The Avg Lifespan / Life Expectancy Canard

[PaleoPhil]

Well, you've supplied Tyler with one example of Paleo Utopianism. I don't subscribe to it--all was not bliss in any era or for any species (surely an antelope that is being eaten alive by a lion does not think that all is blissful at that moment, even if it is for the best for nature as a whole in the long run)--and that still doesn't make it wise for critics of raw Paleo diets to use the avg lifespan canard, since it only undermines their own credibility.

[TylerDurden]

Well, i'm happy to read this from you and i'm inclined to believe that it is true. Though it is not easy IMO to provide clear cut scientific proof. 

Google under "beyondveg.com longevity height" and you'll find the data.

Just notice that if this is indeed true it is by no means in line with the " Nasty, Brutish and Short" ideology. Nor is the largely absent osteopororis, dental cavities etc in paleomen.

No, it doesn't. The nasty, brutish and short philosophy covers a hell of a lot more than just general health. I wouldn't mind people quoting (somewhat limited) better health of ([post-cooking)palaeo-era tribes but most people imply there is a noble-savage theme to that with  a supposedly  idyllic, moral life in the stone age etc..

As Raw Kyle recalled, lifespan isn't much of a good indication of health. The recent probably longer lifespan reached by neolithic man in the last century can be largely traced back to the massive use of medical crutches that just prevent people from dying but by no means makes them "healthy" at least as "healthy" as paleomen apparently were. And by far, even if paleomen's health was certainly not perfect. Nor was their diet since they already ate part of their food cooked at least in the upper paleolithic. But we RPD should always keep in mind that even that part of cooked paleofood had never the dramatic consequences on health we observe with neolithic foods.

  Well, that's where we differ. I find that the consumption of cooked palaeo foods was indeed harmful to human health, maybe not to the huge extent of damage grains and dairy and processed foods have done, but it was still very significantly harmful.

[TylerDurden]

"Life expectancy: Another problem. I keep hearing the fiction that medical practitioners doubled our life expectancy. Life expectancy increased because of 1) sanitation, 2) penicillin, 3) drop in crime.

Umm, this is erroneous. Sanitation was introduced by doctors as was penicillin.

[TylerDurden]

Refuting the avg lifespan canard is not the same thing as making claims of blissful perfection in all things during the Stone Age. I have not argued for a noble savage theory in this thread, nor has anyone else here. To help clarify that, I'll openly and soundly reject and denounce this "Noble Savage theory," as you describe it, with its claims of "idyllic bliss." I do not believe that Stone Agers were inherently perfectly noble and I don't believe that utopia is possible. I hope that puts that ridiculous straw man to rest once and for all.

The very fact that Weston-Price holds such a near-infallible aura here in the RVAF community rather strongly indicates that Price's Noble Savage theory is strongly favoured in this community, the notion re hunter-gatherers living longer (in a healthier state)
than modern man is just one common aspect thereof, which has been claimed before in RVAF circles.
Also, there  are inescapable facts such as the modern vast decrease in deaths from childbirth as a result of increased sanitation, which we can't ignore(though one can explain it by pointing out that it is the environment  and not the so-called "pathogen" which is at fault.Just pointing out that modern innovations did improve on the health of tribes(eg:- the Maori doing better, healthwise, despite switching to a modern diet - their native diet being rubbish).

what you mean, but it's not a realistic way of representing a "scientific consensus." People consent, not papers. A scientific consensus is not YOUR controversial interpretation of other people's papers which they would not agree with. A consensus is when the majority of scientists agree with a particular general interpretation of the accumulated studies. I guarantee you that the majority do not agree with your view of what the consensus is, therefore your so-called consensus bears no relation to reality. Right now the consensus seems to be that high heat cooking on grills and frying pans, especially with fat (such as deep fat frying), is unhealthy and that people should instead steam, bake, stir-fry, boil, cook low-and-slow, etc. Neither you nor I agree with this consensus and trying to pretend that our view that all-raw is best is the consensus doesn't make it so. If you don't believe me, then accept my challenge. If you can find a single scientist, JUST ONE, who accepts your interpretation that the vast majority of studies prove that an all-raw diet is optimal, then I will take your claim seriously.

