Hey.
Let me first just say that this is radical stuff. Thank you for having a place for people to talk about it, and thanks for the continued effort to educate people about what you believe is a superior way to live. I’m a couple of days in… I can’t wait to say that I’m apart of the people that finally found their way health wise. That being said, I’m going to jump straight into the deep end here.
http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/important-info-for-newbies/the-dangers-of-(raw)-dairy-consumption/What I want to do first is take a sticky from 2008 from Tyler and spruce it up a bit. No offense to Tyler of course, it is from 2008 and he probably spends way more time contributing to this site than I ever will. Read this first and compare it to the link.
Subject: Dairy
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"No matter if it's (pasteurized or raw) milk (even A2), cheese, yogurt or kefir, dairy is bad for most of us. Dairy is linked to all sorts of diseases and conditions including:
* heart disease [1]
* osteoporosis [2]
* dementia [3]
* depression [4]
* autism [5]
* strokes [6]
* multiple sclerosis [7]
* rheumatoid arthritis [8]
and more [9]. Calcium[10], hormones[11], lactose[12], casein[13], and sugar[14] are the most likely culprits and are unhealthy in even low quantities for most people. Fermenting it doesn't change that equation either! (yogurt, kefir, etc) A healthy raw paleo diet of JUST eggs & organ meats replaces ALL needs for dairy (protein, magnesium, b12, k2, biotin, folate, enzymes & probiotics) and has it’s own nutrient profile outside of that!. In the face of this information, why continue to do dairy?
We have some theories, but we’ll drop one here: casein, found in all dairy, acts as a stimulant and can trigger the same receptors that cause addiction[15].
As always, experiment and find out what works for you. Some of our members do well on dairy, but a vast majority don’t. We'd wager that a big portion that do well on it either will experience symptoms later down the line, or don't realize they experience them already, and we have a lot of anecdotal (and empirical) evidence to back that up. In the face of the dangers of dairy and an alternative diet that provides superior nutritional value, there's no reason to participate in dairy other than taste (similar argument for junk food).
Dairy has only been consumed for the past 9,000 years by humans. There is absolutely no reason to believe that we've had time to evolutionarily adapt to it. Don't let your addiction to milk dictate your health.
Sources:
[15] hxxp://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3285478/Cheese-really-like-crack-Study-reveals-food-triggers-brain-drugs.html
[Pretend all the rest of the sources are here)
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This is by no means perfect but I’m hoping to illustrate my point with this.
Ok so now that I'm done with that, here's my suggestion. This forum needs to focus on it's core. I come from the curezone world and I've really been spoiled by carefully put together resources covering specific topics very rigorously and thoroughly while still maintaining some user friendliness. I've been on this site for a little more than a week, and I've begun to get a little frustrated at how difficult it is to get the full picture of a specific topic (dairy, vegetables, etc) without having to search multiple other threads for relevant information not summed up in one spot , or dealing with the actual stickies which seem to be provided in a less graspable way… for people who may not be great on understanding the science, the language, or the verboseness of the explanation usually meant for the more battle hardened people like myself. That being said even I'm a little fatigued from my first week here, trying to build a picture.
Now, I know what you're going to say:
"oh
the6step... you see, a lot of the information here isn't set in stone. It's up to the reader to educate themselves and find out what's true for them, as we're all different, in different environments with different genetics and predispositions".
And you'd be right but wrong at the same time. I do a lot of research in my professional life and in my free time such as this. For a person like me, it's much, MUCH faster to form my own opinion from people on both sides of the argument rather than people who attempt to remain bipartisan whilst having a definite opinion, assuming both parties have shown to be open minded, even keeled and non dogmatists.
After much reading of the sticky, a bunch of threads, some of the main contributors, some of my own research, and a lot of anecdotal opinions from people, the consensus was that dairy overall wasn't ideal for most people, and being asymptomatic doesn't mean anything because kids eat absolute shit for years in todays society and get by. Also, everything is relative. There’s a guy I think that can control his body temperature, but we still tell people to wear certain clothing in certain weather, because generalizations are important.
