Why cooked paleo reportedly is healing to many?

[Joy2012]

I personally cannot stomach much cooked animal flesh/fat. I did that a couple times (years ago) and would feel bad as if I had a flu.

On the other hand, it appears that the vast majority of the paleo diet community (including gurus and authors of paleo diet books) eat cooked animal flesh/fat. How come so many people do so well with cooked paleo?

[TylerDurden]

The answer is they don't. If you look at the claimed benefits of a cooked-palaeodiet of the gurus, one finds things like a slight reduction in the symptoms of auto-immune diseases reported, an improvement of a few conditions like diabetes, and less weight-gain than on standard, non-palaeo cooked diets. Not too impressive given that rawpalaeodiets provide far bigger health-benefits re decreased aging and many other conditions(after all, studies show significant improvements in age-related conditions when levels of advanced glycation end products(cooking-derived toxins) are reduced in the body.

The simple fact is that cooked-palaeodiets are better/less worse than standard non-palaeo junk food diets. This is because they are less loaded with preservatives/chemicals, and often involve high-quality grassfed meats cooked at much lower temperatures, so, naturally, some people will experience some benefits therefrom, but nowhere near as much as if they had gone rawpalaeo instead.

*Subject should have been moved to the Hot Topics forum", not the General Discussions forum.*

[goodsamaritan]

if cooked paleo could cure:

- cancer
- psoriasis
- tooth decay

etc.,

Then that would make the job of a healer pretty easy.

Unfortunately, the human body doesn't work that way.  The principles of health are quite easy once you take into raw paleo diet and lifestyle concepts.

I find the highest difficulty in healing people is to convince them to eat raw meat, raw fat, raw organs. They want to do everything else... besides that.  But those who do raw paleo immediately without fear are rewarded immediately.

[jessica]

because, at any rate, it is better than what they were previously eating.  i am sure for those who make health attained through diet the pinnacle of their existence or those who are compromised still by diet will continue to search for a healthier or more healing way to nourish themselves

[PaleoPhil]

The answer is they don't. If you look at the claimed benefits of a cooked-palaeodiet of the gurus, one finds things like a slight reduction in the symptoms of auto-immune diseases reported, an improvement of a few conditions like diabetes, and less weight-gain than on standard, non-palaeo cooked diets. Not too impressive....

If that's the case, then why did the majority vote for cooked Paleo being better than raw vegan here: http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/hot-topics/would-any-raw-vegans-do-better-on-cooked-paleo
The vote was actually more favorable to cooked Paleo than I expected, given the usual rhetoric in the forum. It seems that there's a silent majority here that disagrees with you (and doubtless the vast majority of cooked Paleos would disagree with you). If rawness were such a huge factor in the benefits of raw Paleo, and the Paleo factor so small, wouldn't raw vegan fare better than it did?

Many cooked Paleos suscribe to the hypothesis that avoiding or restricting the Neolithic Agents of Disease (NADs)--generally described as wheat/gluten, vegetable/seed oils, and fructose/sugars (sometimes limited to concentrated processed versions, such as soda pop, fruit juices and other processed foods high in added sugars, but frequently also involving limiting of fruit intake)--is the biggest factor in the success of cooked Paleo diets. If that hypothesis is largely on target, then it could explain why so many cooked Paleos report doing very well and would explain why I had dramatic improvements on cooked Paleo myself, and much smaller, though still significant, improvements from rawness.

One good thing about rawness is that it forces one to eliminate many of the most toxic foods. The foods that require cooking do so in part because of their toxic loads and antinutrient effects. Eating a cooked Paleo diet that avoids foods that require cooking, such as NeanderThin, also avoids those same foods. Using forms of cooking that produce far lower levels of heat-related toxins like AGEs, as many cooked Paleos recommend, would make a NeanderThin-type cooked Paleo diet even closer to raw Paleo.

