Daniel Vitalis on cooked meat

[Hanna]

claws, teeth and large muscles function to keep otherwise weak individuals alive

... and so do wings (to fly away, e. g. in birds), long legs (to run away), shells (e. g. of turtles), stings (e. g. in bees or hedgehogs) etc. Small birds without wings, turtles without shells, hedgehogs without pricks would hardly have any chance to survive.

So does natural selection ruin darwinism?  Even today, birds are a very successful species.

[miles]

Tyler you talk some shit y'know.

Can some smart people go back and read the exchange between me and Tyler and comment?

[TylerDurden]

Tyler you talk some shit y'know.

Can some smart people go back and read the exchange between me and Tyler and comment?

  Could it possibly be that you are the one with a low IQ, you foolish little troll?  So far, you have not come up with a decent riposte to my answers. One would at least expect that from a long-time member, not just stupid, knee-jerk comments like yours!      Sorry, I forgot, you did ask if someone (else) smart could comment about my posts, making it clear that you don't have such high hopes about your own intelligence!   

[PaleoPhil]

There is very little agreement over the toxicity of these seeds which doesn't matter anyway because it might be the toxicity itself which produces the healing!

Bingo! That's what I suspect is the main factor. It's called hormesis. The hypothesis is that some amount of poison can be healthy, whereas too much can make you ill or even kill you. The tricky part is figuring out which "toxins" to use with whom and how much to use of them. Apparently, only certain toxins tend to have hormetic effects and some may work for one person but not another, or at different doses.

Tyler you talk some shit y'know.

Can some smart people go back and read the exchange between me and Tyler and comment?

As far as I can tell, it seems to me that people are talking past each other. As I said before, Tyler is talking about full adaptation to a food, so that it has no seriously degenerative effects and even promotes health, whereas RawKyle has appeared to be talking about partial adaptation to food that enables survival and reproduction, but is not necessarily healthy. All foods in the current SAD meet RawKyle's apparent definition, whereas raw Paleo foods probably fit Tyler's definition better. Regardless of whether RawKyle's definition is scientific or not, it's not of much use to me in the real world, unfortunately. :shrug: So in this case I find myself in rare basic agreement with Tyler, though I wouldn't use the same language he used in some instances where it seems like he was trying to make RK or you look dumb. I try to analyze things objectively and give even the devil his due.

Wrangham's hypothesis of improved diets and larger brains via cooking and resulting increased tuber consumption fails to explain certain things, such as why BOTH jaw size and strength AND avg brain size and brain/body ratio have declined since Cro Magnon and Neanderthals and why the raw-meat-eating first-contact Eskimos had BOTH larger, stronger jaws (the strongest ever tested) AND larger than avg brains and brain/body ratio and why brain size increased between gracile Australopithecus and H. erectus, before even Wrangham's early estimate of the advent of cooking (1.9+ million years ago). The near-vegetarian Wrangham's hypothesis also fails to explain why vegetarian brains shrink, especially vegan brains (http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/health/going-veggie-shrinks-the-brain/story-e6frer7f-1111117468644, http://cavemanforum.com/diet-and-nutrition/can-a-vegetarian-diet-shrink-your-brain/).

[Raw Kyle]

My definition is the definition of adaptation in biology. Feeling good and healthy and liking your reflection in the mirror have nothing to do with it. If our ancestors hadn't been adapted we wouldn't be here, regardless of how they felt about their health.

[PaleoPhil]

Your definition still has no bearing on my real world experience, which is what I'm interested in, sorry. I'll leave the ivory towers to the scientists.

[TylerDurden]

So in this case I find myself in rare basic agreement with Tyler, though I wouldn't use the same language he used in some instances where it seems like he was trying to make RK or you look dumb. I try to analyze things objectively and give even the devil his due.  

I did NOT try to make RK look dumb. Just Miles, and, in Miles' case, I was just trying to adopt his own tactics/behaviour. As for the devil reference, thanks - I often like to play the role of devil's advocate in certain discussions.