You've just admitted my point that scientists already accept that well-cooked foods are harmful(eg:- microwaving/frying/grilling/barbecuing etc.), that's bad for them as it means that the pro-raw argument is already half-won, if only 3 or so  cooking methods are considered "OK" . And opinions of specific scientists means nothing as science depends on the results of scientific studies, not human opinions of what those studies mean. For example, that  guy , Harris, blithely dismissed the concept of advanced glycation end products but was unable to provide any decent scientific data to back up his claim that AGEs don't matter.So, his argument looked  dead-in-the-water.That's what I meant, there is a big difference between scientific concencus(as shown by advances made by studies, and mass cultural opinion as held by nutritionists and individual scientists).

I was very critical of his post about "the raw crowd" myself, but I wouldn't go that far. Given that he OK'd Lex's all-raw diet, he has now spoken more positively, at least in part, about RPD than anyone other than Ray Audette. If he's OK with Lex's diet, then I must have badly misjudged him and I should followed my normal rule of seeking "first to understand, then to be understood." I'm hoping to do that in the future--with any luck I'll get some time to read more of his blog this weekend. How much of it have you read so far?

I've read 2 full articles by him so far. I got a bit tired of the negative opinionated language and the lack of data, personally.

His disagreeing with you (or me, for that matter) doesn't make him a kook. I regret having reacted very negatively to his critique of RPD before more thoroughly investigating. You're helping me to realize that more vividly by giving me a third-party perspective on someone else doing the same thing. Given that he is one of the few "experts" on planet earth who have said anything good at all about someone doing RPD, we should probably try to smooth things over rather than throw oil on a fire. He could provide us with helpful info like he did for Lex.

What makes him a kook is the fact that he goes against the masses of scientific data when it suits him, whereas a good scientist would be willing to accept an opposing view if there was enough convincing data(as with AGEs).I don't mind opposing views, but they have to have some substance to them. And, similiarly, just because he was nice to Lex, doesn't make him a competent scientist or an authority on anything. (*For example, I always remember a brilliant Science teacher at my prep-school who was a great teacher but who also happened  to shout and scream insults at us, all the time).

[pfw]

For example, that  guy , Harris, blithely dismissed the concept of advanced glycation end products but was unable to provide any decent scientific data to back up his claim that AGEs don't matter.So, his argument looked  dead-in-the-water.

Harris' problem is that you can't produce any studies which demonstrate that AGEs do matter, at least no well constructed human studies intended to study the issue. You can produce oodles of tangential evidence that the byproducts of cooking are harmful, but no direct confirmation of that claim. It just hasn't been studied directly or thoroughly. If it had, this wouldn't be a debate.

It's not possible to prove a negative. The onus is on the claimant to prove the positive. Hence Harris' disdain for those who claim absolutely that cooking is the cause of all ills; without direct testing of the claim that various cooking byproducts are harmful rather than theoretically harmful or genuinely correlated with harm.

[alphagruis]

Google under "beyondveg.com longevity height" and you'll find the data.

Well, I will do it but i always prefer to look at the original scientific works or papers.

No, it doesn't. The nasty, brutish and short philosophy covers a hell of a lot more than just general health. I wouldn't mind people quoting (somewhat limited) better health of ([post-cooking)palaeo-era tribes but most people imply there is a noble-savage theme to that with  a supposedly  idyllic, moral life in the stone age etc..

Very funny. Maybe you didn't notice but "nasty, brutish and short" contains the word short, for short life times as far as i can remember. And rebuttal of the relevant ideology does by no means imply what you repeat again and again, namely the adoption of the "noble savage" mythology. As PaleoPhil told you, your strawmen arguments are unlikely to convince anyone.

[alphagruis]

Harris' problem is that you can't produce any studies which demonstrate that AGEs do matter, at least no well constructed human studies intended to study the issue. You can produce oodles of tangential evidence that the byproducts of cooking are harmful, but no direct confirmation of that claim. It just hasn't been studied directly or thoroughly. If it had, this wouldn't be a debate.

It's not possible to prove a negative. The onus is on the claimant to prove the positive. Hence Harris' disdain for those who claim absolutely that cooking is the cause of all ills; without direct testing of the claim that various cooking byproducts are harmful rather than theoretically harmful or genuinely correlated with harm.