[TylerDurden]

If that's the case, then why did the majority vote for cooked Paleo being better than raw vegan here: http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/hot-topics/would-any-raw-vegans-do-better-on-cooked-paleo
The vote was actually more favorable to cooked Paleo than I expected, given the usual rhetoric in the forum. It seems that there's a silent majority here that disagrees with you. If rawness were such a huge factor in the benefits of raw Paleo, and the Paleo factor so small, wouldn't raw vegan fare better than it did?

That was a deliberately distorted poll of yours. For one thing, polls never accurately reflect a particular community's views as people are lazy and don't vote or for other reasons. Take the polls, years ago on this forum, for  finding out who was RZC or raw omnivore - if those polls had been believed, then Rawpalaeos were mostly RZCers at the time. Not true, as it turns out we got more and more rawpalaeos joining this forum from other areas of the Internet/world who were raw omnivores, and the RZC portion is a minority here. Mrs Thatcher also complained about the polls in the UK, as they were often wrong.

The other point was that it was a distorted, biased poll intended to make people give the wrong impression(you often limit/fix poll-options to ensure the results seemingly favour your own beliefs...hmm). For example, it's well-known,       scientifically and anecdotally,  that a raw vegan diet(possibly not 80-10-10 but who knows?) does provide a lot of health-benefits in the short-term,  mainly due to the avoidance of cooked foods. The only catch with a raw vegan diet is that it does not provide all the nutrients that a human body needs so that, in the long run, cooked-palaeo is "less worse" than a raw vegan diet. The sheer load of heat-created toxins on a cooked, palaeolithic diet means that it is very difficult for people to be truly healthy on it, long-term(even if they eat grassfed, and many  even eat grainfed meats). Sure, there are gimmicks, such as regular fasting and regular, everyday exercise,which help reduce only one type of heat-derived toxin,  but I seriously doubt most cooked-palaeos go in for either or both in a big way. By contrast, those who follow a mostly raw vegan diet but eat only a little raw animal food as well are way healthier than the cooked-palaeodieters, judging from reports.

[PaleoPhil]

That was a deliberately distorted poll of yours.

Feel free to make your own undistorted version. You're not afraid of what it might show, are you? And for the umpteenth time, unless you can read minds you don't know whether people are doing things "deliberately" or what their motivations are. As I've mentioned before, you are astoundingly bad at mind reading. Much worse than average.

[TylerDurden]

Feel free to make your own undistorted version. You're not afraid of what it might show, are you? And for the umpteenth time, unless you can read minds you don't know whether people are doing things "deliberately" or what their motivations are. As I've mentioned before, you are astoundingly bad at mind reading. Much worse than average.

I was dead on target this time, you crook!

Like I said, though, polls never are correct, even if phrased in an honest way. I recall a lot of polls I got started which were unbelievable re results. People are bone-idle on the Net, or have their own reasons for not voting, such as timidity or whatever. Indeed, like with all other internet forums, a large number of  people just read here but never post at all, let alone vote. So, polls are never representative(unless you have a system like in Australia where you are forced by law to vote!)

Like I said, though, there is plenty of scientific and anecdotal evidence that raw vegan diets work, at least in the short-term. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that eating mostly raw vegan plus a little raw animal food works way better than a cooked-palaeodiet. And there is plenty of scientific and anecdotal evidence that heat-created toxins in cooked foods are a major problem, not just preservatives/chemicals and other modern extras. Indeed, in past centuries, many people in mediaeval societies were eating diets that excluded modern chemicals, and who went in for raw dairy and fermented grains(or even no grains or dairy in some of those societies), and yet they routinely ended up unhealthy.

[PaleoPhil]

I was dead on target this time, you crook!

LOL! Crook? That's hilariously over the top and irrelevant even for you.

Like I said, though, polls never are correct, even if phrased in an honest way.

If polls are "never" correct, as you say, then we can always figure out the correct result, which will always be the opposite of what they indicate, right? So if we poll the folks here, asking if they have fared well on raw Paleo, then if the results say yes, according to your logic, we could therefore assume the correct answer is no?

