It doesn't really seem to me that people have sorted through much of his actual information. I don't know how much raw meat he eats presently and how much he cooks, but since his break with raw veganism which was years ago I'm pretty sure he has embraced the power of cooking as a tool in terms of increasing nutrition. I'm not sure if he believes nutrition is more available in meats after being cooked, but I suspect he is speaking more in general as applied to the role of fire to make certain types of foods edible. He is also (I believe) saying that this can be far more of value even than many diets consisting of 100% raw food, (including animal food diets). This to me is not the same as saying cooked diets are better than raw..its that cooking plays an integral roll in optimal health (for him).
In a nutshell what it seems to be his motivation other than whatever is working for him..is to dispel some relatively artificial ideas about health, particularly between cleansing and building approaches.
replacing: limiting your exposure to harmful foods as a path to health
with: eating a wide spectrum of healthful foods in abundance
Raw foodists love to shun certain science, but then will present all kinds of information on paper that conflict with peoples actual results that one can also measure with science ironically.
What we see is on paper that eating raw foods like fruits or whatever would add all kinds of nutrients and vitamins to our diet, but when you actually dissect both the science and the anecdotal evidence the net results is not so simple or good. Discounting all the modern reasons for such in peopels systems...as presented over an over ...true people living in nature will opt for cooked starch sources over the actual available wild fruits even when they exist in abundance. Many of which are basically inedible and even if their tart taste is appealing..its nearly impossible to use foods like wild grapes or berries as any sustainable calorie source. Because of that, I think the simplest response to why he's 'skipped over' raw omnivore, is that such a thing is impossible living outdoors in Maine for instance. Its sounds paradoxical, but If you are eating plant food year round in nature, you are going to have to use some kind of processing.
In a way I think he is just pro tools, ie, not just cooking but other processes of fermentation and the like. People if they choose can avoid cooking and use some kind of raw fermented foods or vinegars to help digest and assimilate the maximum amount of nutrition from the herbs, fungi, and weeds and seaweeds that are readily available in nature today as in the past. It could be true that If people are eating the actual clean wild ruminant diets that their ancestors ate, perhaps these can become less than necessary. But why did people employ them anyway when they had access to such things? People can ruminate all they want and toss things up to addictions or passed down habits but obviously it isn't so simple. Even someone like Aajonus who believes pretty much all cooking to be harmful, sees some value in processing plant foods that can either supply minerals that we need generally that is lacking in modern foods, OR have some roll in healing/rebuilding of unhealthy people.
I'm not sure if he believes at all in abstaining from cooked food anymore, but for me raw food and abstaining from cooked food is basically a kind of strategy to reverse illness, but this is not the same as a diet of the highest nutrition. For me I believe a diet that is 100% RAF with some chosen plant foods can possibly be the best diet, but it certainly is not for every goal as even many of the people on this forum point out.
at a certain point, it becomes confusing because virtually everyone seems to 'get by' on next to no real nutrition, so its hard for say someone eating far less crap and eating raw food is suffering from lack any specific type of nutrition found in processed plant foods, but obviously if people can employ them to superior results then the initial argument that says a 100% raw diet is always superior is somewhat flawed.
Personally, i'm against the idea that if you take a regular unhealthy American, that just giving them 'real food' like WAPF or whatever that this will be the ticket to health, but the people that exist as HGs or pre agrarian societies certainly were adapted to cooking in some respect that they did not suffer the diseases of civilization. That by and large I think is enough of a goal for most people I think.
Its not to say that further back in history people were not much healthier, but that many such people had envious health and vitality. So again while raw foods might be crucial for health, its silly to argue that people were unwell just because they cooked foods when the evidence does suggest cooking made homo sapiens what they are for better or worse. Wrangham's conclusions obvious have bias, but the root seems to be accurate in what DV is expressing: that all of homo sapiens have employed cooking having begun actually with homo erectus. Cooking (all types) certainly can be linked disease or toxicity, but malnutrition also causes disease as well as a vast array of other psychological or physiological factors. People eating raw food diets certainly are not devoid of nutritional issues, so the idea that cooking can't possibly help play a roll to correct that is just blatantly false. It might be entirely unnecessary, but ultimately this is a untested and unproven battleground as suggested.
