Case may be closed for you, but since none of the studies show any actual toxic effect from AGE's in the real world, and only discuss "theoretical" damage that free radicals "might" cause, the jury is still out for me. Remember all those "1,000s of studies" that showed "strong links" or "connections" of cholesterol with heart disease - and they were all nonsense. The bigger picture says carbs and high levels of blood glucose are far more damaging than AGEs and can be proven to cause undesired responses in the body.
The trouble is that the evidence re carbs is even less compelling than the evidence re cooked animal fats/heat-created toxins etc. The sheer numbers of papers re the latter prove my point whereas most of the data re carbs/blood-sugar seems to originate from Creationist websites such as biblelife.org, barry groves et al(I note that Barry groves made an excuse and fled the rawpaleodiet group because he was quite unable to effectively counter the points we made re heat-created toxins in cooked-foods. And, yet, Barry is THE guru for the various anti-carb theories out there.
As regards claims of statistics, that's very misleading. There are plenty of studies featuring heat-created toxins which involve in vitro studies of the direct, very unhealthy effects of AGEs/advanced glycation end products on living (human or animal) cells:-
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9079706(so , in other words, the chemical effect of AGEs on the human body is well understood)
then there are studies focusing on how there are direct connections between the amounts of AGEs in the body and the incidence of numerous age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer's:-
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T0G-3P69T2Y-19&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=65bfdac1fe363e31c57f1a16726d6d6fRe cholesterol/saturated fat claims:- ironically, scientists have recently suggested that there is a much more likely explanation for the frequently-reported increased ill-health of people on diets consisting of high levels of cooked animal food. They have pointed out that all the studies focusing on the dangers of saturated fats, while they were correct in their results, they failed to realise that it was the heat-created toxins in the cooked-animal foods of the diets they studied which were the cause of the greatly-increased rates of illnesses:-
Another confounding issue may be the formation of exogenous (outside the body) advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) and oxidation products generated during cooking, which it appears some of the studies have not controlled for. It has been suggested that, "given the prominence of this type of food in the human diet, the deleterious effects of high-(saturated)fat foods may be in part due to the high content in glycotoxins, above and beyond those due to oxidized fatty acid derivatives." The glycotoxins, as he called them, are more commonly called AGEs" :-
http://www.pnas.org/content/94/12/6474.longFor health, I'll take cooked meat and fat anyday over carbs of any kind. You see, I'm far more concerned with getting the MACRO nutrients right, (eating fat and protein and eliminating most carbohydrates) than agonizing over relatively minor issues like freezing, dehydrating, or even cooking. If you're eating crap to begin with, freezing, dehydrating, and cooking are totaly irrelevent. Supposed toxins like AGEs and free radicals are a waste of time to worry over and divert attention away from the far more important issue of eating the correct foods in the first place.
Lex
The trouble is that the vast majority of Raw Animal Foodists have experiences, quite counter to yours. That is, they'll get nasty side-effects/detox(much like a hangover) , within 24 hours, from cheating and eating cooked animal fat(or cooked food in general)(ie crap) whereas if they eat a little raw organic fruit, there will be no such side-effects(often no side-effects, either, from eating even nonorganic fruit). Now, I don't doubt that the zero-carb minority are an exception. I remember myself experiencing awful issues with carbs if I went too VLC for extremely long periods(VLC, in this case, involving 1 piece of fruit every 2 weeks at most). This had nothing, however, to do with the carbs being "bad" in any way, it was simply that once I went VLC for long periods, my body became hopeless at handling more and more carbs(due to lack of the correct bacteria as the bacteria were starved for lack of carbs etc.). Of course, as soon as I readded carbs in quantity back into my diet, such side-effects disappeared completely and I was right as rain, again. So, carbs are not bad at all, it's just a question of whether you're doing zero-carb or not(or VLC for long periods). But, of course, much like with animal fat(re yours and mine experiences re this), it's not a good idea to splurge on carbs, either, everything in moderation.