Well,  what has been shown VERY CLEARLY is that the more you heat the food the worse are the biological parameters such as insulin sensitivity, inflammation indicators, arterial elasticity etc etc

Whether this is due to AGEs or the MANY other heat induced chemicals or changes doesn't  matter much here.

Just google Helen Vlassara papers and read the (free) abstracts.

[alphagruis]

An exemple of a paper that shows the relationship between lifespan, health and heated food ingestion. Note that lowAGE and RegAGE diets just differ by heating temperature and/or duration and AGEs= glycotoxins

Reduced Oxidant Stress and Extended Lifespan in Mice Exposed to a Low
Glycotoxin Diet

Association with Increased AGER1 Expression
Weijing Cai*, John Cijiang He, Li Zhu*, Xue Chen*, Sylvan Wallenstein, Gary
E. Striker and Helen Vlassara*

From the Department of Geriatrics,* Division of Experimental Diabetes and
Aging, the BioMath Department, and the Department of Medicine, Division of
Nephrology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York


Aging is accompanied by increased oxidative stress (OS) and accumulation of
advanced glycation end products (AGEs). AGE formation in food is
temperature-regulated, and ingestion of nutrients prepared with excess heat
promotes AGE formation, OS, and cardiovascular disease in mice. We
hypothesized that sustained exposure to the high levels of pro-oxidant AGEs
in normal diets (RegAGE) contributes to aging via an increased AGE load,
which causes AGER1 dysregulation and depletion of anti-oxidant capacity, and
that an isocaloric, but AGE-restricted (by 50%) diet (LowAGE), would
decrease these abnormalities. C57BL6 male mice with a life-long exposure to
a LowAGE diet had higher than baseline levels of tissue AGER1 and
glutathione/oxidized glutathione and reduced plasma 8-isoprostanes and
tissue RAGE and p66shc levels compared with mice pair-fed the regular
(RegAGE) diet. This was associated with a reduction in systemic AGE
accumulation and amelioration of insulin resistance, albuminuria, and
glomerulosclerosis. Moreover, lifespan was extended in LowAGE mice, compared
with RegAGE mice. Thus, OS-dependent metabolic and end organ dysfunction of
aging may result from life-long exposure to high levels of glycoxidants that
exceed AGER1 and anti-oxidant reserve capacity. A reduced AGE diet preserved
these innate defenses, resulting in decreased tissue damage and a longer
lifespan in mice.

[pfw]

Mouse studies != human studies. Humans have been cooking for some duration of time, perhaps even evolutionary timescales depending on what random source you choose to believe. The result might be a higher tolerance for cooking created compounds than in other animals.

Like I said, there is plenty of reason to believe that cooking creates compounds which could be problematic in humans. There's even plenty of research showing that these compounds are probably bad, and indeed are bad for people with various problems (diabetics especially). What has not been done is the science necessary to prove it generally. This is a lot like the diet-heart hypothesis. You feed rabbits cholesterol and watch them die of heart attacks, then claim that the same thing happens to humans. Problem: it doesn't actually happen in humans. Virtually all the observational data show no correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease.  Similarly, we have lots of specific studies showing that, for example, charred meat contains carcinogen-like compounds. It stands to reason that they'd cause cancer. Now you have to do the study that tests for that. It doesn't just follow logically, nothing in science does.

To prove the effects of cooked food you'd need to do a study where one cohort ate raw everything while another cohort ate the same stuff cooked. If at the end of your study, incidence of disease and mortality differed in a statistically significant manner, you'd have borne out the hypothesis.

[alphagruis]

To prove the effects of cooked food you'd need to do a study where one cohort ate raw everything while another cohort ate the same stuff cooked. If at the end of your study, incidence of disease and mortality differed in a statistically significant manner, you'd have borne out the hypothesis.

Sure. But this thread is about lifespan and for obvious reasons the experiment would take a very long time for man  and is much more easy to perform with rodents whose lifespans are a few tens of months as opposed to 80 years or so.

Yet, as i said, biological parameters that reflect health status such as glucose tolerance, insulin sensitivity, inflammatory indicators such as C reactive protein, oxidative stress etc have also been compared in humans on a mildly cooked (called lowAGE) and on more heavily cooked (called highAGE) diet for a given period (admittedly short with respect to human lifespan) . The result is quite clear enough, everything is degraded on highAGE with respect to lowAGE. And one can only expect that the results would have been even more spectacular if a really raw rather than a lowAGE diet had been used. 