Why are you so confident that the poll is wrong and the cooked Paleos reports of success are apparently lies and the studies finding cooked Paleo to beat the "Mediterranean diet" and so forth are apparently worthless, but your own favorite studies and intuition about what the silent majority thinks are correct (ironically, despite the fact that you who apparently think that rawness far outweighs the Paleo factor are much more vocal and active than the silent ones who voted that raw vegans would do better on cooked Paleo)? How do we know this isn't just cherry picking to support your foregone conclusions?

[TylerDurden]

You certainly have a gift for committing false logic, based on your above claims. First of all, an honest poll would inevitably include a lot more options than just 2. Despite your "black-and-white"-type viewpoint, the real world exists in shades of grey as well. So the genuine result would never be the exact opposite of a particular poll result - indeed there may well be some who think that other options are better than either raw vegan or cooked-palaeo. When one factors in other issues such as fatigue/laziness or the fact that most people do not bother voting anyway etc. , it's absurd to claim that any poll is representative. I mean, we even have political polls which show that voters will vote less for certain parties if there is bad weather, and so on...

The problem with your claims is that there are very few cooked-palaeodiet studies around. By contrast, there are a multitude of studies which focus on the harm done by heat-created toxins(several tens of thousands just on advanced glycation end products alone) , so from a democratic viewpoint, the cooked-palaeodiet argument dies a quick death. The "intuition" claim is just childish. I've come across too many  reports over the years from Instinctos who did fine even on high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diets but who reported having issues with cooked meats, for example -reports from cooked-palaeos on forums, by contrast, were pretty dismal. As for "being more vocal", that is irrelevant, of course.  Whether one is silent or vocal does not change the main result, neither does any poll since it can never be truly representative for the reasons I gave above.

[cherimoya_kid]

I've come across too many  reports over the years from Instinctos who did fine even on high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diets but who reported having issues with cooked meats, for example -reports from cooked-palaeos on forums, by contrast, were pretty dismal.

I agree with there being a lot of people who do well on raw diets that include relatively small amounts of animal products.  I've seen a lot of this anecdotal data myself.  I think that I would have done very well on such a diet if I had never done veganism, but I think eating so little animal foods for several years has forced me to go the other direction.

At this point I'm somewhere in between, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to eat such small amounts of animal products as some people do without sacrificing some mental calm and stability.

I think a lot of the cooked-paleo folks have problems because they are OVER-cooking their food. I imagine if they went in for light steaming instead of the usual cooking methods that they would see a great increase in health.

For that matter, I think being strict about the Brix levels of your plant foods helps too.  Also, avoiding farm-raised fish and grainfed beef also make a big difference, IMHO.

[PaleoPhil]

First of all, an honest poll would inevitably include a lot more options than just 2.

Again, feel free to create one.

I've come across too many  reports over the years from Instinctos who did fine even on high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diets but who reported having issues with cooked meats, for example -reports from cooked-palaeos on forums, by contrast, were pretty dismal.

I would be interested to see those examples. If they are as numerous as you seem to suggest, it shouldn't be difficult to produce some. I know that some exist, so I'm open-minded about what the balance of experiences might be--I just suspect that you are overstating the case as usual.

As for "being more vocal", that is irrelevant, of course.

The point was that you seemed to be suggesting that there's a silent majority of people who didn't participate in the poll, which was rather ironic given that the most vocal person of all on the topic is you, someone who believes that the rawness aspect of the RPD is far more important than the Paleo aspect and who insults anyone who dares suggest anything to the contrary. The poll seems to suggest that your rants against anyone who dares speak up and share a different perspective on the topic than yours may have a silencing effect (and, again, feel free to create your own poll, I would be interested to see the results).

[PaleoPhil]

I agree with there being a lot of people who do well on raw diets that include relatively small amounts of animal products.  I've seen a lot of this anecdotal data myself.

I have seen some examples too, including some people who were eating what they thought were relatively healthy conventional diets that included meat and improved by becoming raw vegan, at least in the short term (though I've seen more counter examples--raw or cooked vegans moving to partly or mostly cooked Paleo, vegetarian diets that include eggs or fish or dairy, or LC and improving), and I was surprised that the poll result was as lopsided as it was, especially since it was conducted at a raw Paleo forum that is self-selected for people who think rawness is important enough to frequent a raw Paleo diet forum rather than just a generic Paleo diet forum.

