I searched for anything on that but couldn't find it. I did find an article from that same periodical on the potato diet guy. He did it for two months:
Washington man completes 60-day potato challenge
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/washington-man-completes-60-day-potato-challenge/story-e6freuyi-1225963611024
That man's experiment doesn't prove anything, but it does raise questions about just how toxic potatoes are if someone can eat little else for 60 days and end up better off by all appearances rather than worse off. Of course, the benefits he experienced could possibly be attributable to replacing worse foods like wheat with the less-"bad"-but-not-necessarily-"good" potatoes, but it is intriguing.
It will be interesting to see what future experiments and research produce. I have seen many cooked Paleo dieters experimenting with cooked tubers lately, with some experiencing negative results and others positive. I think it's somewhat of a fad that Paleos have gotten carried away with at this point, but there could theoretically be a kernel of truth behind it if raw tubers and other raw USOs were consumed in significant quantities by hominins. It is a heck of a coincidence that every HG tribe I've read about that had access to edible tubers was observed eating them as a staple food. It puzzled me that Dr. Cordain didn't address this in The Paleo Diet (or maybe I missed it), though he did later suggest sweet potatoes for athletes in The Paleo Diet for Athletes.
Cordain pointed out that plant foods actually consisted of, at most, 25 percent of calories of HG diets near the equator - so tubers were hardly a staple, even of those tribes that ate them. Plus, I am deeply sceptical of the notion that all non-arctic tribes ate more than minimal amounts of tubers, let alone lots of tubers.
As for that comment re the raw potatoes experiment of the artist, it was mentioned in the Daily Telegraph magazine in an interview of a pop-star, and magazine articles don't seem to get reported online, last I checked. What makes it interesting is that that man's diet consisted of RAW potatoes, whereas the other guy you mention ate cooked potatoes(he mentions the use of cooking-oil). Now, the whole point of my argument was that RAW tubers were not ideal foods, givne their antinutrient-levels. Cooked/processed tubers provide a lot more nutrition than raw tubers but still have their defects, such as heat-created toxins derived from cooking plus lack of bacteria and lack of enzymes.
I do take my personal experience more seriously than the research. On that note, while cooked tubers do tend to make a heavy lump in my stomach and make me feel logy if I eat too much, and I can't eat even a single daikon root without getting a little stomach upset, raw parsnips don't seem to bother me. It's possible that there's just too little starch to cause any symptoms, especially since I tend to eat less of a raw starch than a cooked one, but it is mildly intriguing.
I think, like with raw vegetables, only a few tubers are worth eating raw, albeit in small amounts, due to concerns about antinutrient-levels.
Interesting opinion. If you believe that then do you also believe that omnivory was by no means a given among humanity,
No, I am not convinced that all HGs in non-arctic areas ate huge amounts of raw tubers. At best, I think tuber-consumption may have increased after cooking was invented.
Another thing to bear in mind is that drying and soaking would have been possible prior to the adoption of cooking.
Drying and soaking is not as effective as cooking for removing antinutrients.
I don't think they had to either. The scientists who reported the evidence on Australopithecine consumption of USOs didn't claim that they HAD to eat them, just that they did. So that's a digression that I'm not intrigued by.
It seems reasonable to assume that tubers were eaten in order to avoid starvation during times of famine, rather than being a preferred food, given taste-issues and lack of nutrients by comparison to other foods.
That's a red herring because that was a single domesticated variety that the population had become overreliant on and the famine was triggered by a blight on the potatoes, not from malnutrition from eating the tubers. Have you ever heard of any such widespread blight happening to wild tubers that are edible raw and thus qualify as raw Paleo? The reason such catastrophic blights happen is apparently because 1) the natural antinutrient defenses in domesticated plant foods are reduced to such an extent that they become highly susceptible to infection and overpredation and 2) the over-reliance on a single species of plant further increases the odds of a widespread catastrophic blight.
Blight does seem to occur in wild varieties, however they are more resistant usually than domesticated varieties.
The claim that antinutrient levels are heavily reduced by cultivation does not apply, though. it was mentioned, for example, that for various reasons farmers often want to cultivate cassava tubers with higher levels of antinutrients in them - while the reason therefore was not mentioned,I suspect this has to do with the fact that the higher the levels of antinutrients, the more resistant the plants are to insect infestation or parasites. So, useful for those farmers not using lots of expensive pesticides/chemicals.
As for number 2), the same would apply to any palaeo HG tribe which fixated on only one type of plant.
Plus, the potatoes in Ireland were not the same species as the raw Paleo tubers consumed by Australopithecines in ancient Africa. So that's doubly a red herring.
Irrelevant that they were not the same species as that does not imply full immunity to blight.
Cassava is another tuber that was not one of the raw Paleo tubers consumed by Australopithecines in ancient Africa.
They could have been consuming other tubers which were just as bad, for all we know, but heavily processed them.
What is revealing is that HG tribes consuming lots of tubers seemed not to thrive on them. Well, I can think of the Maori, as a classic example, with their fixation on tubers. The problem seems to be the poor levels of protein in tubers, compared to other foods.
Presumably cooking would not be necessary on the raw Paleo tubers that the Australopithecines ate before cooking was invented.
Good point. Although, like I said, Australopithecines may have resorted to tubers during times of famine, mainly as a last resort. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that the main reason why cooking was eventually invented was in order to greatly lower the high levels of antinutrients in raw tubers, and some raw vegetables. Indeed, it is quite possible that they only cooked tubers/veg and ate anything else raw, for a while.