Wrangham's hypothesis of improved diets and larger brains via cooking and resulting increased tuber consumption fails to explain certain things, such as why BOTH jaw size and strength AND avg brain size and brain/body ratio have declined since Cro Magnon and Neanderthals and why the raw-meat-eating first-contact Eskimos had BOTH larger, stronger jaws (the strongest ever tested) AND larger than avg brains and brain/body ratio and why brain size increased between gracile Australopithecus and H. erectus, before even Wrangham's early estimate of the advent of cooking (1.9+ million years ago). The near-vegetarian Wrangham's hypothesis also fails to explain why vegetarian brains shrink, especially vegan brains (http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/health/going-veggie-shrinks-the-brain/story-e6frer7f-1111117468644, http://cavemanforum.com/diet-and-nutrition/can-a-vegetarian-diet-shrink-your-brain/).

  Very good points. I had forgotten the vegan/shrinking brains points. I must include all that in my revised anti-cooking essay on rawpaleodiet.com. I never liked the current draft much.

[TylerDurden]

My definition is the definition of adaptation in biology. Feeling good and healthy and liking your reflection in the mirror have nothing to do with it. If our ancestors hadn't been adapted we wouldn't be here, regardless of how they felt about their health.

  If you are talking about partial adaptation, one would need to find a study supporting that, such as a benefit countering the disadvantages of cooking(eg:- linking cooking to bigger brains - so far the evidence is overwhelmingly against that, though) or show that humans are somehow partially resistant to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods etc.. Otherwise, I mean one could, quite wrongly for example, state that animals are all  "adapted" to stinging nettles because they only get a painful feeling from it , but don't die from it.

[Hanna]

Maybe we could say that our FITNESS is negatively affected by cooked food compared with raw foods provided that a sufficient range of suitable raw foods is available. Nevertheless, our fitness would even more be compromised by starvation - and this is what we (or many of us) would suffer from if all humans in the world would begin to eat strict rawfood diets. Obviously, cooking has increased the fitness of the human species as a whole because it enabled us to reproduce at a high rate.

Adaptedness and fitness
From the above definitions, it is clear that there is a relationship between adaptedness and fitness (a key population genetics concept). Differences in fitness between genotypes predict the rate of evolution by natural selection. Natural selection changes the relative frequencies of alternative phenotypes, insofar as they are heritable.[18] Although the two are connected, the one does not imply the other: a phenotype with high adaptedness may not have high fitness. Dobzhansky mentioned the example of the Californian redwood, which is highly adapted, but a relict species in danger of extinction.[15] Elliott Sober commented that adaptation was a retrospective concept since it implied something about the history of a trait, whereas fitness predicts a trait's future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation

[sabertooth]

There is a difference between tolerance and adaption.

Perhaps the human body can't adapt in a way that completely mitigates all the toxic effects of cooked meat, but I still believe that the body does find ways to tolerate such poisons.

People with scarred arteries will increase cholesterol production in the liver as an attempt to protect the already damaged tissue from further deterioration.

This development of tolerance to chronic toxicity may not fit the scientific definition for adaption, but these types of toxin mitigating reactions may have some root in evolutionary developed survival mechanisms, from a time when we foraged on the verge of starvation and were often forced to eat semi poisonous plants.

It could explain how my ancestors could eat cooked meats, grains legumes, and copious amounts of alcohol and smoke nicotine; while still reproducing prolifically and living into old age.

[TylerDurden]

Maybe we could say that our FITNESS is negatively affected by cooked food compared with raw foods provided that a sufficient range of suitable raw foods is available. Nevertheless, our fitness would even more be compromised by starvation - and this is what we (or many of us) would suffer from if all humans in the world would begin to eat strict rawfood diets. Obviously, cooking has increased the fitness of the human species as a whole because it enabled us to reproduce at a high rate.

  No evidence exists that the world's population would all starve if we ate raw. It might require some form of reorganisation(so, we might have to eat mass-produced insect grubs instead of eating cooked grains, for example).

As for cooking and reproduction, that's more complex an issue. Palaeolithic tribes did not proliferate due to cooking, far from it. The palaeolithic populations remained stable until the Neolithic era, when a more settled life and further access to unnatural foods like grains meant they could afford to have more children than before, instead of enduring the high infanticide rate in palaeo times. Plus, it is telling that as modern foods have become ever more processed, that men in developed countries have incurred rapidly decreasing sperm-counts with women having rising infertility-rates as well. This suggests that all cooked foods have some negative effect on fertility, with cooked junk foods just being worse in effect.