I think a lot of the cooked-paleo folks have problems because they are OVER-cooking their food. I imagine if they went in for light steaming instead of the usual cooking methods that they would see a great increase in health.

For that matter, I think being strict about the Brix levels of your plant foods helps too.  Also, avoiding farm-raised fish and grainfed beef also make a big difference, IMHO.

I think you're probably right on all points, though we might have somewhat different guesses on the degrees of importance of each factor. I suspect that a Stephan-Guyenet type near-Paleo diet of traditionally cooked (such as steaming, boiling and crockpot-cooking) whole foods would be more health promoting for most folks than a raw vegan diet, and the poll was just one more small data point lending some support to that guess.

Despite Tyler's accusation, I don't go in for the black-and-white thinking of seeing cooking as either all complete poison or all totally benign (even the poll had a continuum of 5 choices--it wasn't limited to just two discrete options). I tend to see things in shadings, a continuum of bad to good, including cooking. Some cooked Paleo dieters seem to think that if some studies show some forms of cooking to produce low amounts of heat-related toxins or increase calories obtained from certain foods (which is an odd "benefit" to promote in light of the "obesity epidemic") or increase the intake of nutrients from certain foods or otherwise seem relatively OK, and if Wrangham and some others say we may be at least partly adapted to cooking, then any and all forms of cooking are OK, which I doubt even Wrangham would support. In large part it seems like it might be a comforting excuse for eating huge amounts of fried crispy bacon and well-done meats fried in butter or lard, but that's just my amateur speculation based on lots of posts I've read.

I did expect some controversy and backlash from the poll question and my other questions on the topic, and those of others like Joy2012. It's never popular to ask questions that don't jibe 100% with the most purist interpretation of a dietary forum's ideology, but I'm more interested in learning than in promoting an ideology. Over the years I've noticed the same thing that Joy2012 noted in the original thread post and it is an interesting question. If Tyler is right that cooked Paleo offers little or nothing more than slight reduction in symptoms of a few conditions compared to the range of more conventional Western diets that most Westerners eat and that cooked Paleos tend to switch from, then it will likely peter out in relatively short order, as it requires substantial changes that most people seem to prefer not to have to make.

[TylerDurden]

There are plenty of polls if you look in the off-topics forum and the philosophy section. They either have too few votes(the political spectrum poll is a case in point) or people don't bother to vote, such as in the Sexual Orientations poll where no one put a vote for "homosexual" in, a rather unlikely prospect when there are 100s/1000s of past and present members.

As for making a new poll, like I said, no poll can possibly be truly representative, so it's a waste of time.

As regards Instinctos, I suggest you actually go onto Instincto forums/websites  yourself, like I did years ago  and do the relevant research rather than my wasting my time. An obvious example of someone right now doing well on Iots of raw plant foods/low-raw-animal foods, is SkinnyDevil, last I checked.

Like I said, whether someone is vocal or not is irrelevant. For example, I used to feel forced to write vehement condemnations of raw dairy on other RVAF diet forums because the large anti-raw-dairy crowd often were always too timid to post or just couldn't be bothered(despite many of them PMing me about their real views). They were generally frightened off by the fanatical pro-raw-dairy crowd, so I eventually felt forced to put forward the anti-raw-dairy stance on open forum  just to warn others in case they encountered the same sort of problems I had. In your case, like that pro-raw-dairy crowd, you are being fanatically pro-cooked-palaeo despite the fact that most in the RVAF diet community find that cooked foods, including cooked-palaeodiets, were less useful or downright harmful by comparison to RVAF diets.

[TylerDurden]

The point re palaeolithic diets "petering" out if they don't work is nonsense, of course. There have been a multitude of diets that have remained popular(albeit in cycles) despite not really working at all. The Atkins Diet comes to mind. Even Breatharianism hasn't died out yet. All an SMD eater needs is a diet that is "less worse" than a cooked, junk-food diet, no matter by how little(not difficult to achieve), and people will often stick to it. It takes a bit more  imagination to go for more effective diets like rawpalaeo ones.