Now it is very likely that we are capable to detoxify the poisons from cooked food in a limited way probably because these poisons also form inevitably in a very tiny quantity even in raw food just left at room temperature and so we were somewhat exposed to a minute amount of them during our whole evolutionnary track. In a modern "cooked framework" this "raw food adapted" detoxification ability might be just overwhelmed progressively with age, more or less rapidly depending on our genetic background and life style. So that illness usually appears only upon aging once a sufficient amount of poisons has accumulated in the organism.       

[PaleoPhil]

Tyler, I wasn't comparing cooked Paleo to raw Paleo, I was comparing cooked Paleo to cooked modern foods. Whenever I say anything good at all about cooked Paleo, please understand that I am only saying that in comparison to cooked modern foods, not to older, more raw diets. In other words, I believe that BOTH the raw and Paleo aspects of the RPD are beneficial--not just raw or just Paleo. So raw is better than cooked and Paleo is better than modern. Does that make it more clear?

I noticed you didn't accept my challenge to test whether the scientific consensus favors all-raw diets. I think that is more telling than any rhetoric you could come up with to support that claim. You don't seem to have convinced a single person here that all-raw is the current dietary consensus among scientists. I hope you are right, but I doubt it, and extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary evidence, not just your personal assertions and rhetorical arguments. I'll make the test easier for you: if you can find a single respected scientist (unfortunately, Aajonus is not currently respected and isn't widely regarded as a scientist) who accepts that all-raw, including raw meats, is optimal, then I'll concede your point. I don't mean a scientist who accepts a study finding AGEs to be harmful, I mean one who agrees that all-raw is best and therefore eats an all-raw diet him/herself.

[PaleoPhil]

Harris' problem is that you can't produce any studies which demonstrate that AGEs do matter, at least no well constructed human studies intended to study the issue. You can produce oodles of tangential evidence that the byproducts of cooking are harmful, but no direct confirmation of that claim. It just hasn't been studied directly or thoroughly. If it had, this wouldn't be a debate.

It's not possible to prove a negative. The onus is on the claimant to prove the positive. Hence Harris' disdain for those who claim absolutely that cooking is the cause of all ills; without direct testing of the claim that various cooking byproducts are harmful rather than theoretically harmful or genuinely correlated with harm.

Brilliantly stated, pfw. Harris' criticism is an understandable one that we cannot refute because scientific studies haven't been done on all-raw diets. I don't expect scientists or physicians to adopt my diet or recommend it to patients simply because I do well on it or because some studies suggest AGEs may be harmful. They need stronger evidence than that before they will make that radical a change.

Based on my experience and that of others here, as well as the suggestive evidence about toxic byproducts of cooking, I happen to believe there is a very good chance that Tyler is right about raw meats and fats being significantly superior to cooked ones, even lightly cooked ones (after all, why else would I be eating a RPD?), but I do not delude myself by pretending that this is a popular opinion in the scientific community. Unfortunately, I doubt there is a single other person on planet earth who agrees with Tyler on that.

[TylerDurden]

Well, I will do it but i always prefer to look at the original scientific works or papers.

beyondveg.com shows the title of each relevant research paper cited  in a bibilography somewhere.

Very funny. Maybe you didn't notice but "nasty, brutish and short" contains the word short, for short life times as far as i can remember. And rebuttal of the relevant ideology does by no means imply what you repeat again and again, namely the adoption of the "noble savage" mythology. As PaleoPhil told you, your strawmen arguments are unlikely to convince anyone

  Of course it implies it. Part of the claims re the  idyllic life of the noble savage is the long lifespan claim. Yet, even when one takes into account child-mortality, one still finds that native lifespan was less than us by far, so "nasty, brutish and short" applies.

[TylerDurden]

Harris' problem is that you can't produce any studies which demonstrate that AGEs do matter, at least no well constructed human studies intended to study the issue. You can produce oodles of tangential evidence that the byproducts of cooking are harmful, but no direct confirmation of that claim. It just hasn't been studied directly or thoroughly. If it had, this wouldn't be a debate.

It's not possible to prove a negative. The onus is on the claimant to prove the positive. Hence Harris' disdain for those who claim absolutely that cooking is the cause of all ills; without direct testing of the claim that various cooking byproducts are harmful rather than theoretically harmful or genuinely correlated with harm.