[Hanna]

Palaeolithic tribes did not proliferate due to cooking, far from it. The palaeolithic populations remained stable until the Neolithic era, when a more settled life and further access to unnatural foods like grains meant they could afford to have more children than before

They were able to take advantage of grains just because they cooked. Grains have to be cooked to be reasonably digestible for us. So cooking enabled the grain-based proliferation.

The fact is that the raw eating tribes / primates did NOT proliferate, but the cooking tribes / primate did. So the cooking tribes (or humans as the cooking species) were better adapted to their environment according to Kyle´s (or the biological) definition of "adaptation".

[KD]

As far as I can tell, it seems to me that people are talking past each other. As I said before, Tyler is talking about full adaptation to a food, so that it has no seriously degenerative effects and even promotes health, whereas RawKyle has appeared to be talking about partial adaptation to food that enables survival and reproduction, but is not necessarily healthy. All foods in the current SAD meet RawKyle's apparent definition, whereas raw Paleo foods probably fit Tyler's definition better.

My definition is the definition of adaptation in biology. Feeling good and healthy and liking your reflection in the mirror have nothing to do with it. If our ancestors hadn't been adapted we wouldn't be here, regardless of how they felt about their health.

Perhaps the human body can't adapt in a way that completely mitigates all the toxic effects of cooked meat, but I still believe that the body does find ways to tolerate such poisons.

It could explain how my ancestors could eat cooked meats, grains legumes, and copious amounts of alcohol and smoke nicotine; while still reproducing prolifically and living into old age.

The largest percentage of  'paleo' literature has nothing to do with raw and does suggest that SWD foods specifically won't fit this model of adaptation citing already the problems of reproduction (particularly when taking out any assistance) with even poorer predictions for future generations.

I'm unaware of anyone suggesting that plains Indians of 1541 were significantly degenerated than those of the 12th century and so on or any uncovered information that these people were on a constant quest to figure out if they were a less healthy generation which required bringing scrutiny to their methods. Correct me if I am wrong there.

What we DO see is that plenty of people in the bible and so on were far sicker than people living 100 years ago or perhaps today...THE paleo argument...when eating a traditional diet. Ditto the Dark Ages etc... and yet many of these people at the root of western civilization had progeny that were able to live healthier on different diets of cooked foods - and without significantly increasing their raw foods - up to the present.

Humans (and animals) are both adapted to garnering nutrition from cooked foods. This can not be questioned by pointing out other problematic issues with such. So therefore we are adapted to eating cooked foods far better than eating rocks, solid minerals, dirt, and most grasses and raw grains that exist naturally on the planet and do not provide nutrition for humans. You can say the same about possible combinations of foods that are edible but do not fulfill all nutritional requirements.

Obviously everyone here is of some opinion that cooking creates compounds best left avoided if possible. To get back on the subject it is indeed suggested by such 'guru' that this is true and not that one necessarily can ameliorate all toxins of cooking just because we are adapted. What is simply being suggested is that cooking unlocks certain kinds of nutrition. That without getting proper nutrition from a diet that simply 'lacks toxins' it becomes irrelevant and improper to refer one diet as one we are adapted to and another not based on those terms.  Once one has a healthy diet, then they can decide how the negative aspects impede on the positive impacts of having a healthy diet and can adjust the amount or percentage of raw food according to their needs healing specific conditions, building some abstract health etc...

[TylerDurden]

Humans (and animals) are both adapted to garnering nutrition from cooked foods. This can not be questioned by pointing out other problematic issues with such. So therefore we are adapted to eating cooked foods far better than eating rocks, solid minerals, dirt, and most grasses and raw grains that exist naturally on the planet and do not provide nutrition for humans. You can say the same about possible combinations of foods that are edible but do not fulfill all nutritional requirements.

  The rest of the text has been already debunked in other threads. This particular claim is meaningless:- the fact that we are better adapted to eating cooked foods than granite, for example, is irrelevant. That does not per se imply that cooked foods are OK just because they are "less worse" than lethal poisons, say. Nor does their "less worse" aspect mean that we are adapted to them in any way. The real test would be evidence showing that we were somehow immune to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods. Plenty of wild animals have adapted, over millions of years, to eating highly toxic foods without incurring any injury therefrom, but they adapt because they become immune to the poisons therein.