[PaleoPhil]

Those examples support what I was talking about--the Atkins diet has petered out quite a bit from its peak and Breatharianism has never exceeded a miniscule following. If Paleo follows those examples then it will eventually fall dramatically in popularity and be eclipsed by other diet trends, just as Paleo has been eclipsing Atkins. Even one of the top promoters of Atkins, Jimmy Moore, went Paleo.

Check out the collapse of interest in Atkins on Google trends:


And with the collapse in interest of Atkins went a parrallel collapse in interest in carbs:

"Time-based data related to a search term can be a fascinating look at how trends spark interest in particular topics. For instance, as the Atkins Diet lost popularity, so too did interest in the carbohydrate content of food."

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/google-correlate.html

As for making a new poll, like I said, no poll can possibly be truly representative, so it's a waste of time.

So you're chickening out? It's easier to cast stones than to put constructive effort into something and put one's theories to the test, isn't it? If you're going to criticize my poll then the least you could do would be to create or suggest a better one. If all polls are completely worthless then mine is no worse than any other and it was a waste of time for you to point out alleged defects and motivations behind it ("deliberately distorted", "biased" and so on)--you could have just claimed from the start that all polls are completely worthless instead of suggesting that mine was particularly bad. If instead it's possible to improve upon it, then feel free to do so.

As regards Instinctos, I suggest you actually go onto Instincto forums/websites  yourself, like I did years ago  and do the relevant research rather than my wasting my time. An obvious example of someone right now doing well on Iots of raw plant foods/low-raw-animal foods, is SkinnyDevil, last I checked.

So are you saying that Skinny Devil "did fine even on high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diets but ... reported having issues with cooked meats"? I know he eats more plant foods than what most raw Paleos report, but I didn't know that he did fine on a high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diet. I guess it would help if you would define what you mean by high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diet.

Probably the best examples to support your case would be ex-cooked-Paleos who switched to raw vegan or partly-cooked vegan and did better on the vegan diet, particularly for longer time periods. To try to help give you a head start, the closest example I can think of off the top of my head is Don Matesz, who switched from LC cooked Paleo to cooked near-vegetarian and improved. It's not quite the same thing, but not far off.

you are being fanatically pro-cooked-palaeo

How on earth do you square the notion of a high-raw dieter being "fanatically pro-cooked-Paleo"?

despite the fact that most in the RVAF diet community find that cooked foods, including cooked-palaeodiets, were less useful or downright harmful by comparison to RVAF diets

Another tiresome straw man. I eat high raw myself, so I'm obviously not arguing that cooked Paleo is better than RVAF diets like my own. The point was never that cooked Paleo is optimal, but that your claims regarding the lack of importance of the Paleo aspect of raw Paleo and your minimization of benefits experienced by people who swtiched from more conventional diets like SAD-type diets to cooked Paleo have been excessive. Joy2012's question was a valid one and can't be so easily dismissed as you tried to do, and clearly Joy isn't "fanatically pro-cooked Paleo."

[TylerDurden]

Those examples support what I was talking about--the Atkins diet has petered out quite a bit from its peak and Breatharianism has never exceeded a miniscule following. If Paleo follows those examples then it will eventually fall dramatically in popularity and be eclipsed by other diet trends, just as Paleo has been eclipsing Atkins. Even one of the top promoters of Atkins, Jimmy Moore, went Paleo.

Check out the collapse of interest in Atkins on Google trends:


And with the collapse in interest of Atkins went a parrallel collapse in interest in carbs:

  As usual, you are conveniently ignoring the fact that all these diets go up and down in cycles over decades - for example Atkins was very popular in the 60s. This does not  have anything to do with whether the diet works or not, but on whether a new book is out or not, or maybe an Internet guru appears etc. The Palaeolithic diet also has similiar cyclic activity.  As regards Breatharianism, while I have no doubt it is less popular than many other diets, I am pretty sure your claim that its followers are nonexistent is pure bull - I had a dinner with a cousin of mine a while back in which she enthused about the wonders of Breatharianism - she's a new-age follower and eagerly follows every new trend in that field, with an emphasis on the wackiest ones.