You're dead wrong as alphagruis mentions. So far, there have been multiple conclusive studies showing that AGEs and other heat-created toxins greatly harm animals(studies on humans re diet are impossible to maintain for an entire lifespan after all). There are also even many clear-cut studies showing that humans are directly affected in the short-term by AGE-rich diets, in that humans are shown to benefit from low-AGE diets, with health-improvements to their conditions when AGEs are reduced(there are also studies showing the direct immediate harm done by AGEs on human tissue). Plus, AGEs/advanced glycation end products in particular, have been again and again implicated in age-related conditions, meaning that there is  a reduction in longevity  or increase in aging rate, as a result of eating cooked foods.So, one doesn't need to prove that raw is beneficial , just that cooking is harmful. And so far, there has been NO evidence whatsoever in the pro-cooking camp that heat-created toxins are beneficial for humans.So, scientifically speaking, people like Harris have no leg to stand on, which is why he blithely dismissed those claims without evidence.

Plus, science works on the principle of the correct data being provided by whichever side has the most studies backing it or condemning the other side. There are a few studies backing the consumption of raw food(either direct or indirect) and many, many thousands of (direct or indirect) studies backing the notion that cooked foods are harmful with only some isolated studies(eg:- re lycopene) in the pro-cooked camp.So the raw camp is winning.

[TylerDurden]

I noticed you didn't accept my challenge to test whether the scientific consensus favors all-raw diets. I think that is more telling than any rhetoric you could come up with to support that claim. You don't seem to have convinced a single person here that all-raw is the current dietary consensus among scientists. I hope you are right, but I doubt it, and extraordinary claims like that require extraordinary evidence, not just your personal assertions and rhetorical arguments. I'll make the test easier for you: if you can find a single respected scientist (unfortunately, Aajonus is not currently respected and isn't widely regarded as a scientist) who accepts that all-raw, including raw meats, is optimal, then I'll concede your point. I don't mean a scientist who accepts a study finding AGEs to be harmful, I mean one who agrees that all-raw is best and therefore eats an all-raw diet him/herself.

You're deliberately twisting the issue. I stated that it was the scientific concensus that cooking was harmful, the raw issue is another matter but since raw is the opposite of cooking, it follows that constant scientific recommendations to lower thecooking  temperature gradually encourage people to move towards the raw camp)-note how now it's commonly recommended by people to just sear meats on the outside, these days. Now, granted there is still controversy about the full extent of harm of cooking within the scientific community, with some claiming that boiling is "OK", and others admitting grudgingly that even boiling does some harm, but that doesn't change the fact that the pro-cooking camp is in real trouble(I mean can you find any genuine scientist who claims that any kind of cooking(even cooking till the food is charcoal) is healthy). I mean, even Wrangham, the most fanatical pro-cooking candidate has recognised that he can't blithely ignore the existence of AGEs, a sure sign that the mass of scientific papers is now too great for a serious scientist to ignore(I don't count Harris as a serious scientist).

Another issue I have with all this discussion is the seeming need for guru-worship re mentions of Harris. I mean, the vast majority of RVAFers have usually come a cropper as a result of following 1 guru or another(I'm a case in point, having foolishly believed in Aajonus re the raw dairy issue, the raw vegan-philosophy re Dr Hay etc.) In the end, I learnt far more by just reading all the message-archives and finding out all the past mistakes other RVAFers made. Also, most gurus tend to disappear after they stop publishing etc.(look at Ray Audette who no one seems to have heard of in a long while).

Since people are throwing down the gauntlet, can someone please provide me with a study which shows that humans need to consume those heat-created toxins in foods in order to survive/be healthy?

[PaleoPhil]

OK, I think you are agreeing that there is no scientific consensus supporting all-raw diets like our RPD, yes? If all you meant was that there is consensus that certain types of cooking at high heat show evidence suggestive of harm, I agree with that. It was only when you seemed to extrapolate this to consensus support for all-raw diets that I was incredulous, as were others here. I agree that the views of Wrangham and the rest of the most stridently pro cooking camp are in trouble, just as the pro-Food-Pyramid views are in trouble. That doesn't mean all-raw has been embraced. On the contrary, it is still ridiculed. Haven't you ever encountered any negativity toward all-raw diets from anyone other than Dr. Harris? If so, then you know what I'm talking about. There is a vast area where most scientists' views seem to lie in-between the extremes of Wrangham's proposed 2 million years of cooking vs. support for 100% raw diets.