[TylerDurden]

They were able to take advantage of grains just because they cooked. Grains have to be cooked to be reasonably digestible for us. So cooking enabled the grain-based proliferation.

The fact is that the raw eating tribes / primates did NOT proliferate, but the cooking tribes / primate did. So the cooking tribes (or humans as the cooking species) were better adapted to their environment according to Kyle´s (or the biological) definition of "adaptation".

  The trouble is that the advent of grains came many hundreds of thousands of years after the advent of cooking, so the 2 are not interlinked. Palaeo tribes did NOT proliferate as soon as cooking was introduced, only after the Neolithic era. It could also be argued that the settled life and more access to foods via domestication of animals of meat-consumption prevented the risk of starvation(and caused population-increase) to a far greater extent than grains ever did. Grains only provided a regular supply of "food" but it is a fact, based on archaeological evidence from bones,  that Neolithic-era tribes suffered appalling health-problems from eating grains including a drastic decrease in height and longevity,
http://www.beyondveg.com/nicholson-w/angel-1984/angel-1984-1a.shtml
so that grains cannot be considered to have been adapted to.

I suppose it makes sense that a person who has access to only a limited supply of high-quality raw foods is not going to have the same chance of success at surviving as a person who has access to a huge amount of mostly very low quality cooked foods, as the former is more subject to the possibility of famine. But if the latter is frequently ill as a result of his poor choice of diet, he cannot be said to be adapted to his environment.

Re adaptation:- Another definition re adaptation to one's environment  is that one is in harmony with the environment. Raw-eaters, by definition, are more  in balance with the environment than cooked food eaters because the former don't need vast fields of grains to feed themselves, so don't need to destroy the local wildlife so much.

[KD]

  The rest of the text has been already debunked in other threads. This particular claim is meaningless:- the fact that we are better adapted to eating cooked foods than granite, for example, is irrelevant. That does not per se imply that cooked foods are OK just because they are "less worse" than lethal poisons, say. Nor does their "less worse" aspect mean that we are adapted to them in any way. The real test would be evidence showing that we were somehow immune to the heat-created toxins in cooked foods. Plenty of wild animals have adapted, over millions of years, to eating highly toxic foods without incurring any injury therefrom, but they adapt because they become immune to the poisons therein.

I would think the 'real test' as even PP points out is whether one can become a healthier in the real world following DVs information, or whether they are better off with eating any diet that can be considered raw which is mostly what the argument is. I don't think you are prepared to defend all raw diets (vegan and otherwise perhaps primal or ZC too?) as healthier than ALL cooked/raw diets (even high percentage raw) so I think you are the one as usual arguing abstract information. Included in this 'real test' would be a actually proving one had healthier tissue/bone structure , live longer etc.. than someone following traditional diets both in past and present. Personally I would agree as usual that merely following a 'traditional diet' is not necessarily enough to create good health, but this does not mean that many raw diets have even adequate nutrition or even avoid more toxic foods or are removed from the possibility of having greater 'toxic' effects than diets with cooked foods. This can be shown with REAL evidence.

Your insistence that one has to prove immunity to 'cooked food toxins' is actually the one thing in this conversation which is 1.) not in dispute b.) totally irrelevant if one isn't thriving on their raw diet as much as DV on his and so on . You are infact now saying animals do adapt to harmful foods in nature that are uncooked?   Dismissing my account of HG tribes or western civilization as likely having the SAME or perhaps BETTER health century after century is appalling when we are talking about which factors decrease health the most and whether 'raw' even factors in as a variable - more than improper diets.  Unless one can say that humans degenerated measurably year after year eating their mixed cooked/raw diet in nature then there is literally no argument against cooking as being something we are not 'adapted' to. Whether it creates significant damages otherwise or not or whether people can use a raw diet to create the best of health.

[TylerDurden]

Well, your above points are very easily debunked:-

1) You are actually the one being too abstract, not me. You are trying to compare any and all raw diets to any and all mixed cooked/raw diets. This is wholly dishonest. First of all, a fair comparison, in your absurdly limited range, would be between any and all 100 percent raw diets versus any and all 100 percent cooked diets - obviously any mixed cooked/raw diet would be better than any 100 percent cooked diet simply because of the raw component of the former, which  just proves the point, yet again, that cooking is harmful. The simple point is that when DV talk about the so-called "benefits" of cooking, they should not be hypocrites and eat raw as well.