So you're chickening out? It's easier to cast stones than to put constructive effort into something and put one's theories to the test, isn't it? If you're going to criticize my poll then the least you could do would be to create or suggest a better one. If all polls are completely worthless then mine is no worse than any other and it was a waste of time for you to point out alleged defects and motivations behind it ("deliberately distorted", "biased" and so on)--you could have just claimed from the start that all polls are completely worthless instead of suggesting that mine was particularly bad. If instead it's possible to improve upon it, then feel free to do so.

  What I actually stated was that polls were worthless in terms of providing reliable data. I had further, correctly, stated that your poll was worse than just useless, being actually deceitful. Also, there's no point in my putting forward an honest poll of mine if it's anyway going to be inaccurate like every other poll, anyway.

So are you saying that Skinny Devil "did fine even on high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diets but ... reported having issues with cooked meats"? I know he eats more plant foods than what most raw Paleos report, but I didn't know that he did fine on a high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diet. I guess it would help if you would define what you mean by high-raw vegan/low raw animal food diet.

  I mean that Instinctos on c.10% raw animal foods/90% raw plant foods are fine on such a diet. Of course, like cherimoya said, it all depends. Such Instinctos who  had been 100% raw vegan for years beforehand would likely not beneft so much, but otherwise as long as the raw animal food component  provided enough nutrients to avoid nutritional deficiencies, there would be no problem.

How on earth do you square the notion of a high-raw dieter being "fanatically pro-cooked-Paleo"?

You wre belittling the raw component of the diet, suggesting, wrongly,  that it wasn't anywhere near as important as the palaeo component.

The point was never that cooked Paleo is optimal, but that your claims regarding the lack of importance of the Paleo aspect of raw Paleo and your minimization of benefits experienced by people who swtiched from more conventional diets like SAD-type diets to cooked Paleo have been excessive. Joy2012's question was a valid one and can't be so easily dismissed as you tried to do, and clearly Joy isn't "fanatically pro-cooked Paleo."

I did not dismiss the palaeo component as unimportant, you were the one belittling the raw component, I was just defending raw diets. I, after all, am aware of the benefits of avoiding dairy, grains and legumes from one's diet. I merely point out the obvious, that the cooked component of cooked-palaeo is so harmful to health that it negates, to a large extent,  the benefits gained from avoiding non-palaeo foods. Besides, if cooked-palaeo were so wonderful, then why is it that switching from pasteurised dairy to raw dairy suddenly makes (some) people healthier?  Clearly if cooked-palaeo really were so effective, then even raw dairy should, in all cases, be also harmful to everybody's heath.

[cherimoya_kid]

I think you're probably right on all points, though we might have somewhat different guesses on the degrees of importance of each factor. I suspect that a Stephan-Guyenet type near-Paleo diet of traditionally cooked (such as steaming, boiling and crockpot-cooking) whole foods would be more health promoting for most folks than a raw vegan diet,

My concern with boiling and crockpot cooking is that you're reducing the vitamin B and C content, since they are pretty heat-labile.

Also, in both cases you're missing the good bacteria that live on the surface of meat/fish/plants. Granted, this can be fixed by eating some raw high meat and raw fermented fruits/veggies.

I personally would guess that the ratios work like this:

1. Cooking methods (raw vs. steaming or quick boiling vs. frying/grilling/etc.)-- 25-30%.

2. Brix/quality of plant foods (depends a great deal on how MUCH plant food is eaten regularly. For straight carnivores it doesn't matter, except regarding the Brix/quality of the grass/plants that any ruminants you eat have been eating --also, for people whose diet is mainly wild-caught seafood, it makes relatively little difference)--10-60%

3. wild and/or grassfed (again, depends a lot on how much animal food you eat)--15-60%

4.Use of high meat and fermented foods--15-20%.