[William]

Plus, science works on the principle of the correct data being provided by whichever side has the most studies backing it or condemning the other side.

Science works on the principle of truth.
You have confused consensus/fashion/popularity/politics with science.
See my sig line.

[alphagruis]

Plus, science works on the principle of the correct data being provided by whichever side has the most studies backing it or condemning the other side.

 I can testify that you are wrong in this respect. As William points out consensus in science does not mean truth. A false idea doesn't become true just because a majority of scientists adopts it or because a large number of "studies" apparently supports it. There is no principle of democracy that works in science. And there are many reasons that explain this unfortunate situation. One of them is the peer reviewed publication system as well as conference organization principles that strongly favors consensus and rejects minority opinions and outsiders. Another is simply that among scientists too there are much more followers than creative leaders. So if the leaders overlooked something or there is a fundamental flaw in the "studies" one gets both consensus and bad science. 

Moreover there is actually a huge amount of (junk) works in "food science" on all the "positive" effects of cooking. To find them you have to look under Maillard reaction products which is just the original name for AGEs, the one used by food scientists long before a few medical scientists "discovered" the same chemicals from their dark side in diabetes studies and renamed them in their way.

In particular "food scientists" assigned antioxidant properties to Maiillard products alias AGEs and there was  a large consensus about their "positive" effects over several tens of years. And yet, just bad science.   

 

[alphagruis]

beyondveg.com shows the title of each relevant research paper cited  in a bibilography somewhere.
  Of course it implies it. Part of the claims re the  idyllic life of the noble savage is the long lifespan claim. Yet, even when one takes into account child-mortality, one still finds that native lifespan was less than us by far, so "nasty, brutish and short" applies.

It doesn't make any sense to compare lifespans of paleoman and modern neolithic man because, as already said lifespan, isn't just an indicator of health.  What makes more sense is to compare lifespan just before and just after the neolithic revolution.

Note also that by the time Rousseau wrote about his "Noble Savage" philosophy lifespan was much shorter and I'm not sure that the French or English peasants lived longer than the "savages" then just discovered in south pacific islands such as Tahiti by Cook or La Pérouse.  

[alphagruis]

(I mean can you find any genuine scientist who claims that any kind of cooking(even cooking till the food is charcoal) is healthy).

Cooking till the food is charcoal paradoxically becomes HEALTHY AGAIN ! Yes every scientist can safely claim that  

There are even people eating charcoal when poisoned and this is a recognized medical cure of poisoning.

Yet the charcoal is no more food, no protein, no fat, no carbs, no vitamins, zero calories, no AGEs.

[alphagruis]

Based on my experience and that of others here, as well as the suggestive evidence about toxic byproducts of cooking, I happen to believe there is a very good chance that Tyler is right about raw meats and fats being significantly superior to cooked ones, even lightly cooked ones (after all, why else would I be eating a RPD?), but I do not delude myself by pretending that this is a popular opinion in the scientific community. Unfortunately, I doubt there is a single other person on planet earth who agrees with Tyler on that.

Yes, if it were a popular opinion it would have been amply tested experimentally by scientists.

It is not even yet a simple conjecture or an attractive working hypothesis worth to be tested for the majority of scientists. The idea that raw might well set the true baseline for humans clashes with culture. 

[PaleoPhil]

Yes, if it were a popular opinion it would have been amply tested experimentally by scientists.

It is not even yet a simple conjecture or an attractive working hypothesis worth to be tested for the majority of scientists. The idea that raw might well set the true baseline for humans clashes with culture.  

Yes, and no doubt critics will ironically some day try to tag Tyler with promoting "noble savagery," if they haven't already, for promoting raw Paleo as superior to the cooked modern foods of civilization. So for him to use that charge against us is "a bit like the pot calling the kettle black."