Then there's the fact that we on rawpaleoforum specifically state that the raw component is just as equally important as the palaeo component. Sure, for some of us the raw component has been far more important than the palaeo component and vice-versa for others, but the general concensus is that both raw and palaeo are needed for health, not raw, non-palaeo or cooked-palaeo.

2)  Re wild animals adapting:- Sure, I did state that wild animals can adapt to previously unhealthy foods over millions of years. But those are all RAW foods whereas cooked foods are such a totally different category that it is extremely questionable that they can ever be adapted to.

Wrong re no argument needed as one could only prove the necessity of cooked foods for survival by testing everyone on a 100 percent cooked diet and seeing the results. Whatever the case, your whole thesis breaks down when one considers those studies showing a link between  rising rates of malocclusion and other dental problems, and the advent of cooking. Plus, as more varied cooked foods entered the diet(ie grains) , the size of the average human brain dropped by 8 percent, so that's another nail in the coffin.

[KD]

sheesh, another nail in the coffin for me. uh oh. We are comparing the diets being suggested - as everyone else in the dietary world - to see what to eat today. People have the option to eat a variety of foods and weigh which things have the worse consequences. Saying cooked food toxins have any more relevance than other issues in constructing a diet is in fact false and you know this.  No one has to eat a 100 % cooked diet to say that many raw diets are not working. This is crazy as we already know you CAN get nutrition from cooked foods and one doesn't need to claim they are free of any toxins just as raw foods are not free of toxins. Its not necessarily even an issue of which cooked foods are 'beneficial' (which is a whole other argument) but only which process are less detrimental than poorly constructed and deficient diets.  One only has to prove that diets that contain cooked foods (and raw foods ) can be healthier than alot of diets constructed of purely raw food and this has been done ad nauseum.

People can cite the advent of cooking or neolithic food, and associate with many x problems or x degenerations, fine. The point is that at THAT point very little degeneration is known amongst traditional peoples after they adapted cooking up until say to say 100 years ago.  Without this extreme degeneration between say 1000 B.C. and 1800 A.D. this bodes very poorly that we have not leveled off at some adaption, and that this adaptation is clearly absent from many diets composed TODAY of a problematic grouping of things in the natural world..to outright poisons and chemicals manufactured by man. Certainly we are less adapted to many extremes offered as healthy alternatives to in-taking cooked food toxins and that having an overall DIET that covers our needs and eliminates problems of dietary composition -even with 'natural' raw foods- is more important than raw over cooked. This is all. Again, unless there is significant deterioration in that period above, the cooking that they DO employ, or the similar cooking that one can  to employ today is not very relevant in comparison to eating a completely unhealthy diet (low or high or missing in this or that) and saying it is healthy because it is 'raw'.

[Hanna]

   It could also be argued that the settled life and more access to foods via domestication of animals of rmeat-consumption prevented the risk of starvation(and population-increase) to a far greater extent than grains ever did. Grains only provided a regular supply of "food" but it is a fact, based on archaeological evidence from bones,  that Neolithic-era tribes suffered appalling health-problems from eating grains including a drastic decrease in height and longevity,

If meat or the milk of domesticated animals would have caused the proliferation of homo sapiens, then stock-breeders such as the Masai, the Mongols or the Nenets, who did not suffer the drawbacks of grain, would have populated the world. However, they didn´t. Our culture is based on grain, because it is storable and has minimum space requirements, which is important if you have to feed (masses of) workers, establish labor division, live in cities etc. Furthermore, grain provides almost all nutrition needed, including protein.

[Hanna]

Re adaptation:- Another definition re adaptation to one's environment  is that one is in harmony with the environment. Raw-eaters, by definition, are more  in balance with the environment than cooked food eaters because the former don't need vast fields of grains to feed themselves, so don't need to destroy the local wildlife so much.

I agree that a more systemic approach would make more sense than "adaptionism", particularly as the proliferation of a species is not necessarily sustainable...

[TylerDurden]

As usual, KD, you have not actually answered my points.