So in my above rewrite, I made sure to lay out the general consensus, still leaving a bit of leeway for interpretation, experimentation and uncertainty. I also moved all sources to the bottom (just as wikipedia or a scientific paper would do... ), and made the writing more human and relatable, and to the point (and noticed how the subject is just one word now). Also I stripped things out like "lactose intolerence" because it's sending the wrong message. A common comeback of lactose intolerance is "oh well buy lactase drops to eat the lactose" which is true, and "oh well make kefir, it eats all the lactose" which is somewhat true, but it doesn't invalidate the major issues so don't give the reader the idea of wiggle room when there isn't any.
Looking around, most of the answers to most of the questions being asked in posts are either in some random thread or in someone's head and to me I really don't see why there isn't a bigger effort in this regard now that I've stumbled onto this place. I think this place is used for people to find answers to their problems, but also help other people and those efforts make people want to reciprocate and contribute back. In that light, there's no real reason in my mind someone can't come here and get a top down view of the fundamentals:
* There should be a sticky covering just foods and isolating them into categories of certainty. Bone Marrow / Liver / Eggs / Coconut Butter (low heat) / low glycemic fruit as championed sources and staples of the raw paleo diet, then you have veggie juice / high glycemic fruits in the uncertain category, and then pasteurized milk, GMO, as avoid (I don't even know all of them and what category they fall into, don't yell at me. This is just from a weeks research. I'm just trying to get your creative juices flowing). Literally just cover every food, note all the high level nuances, etc.
* There should be a sticky regarding storage and temperature. Refrigeration, non refrigeration. Leave a comment about "high meat" with a short explanation, linking to a sticky just about high meat as to not clutter this sticky. Cover raw foods in plastics / cans, frozen meats, de-thawing procedure, etc. For instance I’ll see things like “nothing in a can” but then coconut butter in a can is fine. Iron all of that out in one sticky.
* There should be a sticky regarding how to consume (chewing / swallowing, time, combining). For instance I know from my research this week that I should not food combine for the most part (adding coconut butter is allowed but is still debated somewhat by some of the top contributors). That means eating watermelon alone, and waiting around 3 hours (or an empty stomach) before eating something else. I know that for the raw diet, it's ideal to chew food less. I also know that it's ideal to have fruit around noon and protein at the beginning of the day. As a newbie I had to search for all of this information. Granted not everyone agrees on everything but I found the above was a general consensus with some few derivates and deviations.
* There should be a sticky JUST on vegetables. I still have no idea what the consensus is on vegetables... I didn't see any nail in the coffin. Again I'm not trying to debate that here, I'm jut saying someone new to this board shouldn't have to go searching post after post to get a decent picture. For instance sure we have a ZC board and people who believe that can go there but it's very obvious that ZC didn't work out long term for most people. Again, just spell that out, leave it up to interpretation and move on, even with vegetables.
* For all these stickies, the goal should be thorough and rigorous but simple and to the point, with citations and anecdotal evidence (both are important)
* There should be an effort to remove all non relevant stickies. There's some sticky about milk not being palaeo but why does a beginner care about that? The site is raw paleo but the point is health. It's much easier to go straight for the throat and tell the person that their health is the reason they shouldn't drink it, instead of trying to argue classification. It's attacking the wrong angle and you're going to end up having people read that and going to milk because a compelling argument wasn't made, and the information that IS there isn't digestable or relatable at all. There are stickies about making some book, the last post on it being 5 years old. We have a saying in User Experience... if everything is important, nothing is important. The things being stickied should be of absolute importance (either protocol (rules) or news happenings if it's that type of place). My favorite are the monstrous stickies that contain information that will be used again and again as education for a specific topic or branch of concern.
* Simplicity: shorter "Subjects" where relevant.
* Let people comment on the stickies to make suggestions (content, wording, citations, removing certain things), then every couple of months, un-sticky the last thread, create a new one with the alterations of your choosing, and then sticky that one. The only stickies that should be locked are non negotiables like rules and such.
All these things together would greatly help new people, entice new people to the board, cut down on repeating questions, and give people more room to have interesting conversations about things that aren't as set in stone. The goal would be to get the essentials and foundation that most of the veterans on the board understand implicitly and distill, organize and formulate them so that everyone can get on board with raw paleo.