If you're eating mostly plant foods, then #3's percentage drops a lot, while #2's percentage rises a lot.

#1 and #4 are fairly invariable, while #2 and #3 depend  on how much of a carnivore you are, or aren't.

I don't recommend anyone eat a paleo diet, or any diet at all, long-term, without paying attention to all 4 of those points. In the long run, they all impact your health pretty significantly, for nearly all people.

The percentages are rough, of course, and vary from person to person.

[cherimoya_kid]

Also, I would say that getting a wide variety of foods, and making sure, long-term, that you're getting sufficient minerals (trace and regular) and vitamins (water-soluble and fat-soluble), has importance ranging from 10-50%. 

Eating instincto-style, or at least very simply, also has importance of around 10-20%.

These percentages can vary quite a bit over time for an individual person, too, depending on what they are eating.    Eating a varied diet versus a near mono-diet can make a BIG difference in the LONG term.  Mono-diets can be very deficient, and therefore dangerous, long-term.

[cherimoya_kid]

I feel like I'm making a character for an RPG, all these percentages.

[Joy2012]

I enjoyed reading your informative exchanges of views and banter. The issue is becoming clearer to me.

[PaleoPhil]

Thanks for your assessment, Cherimoya.

I am pretty sure your claim that its followers are nonexistent is pure bull

I didn't say nonexistent, I said miniscule, and someone once said that the only true breatharians are the dead ones, because no one can actually go without food indefinitely.

I had a dinner with a cousin of mine a while back in which she enthused about the wonders of Breatharianism - she's a new-age follower and eagerly follows every new trend in that field, with an emphasis on the wackiest ones.

How does one "have dinner" with a Breatharian? Did she watch you eat or what?

What I actually stated was that polls were worthless in terms of providing reliable data. I had further, correctly, stated that your poll was worse than just useless, being actually deceitful.

So if my poll was worse than useless, whereas others are better because they're just useless, then it should be possible for you to improve on mine. If you can't improve on it, then that reveals that singling mine out and claiming it was worse was just so much hot air.

You wre belittling the raw component of the diet

No, I was just responding to your belittling of the Paleo component.

I merely point out the obvious, that the cooked component of cooked-palaeo is so harmful to health that it negates, to a large extent,  the benefits gained from avoiding non-palaeo foods.

There you go again, belittling the Paleo component, and yet again you're ignoring the gradations of harm from different forms of cooking.

Besides, if cooked-palaeo were so wonderful, then why is it that switching from pasteurised dairy to raw dairy suddenly makes (some) people healthier?

Again, I wasn't arguing that there's no value in rawness, just responding to your going overboard in diminishing the Paleo aspect. Besides, my understanding is that most cooked Paleos don't consume dairy or see it as a modification of Paleo.

And again, if you could cite examples of people who improved dramatically when they switched to raw vegan from cooked Paleo, that would add credence to your claims. Evidence is more convincing than rhetoric and ad hominem.

[PaleoPhil]

Of course, I don't expect any of this to convince you, TD, so we'll likely have to agree to disagree.

[sabertooth]

Are there any case studies on cooked paleo that may show some evidence as to it being able to heal sickness.

Sure there are cooked paleo gurus like Mark Sisson, but he wasn't really sick. He was a fairly healthy athlete that became burned out from physical stress and eating too much grain and processed carbs. His diet seemed to have helped him regain his health. I still have doubts as to how he will be able to tolerate cooked meat, supplements and vegetable oils as he continues to age.

People who are truly ill may not be able to handle the burden of cooked foods and won't have as dramatic of health benefits as they would on a Raw paleo diet.

Of course we need some real case studies to prove it, one way or another.

[PaleoPhil]

Are there any case studies on cooked paleo that may show some evidence as to it being able to heal sickness. ...

Of course we need some real case studies to prove it, one way or another.

Are there any case studies on the ability of raw Paleo to heal sickness? No. Do you believe it works nonetheless? Yes! And you don't require a single study to believe that, because you experienced it yourself.