First, like I said, you are unfairly comparing all-raw diets to mixed cooked/raw diets., when you should be examining how much worse all-cooked diets are than all-raw diets. Plus, you are unfairly criticising all raw diets when there are far more cooked-diet-variations which are far worse than most raw diets. I mean, one can't pretend that all cooked/mixed diets are cooked-palaeo-like in quality when there are millions of obese people who now subsist largely on cooked junk food like MCDonald's and doner kebabs and the like.

Secondly, you are claiming that raw foods contain toxins just like cooked foods do. In actual fact, cooked foods contain far more toxins(eg heat-created toxins) than raw foods, unless you count foods like raw grains which virtually  no raw foodists eat anyway, unless possibly fermented/improved. So invalid point on your part.

Thirdly, there has indeed been some deterioration up to 100 years ago, it's just speeded up in recent years, nothing more. I mentioned serious deterioration in dental health since the advent of cooking, but there are  now some claims that cooking got mental conditions like schizophrenia to start. Obviously, studying something that happened so many hundreds of thousands of years ago is difficult, meaning that it will take time to get more data, but that's all.

The real problem with your claims, though is this:- many members here benefitted far more from the raw aspect than the palaeo aspect. I'm one of them, cooked-palaeo was absolutely useless to me in terms of regaining my health. By contrast, my raw vegan phase was a lot less worse re pain and other symptoms.

[TylerDurden]

If meat or the milk of domesticated animals would have caused the proliferation of homo sapiens, then stock-breeders such as the Masai, the Mongols or the Nenets, who did not suffer the drawbacks of grain, would have populated the world. However, they didn´t. Our culture is based on grain, because it is storable and has minimum space requirements, which is important if you have to feed (masses of) workers, establish labor division, live in cities etc. Furthermore, grain provides almost all nutrition needed, including protein.

Err, the Mongols did rather "populate" much of the world, given their invasions of Europe and Asia, and all that rape and pillage!

I doubt that grains are a complete food. Indeed studies done on ancient egypt show that grains-heavy diets led inevitably to nutritional deficiencies and various vitamin-related diseases of deficiency. Same happened in Neolithic times when they transitioned to grains. The only benefit re grains was its longer shelf-life and mass production possibilities.

[KD]

Sigh, as usual I failed to give what seemed to me a conclusive argument...

As usual, KD, you have not actually answered my points.

First, like I said, you are unfairly comparing all-raw diets to mixed cooked/raw diets., when you should be examining how much worse all-cooked diets are than all-raw diets. Plus, you are unfairly criticizing all raw diets when there are far more cooked-diet-variations which are far worse than most raw diets. I mean, one can't pretend that all cooked/mixed diets are cooked-palaeo-like in quality when there are millions of obese people who now subsist largely on cooked junk food like MCDonald's and doner kebabs and the like.

I don't understand why we can't compare the diet DV is suggesting and its balance of cooked and raw foods and the results it has given him and others  in comparison at least to the raw variations they had tried, even ones that included raw meat. Certainly many people will argue a cooked zero carb diet is the best diet or that a diet that contains regular daily cooked or rendered food has given them better results than raw diets - at least in the short term -  so even in your extreme I would say having a composition of a diet closer to nature is more ideal than whether or not one is bombarded with cooked food toxins. The more raw food the better perhaps but no use if the composition is not appropriate or lacking necessary things.

Secondly, you are claiming that raw foods contain toxins just like cooked foods do. In actual fact, cooked foods contain far more toxins(eg heat-created toxins) than raw foods, unless you count foods like raw grains which virtually  no raw foodists eat anyway, unless possibly fermented/improved. So invalid point on your part.

My point is more that even if one is eating in a way that YOU would be ok with as sufficiently raw and paleo, they arn't necessarily going to get great results or better than what DV is suggesting. You may disagree all you like but you have to accurately measure the real world trends and not what is said on paper about which things have more toxicity. lots of things create problems, even 'diets' of all raw foods with no real documented level of toxin.

Thirdly, there has indeed been some deterioration up to 100 years ago, it's just speeded up in recent years, nothing more. I mentioned serious deterioration in dental health since the advent of cooking, but there are  now some claims that cooking got mental conditions like schizophrenia to start. Obviously, studying something that happened so many hundreds of thousands of years ago is difficult, meaning that it will take time to get more data, but that's all.

