http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/general-discussion/coconut-oil/msg44670/#msg44670This butter taste wonderfull and makes me feel good , what else matters unless your a fundamentalist fanatic. Its the only processed food I eat and its nearly raw and organic so I sleep good at night.
Not much else probably matters to
you, and I'm not questioning your experience, which is intriguing to me, but your experience doesn't necessarily apply precisely the same way to everyone else, which is why in forums like these people ask questions and others share answers. Questioning and answering--that's the Socratic method and it's a pretty good learning tool in my experience. I've even got links re: Socrates and the Socratic method at my blog, so don't be surprised if I ask a lot of questions.
I'm not a fundamentalist fanatic by any stretch of the imagination (not that you were necessarily implying that, but I'll try to put you more at ease by explaining this)--you only have to glance at my avatar caption "
mostly-raw
facultative carnivore" (it doesn't say 100% raw zero carber, for example)--to know that, and I've been on the receiving end of some tut-tutting in the past for being insufficiently pure in both my rawness and low-carbness, but that coconut butter is expensive and I am more interested in factual answers to my questions than opinions. I'm curious about coconut butter and do intend to try it because coconut oil is indigestible and nasty tasting for me unless I mix it in with something else. If you don't have the answers, that's fine, maybe someone else will. That's the beauty of forums.
Surely it's not out of bounds to ask about the rawness of a food in a place called the "
Raw Paleo forum"? I'm open to either interpretation--TD's claim that keeping foods below 40 C is essential and other people's claims that heating up to 45.6 C / 114 F ("low-and-slow", hunter-gatherer style) is OK, though perhaps not optimal. I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I'd like to learn the reasoning and evidence of both sides. I used to lean a little to the low-and-slow cooking is OK side of things, but after I'd been eating mostly raw for a while I started to notice that when suet, pork fat and honey are heated up to 114 F or somewhat higher, they acquire a wee bit of a burnt flavor. Even so-called raw honey that has only been heated up to 90 F or so doesn't taste as good as honey that has never been heated at all above room/shipping temperature. So now I do lean more to the lower-temp side of things, for taste reasons if nothing else, but I also do eat some low-and-slow-cooked foods too and even eat some higher-and-faster cooked foods when I dine at restaurants or relatives' homes and I don't vomit as a result like Tyler reports he does.
...So I would say that the max temp for something to be considered raw is the optimum temperature for the enzymes of that organism when it was alive. For example in humans it would be 37.8 C. However, different organisms have different optimum temperatures. I believe birds for example maintain their core body temperature at approx 40C.
Thanks, Haai, so the sense I'm getting from proponents of the 40 C figure is that it's a rough average of the body temperatures of animals that are consumed and the principal is not to heat anything much above its normal body temperature, yes? And it sounds like the negative effect that heating within the 40 - 45.6 C range is believed to have is to damage the enzymes in the meat eaten. Is that correct and how does 40 C apply to plants?