In my experience I've noticed that critics tend to resort to that charge when they've run out of ammunition against the raw Paleo diet & lifestyle or the rights of indigenous peoples. The nice thing about it from the critic's perspective is it is sufficiently vague and untestable that it is difficult to prove false, no matter how untrue it may be. Whenever someone says something good about raw Paleo diets or lifestyle, a critic can simply misrepresent their views in exaggerated form and dismiss them as promoting the "noble savage theory" without having to refute the benefits of the diet or lifestyle or even examine the data or try the diet themselves. This is a tactic similar to the charge of "orthorexia" that dieters have started throwing at each other (since there are no clear, obvious physical symptoms of it, there is no easy way to disprove it) and of "Communist" during the Red scare. If you deny the charge, the critic can just say "Of course he would deny it--he's hiding his true feelings. I know what he really meant by his words." Unless "noble savage theory" is clearly defined and someone really did promote it in no uncertain terms, such charges amount to claims of mind reading ability.

In particular "food scientists" assigned antioxidant properties to Maiillard products alias AGEs and there was  a large consensus about their "positive" effects over several tens of years. And yet, just bad science.   

Interesting, I speculated only semi-seriously that some might have claimed that AGEs were medicinal in the way that some claim the natural insecticides in plants might be medicinal/healthy antioxidants/etc. and now I find that someone scientists actually did claim that AGEs were themselves antioxidants. Negative reactions like diarrhea to plant antinutrients are sometimes written off as temporary "detox" reactions (such as by raw vegans and vegetarians in past forum discussions I've seen and at this source: "Sample List of Allowed Foods on a Detox Diet," http://altmedicine.about.com/od/detoxcleansing/a/Foods_Eat.htm) that are actually part of a healthy process. I wonder if anyone made the same claims regarding negative reactions to cooked foods?

[pfw]

Plus, science works on the principle of the correct data being provided by whichever side has the most studies backing it or condemning the other side.

As has been pointed out, this is absolutely not how scientific knowledge is produced. That's how bullshit hysterical nonsense gets pushed on the public via the media and institutions looking to score more grant money. Scientific knowledge is the product of constantly testing hypotheses. There is never certainty and everything can be falsified.

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that cooked food is harmful. I believe it's a strong hypothesis, and merits further testing. It is not yet a well tested, proven hypothesis that generates a theory which can predict results. No one as done studies where one cohort eats raw and another eats the same stuff cooked and compared health outcomes. The fact that studies in humans are hard does not change the reality of the scientific method - until the raw hypothesis is tested, to claim that it's fully backed by science is, by definition, wrong. It's compelling. It is not proven.

No one needs to show that AGEs are beneficial. The burden of proof is on the raw claimaint to show that cooking causes statistically significant levels of harm in a population. If your two cohorts show no difference in mortality or health outcomes over a period of years, then clearly cooking is simply not harmful enough to be significant. If they do, then it clearly shows that cooking is significant. Until that science is done, the hypothesis is not confirmed. This is the basic scientific method. Are AGEs harmful? Probably. So is breathing car exhaust, getting lots of sunburn, having radio waves near your testicles - virtually every modern technology can and likely does cause harm to some, they just don't do so in a statistically significiant portion of the population. Cooking might just be yet another one of those toxic yet not epidemiologically significant activities modern humans participate in. The science has not been done to show it one way or the other.

[TylerDurden]

It doesn't make any sense to compare lifespans of paleoman and modern neolithic man because, as already said lifespan, isn't just an indicator of health.  What makes more sense is to compare lifespan just before and just after the neolithic revolution.

Note also that by the time Rousseau wrote about his "Noble Savage" philosophy lifespan was much shorter and I'm not sure that the French or English peasants lived longer than the "savages" then just discovered in south pacific islands such as Tahiti by Cook or La Pérouse.   

The Maori at that time had mean lifespans of c.25 , less than their French/English counterparts.As for the issue of lifespan and health, it is noteworthy that people are not only living longer but are healthier than in the past(I don't necessarily attribute that to diet but to modern life providing extra comforts unavailable in previous generations).

[TylerDurden]

Cooking till the food is charcoal paradoxically becomes HEALTHY AGAIN ! Yes every scientist can safely claim that 

There are even people eating charcoal when poisoned and this is a recognized medical cure of poisoning.

Yet the charcoal is no more food, no protein, no fat, no carbs, no vitamins, zero calories, no AGEs.

I was very clearly referring to eating only food grilled to charcoal, and nothing else, not just eating a tidbit. No scientist could claim that eating only charcoal was healthy.