

I mean it's possible I'm wrong and cooked food is naturally delicious, but I think you should see it's very open to speculation.

[yon yonson]

In the case of the Inuit, cooking is a hassle given the ubiquity of ice/water, unless in an igloo with cooking utensils.

not to mention the lack of firewood or other fuel...

[yuli]

Yuli, as usual you are over-generalising. First of all, many people turn to RVAF diets precisely because they do badly on cooked animal foods, that is why so many of us are  former raw vegans/fruitarians. With some the effect is near-instant, with some it is gradual. For example, while my own problems with cooked animal foods are less worse than they were pre-RPD diet, I still become heavily overweight if I eat them.
...
The argument that most people do well on clean cooked-palaeo falls flat when one looks at the
evidence....

What about Mark Sisson? He seems to be doing fairly well....
I found adding a bit of cooked meat on some days feels slightly heavier then raw meat but still digests fine, maybe because I am young still, or that I don't eat it all the time, I don't know...
Also about RAF'ers claiming to look 10 years younger at 40, that could be, but I have seen many people looking younger at around 40 too. I'd like to see some photos of RAF'ers in their 40's and 50's and see how young they look, do you have some photos like that? I know one raw paleo guy on you-tube who does look very young for his age, but I'd love to see more real photos, especially of people in their 40's, 50's and 60's. Most of the people that posted their pics here are young so it makes it hard to judge, because I know already people in their 20's and 30's on a regular diet and they look young because they are fit/healthy anyways, its easier to judge when you see older people 
Another thing, why are we trying to prove if cooked foods taste better then raw foods to RAFers and regular folks or not? Isn't it dependent on taste? Isn't that also generalizing? I mean like some cooked foods taste better then some raw foods and some raw foods taste better then some cooked foods. Also I know some people who eat cooked foods and their favorite foods are sashimi! Some Japanese love all kinds of raw meats but still eat cooked cuisine too, its all about taste. You can learn to recognize if a food is tasty because its really tasty or because its an addictive junk food, and you can learn to recognize that with cooked foods too, its just a little more difficult. Example: baked potato = not addictive, fries and chips = ADDICTIVE! Both are forms of cooked potato, but have different levels of addiction, if there are baked potatos around I can eat just one and I am happy, if I had a bag of chips...that bag will be finished  better of course to avoid it all together.

[KD]

Can you not imagine a situation where people ate whatever they had to in order to survive then their kids grew up used to it?

I mean it's possible I'm wrong and cooked food is naturally delicious, but I think you should see it's very open to speculation.

Compared to anything else one might talk about in the universe, I don't think it is any more open to speculation no - as there is no reason one would need to cook meat to survive, unless one is conceding to the basic cooked fooder type arguments. Unless they had to go to some kind of paleolithic Walmart where everything was already cooked and processed, they had to have an additional reason for the act of cooking it in the first place which is what we are discussing. So if the first generation of cooked eaters found cooked meat to be repulsive in taste due to their refined raw palate, they wouldn't have expended the effort of doing it and passing it to their children, no. If someone disagrees, surely they have the opinion that there is some other advantage to cooking that has nothing to do with 'settling' for something mediocre.

As for the Inuit, not only do the comments totally skirt the fact that people are known to consume both raw and cooked animal food, the Inuits indeed cooked some of there food, so whether it was a nuisance or not only hammers home the fact that there was a huge preference for doing so, and other rudimentary peoples given the opportunity cooked (meat) even more.. Having studied assumptions about the later paleolithic peoples that consumed cooked foods, one would guess they still maintained a good amount of raw animal foods which carried over into traditional neolithic peoples. When people congregated into villages, the issue may have indeed been rot and smell, but certainly prior to that there have to be reasons for adding activities and processes to ones daily routine, particularly if they yield worse results. Its either that or the results are not as noticeable in healthy people as some would suggest. I don't really see how it can be interpreted otherwise.

[TylerDurden]

Yuli,

I am not disputing the fact that some people have better genes for longevity and a few might be slightly better able to detox toxins derived from cooking on a daily basis. But, look around at the American citizens of your acquaintance and compare them to photos of hunter-gatherers who a) eat only lightly-cooked food b) do more daily exercise and c) eat some raw animal and raw plant foods too, and you will see a whopping difference already - one can see that people hardly eating/not eating cooked foods at all would have an even lower toxin-load than HGs(provided they do not indulge in raw dairy if they happen to be  allergic to it etc. etc.)

I can only go by other middle-aged RVAFers who regularly visit primal potlucks and the like who have reported back re middle-aged RVAF diet companions looking  much younger than SAD-eating friends of a similiar chronological age,
( of course the UK RVAF diet  scene is by comparison nonexistent as a community so I do not have a lot of personal experience of RVAFers ). But, having myself visited the USA and seen truly shocking and common
 sights such as truly obese 19-year-old American girls who looked like they had   twice the weight  and biological age their same-aged contemporaries had in Europe, I have good reason to note that the more highly processed a diet is, the less healthy a person will be.

Whatever the case, while there are always exceptions such as genes, SAD-eating people generally start developing health-problems at an accelerating rate past the age of 40.

As regards baked potatoes, I am very much addicted to them. They were one of the few things I liked at school pre-RPD. Chips(aka french fries) I have always hated by contrast. But I agree to some extent that some raw animal foods often taste better raw than cooked and vice-versa. I cannot imagine anyone liking scallops cooked, I reckon? And what they call a "stelze"(pigs trotters) is unlikely to be tasty when raw!

[TylerDurden]

First off, addiction is not really the same as taste. I mean people can get addicted to smoking but hate chewing tobacco, for example.

The argument that cooking was done in harsh times out of necessity works extremely well in the case of plant foods. One common argument is that as the Palaeolithic neared its end, HGs, due to famine, had to resort to finding other plants that they could only eat if they were cooked.Now, assuming the usual traditional meals involving mixing both meats and veg together, one could assume that they mainly did the cooking for the veg but just cooked the meats along with them  to avoid hassles and separate dishes.
Oh, and also cooking does add some nutrients in specific circumstances, in the form of bone-broth(?) so people in desperate times might have gotten the notion of bone broths and just continued with that.

Lastly, just because something is harmful does not mean that humans would have had the sense to get rid of it - there are too many examples of humans doing foolish things such as heavy smoking or heavy drinking to counter that notion.

I wonder if cooking preserves meat for a little longer due to loss of water-content or whatever? I know salt was used but that seems to have been of a Neolithic invention, not Palaeolithic.