The point was that you could find people just 100 years ago that were healthier than people 1000's of years ago that ate a less appropriate diet, so certain things we are indeed more adapted to than others as creating realtivly similar offspring free of most degeneration.  Also that even if there was degeneration that it was at a level so low as to signify the proper definition of adaptation.

[Hanna]

Err, the Mongols did rather "populate" much of the world, given their invasions of Europe and Asia, and all that rape and pillage!

The Mongolians plundered grain and, most notably, the Mongol´s life style did not become prevalent at all. On the contrary, Europeans still eat grain and Mongols are more and more adopting the Western way of life including a western diet.

I doubt that grains are a complete food. Indeed studies done on ancient egypt show that grains-heavy diets led inevitably to nutritional deficiencies and various vitamin-related diseases of deficiency.

Nevertheless, most people in the world, including the Egyptians, are still eating grain-heavy diets without suffering from deficiencies which prevent reproduction.

[TylerDurden]

Sigh, as usual I failed to give what seemed to me a conclusive argument...
I don't understand why we can't compare the diet DV is suggesting and its balance of cooked and raw foods and the results it has given him and others  in comparison at least to the raw variations they had tried, even ones that included raw meat. Certainly many people will argue a cooked zero carb diet is the best diet or that a raw meat diet that contains regular daily cooked or rendered food has given them better results than raw vegan diets - at least in the short term -  so even in your extreme I would say having a composition of a diet closer to nature is more ideal than whether or not one is bombarded with cooked food toxins. The more raw food the better perhaps but no use if the composition is not appropriate or lacking necessary things.

  Again, some members here have, instead, found the raw component to work better for them than the "natural", palaeo component. Plus, the whole ethos of this forum is that both raw and palaeo/natural foods are  needed for real health, not just either or.

As for the comparisons, they are fine, it's the false conclusions that are unacceptable, such as the notion DV holds which is that if a partially-cooked diet is "less worse" than one type of all-raw diet(ie raw vegan) that that means that cooking is not harmful at all, if the foods are only mildly processed or prepared  in the HG fashion. That is a false logic. To show that cooked foods are genuinely not harmful means proving that heat-created toxins do not affect us etc. If, in turn, a few raw diets(rawpalaeo, instincto, primal diet etc.) happen to outperform DV's cooked-palaeodiet-type and other cooked diets, then  that means that cooking is harmful. Some forms of cooking or cooked foods may be "less worse" but that's all.
 

My point is more that even if one is eating in a way that YOU would be ok with as sufficiently raw and paleo, they aren't necessarily going to get great results or better than what DV is suggesting. You may disagree all you like but you have to accurately measure the real world trends and not what is said on paper about which things have more toxicity. lots of things create problems, even raw foods with no documented level of toxin.

The science against your notion, however, is damning:-
many heat-created toxins exist in cooked foods, some of which are also present in cigarette-smoke and car-exhaust fumes (such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, for example). AGEs, for example, are linked heavily with most aging-related conditions and general inflammation in the body etc. Then there is the nutrient-loss caused by cooking which explains why so many people nowadays are said to be vitamin-deficient etc. Then there's the lack of bacteria and lack of enzymes in cooked foods which also tax the body heavily. So, DV's diet could only ever be "less worse" than a raw, palaeolithic diet. Sure, some people may make a mistake re the correct dietary proportions for their own bodies re quantity or type of food etc., or  wrongly avoid eating certain mineral-rich raw foods they desperately need for good health, but other people following DV's diet will also make similiar mistakes as regards their diet. This is not a problem confined solely to raw foodists.

The point was that you could find people just 100 years ago that were healthier than people 1000's of years ago that ate a less appropriate diet, so certain things we are indeed more adapted to than others as creating relatively similar offspring free of most degeneration.  Also that even if there was degeneration that it was at a level so low as to signify the proper definition of adaptation.

  Degeneration , even if slow, is constant so inevitably ends badly in the long run. Your claim re people living better, healthier lives a 100 years ago than 1,000 years ago is meaningless. That is mainly due to superior technology, especially medical care. Nothing to do with diet. Indeed, one could claim that diets have steadily deteriorated in the last 150 years or so.