PaleoPhil seems to think that by 'zero carb' I meant muscle meat only,
That's not quite what I meant. I was using the standard understanding of the term at ZIOH that developed out of Bear Stanley's views, where many "zero carbers" also eat added fat, such as butter, bacon, etc., rather than just muscle meat and when they do eat muscle meat it tends to be fatty.
Most ZCers at ZIOH tended to restrict organs due to the evil carb content of some of them, which Bear Stanley advised, or just because they hated them, and claimed that they are unnecessary. While I was a member there they tended to ridicule any positive posts about liver or eggs, due to their carb content, though Charles would sometimes say something along the lines of organs are OK, just not necessary and not the focus of the forum. Quite a few of them claimed that eating fatty "Walmart meat" is plenty sufficient, including one former member from there who became a member here for a while, and there was much ridicule of 100% grassfed meats by Charles and others.
Several of them claimed that traditional Eskimos never ate liver and only fed it to their dogs, and no one disputed this, despite V. Stefansson himself (one of their heroes) reporting that Eskimos loved loche fish liver (I misspelled it as "leche" in my last post).
no... I meant animal foods only, including liver, kidneys, brain, heart, marrow, fat, etc...
That's why the ZC term is often so bogus and confusing. It's used in many different ways. Liver and brain contain carbs, so that's not truly "zero carb," as I've discussed before in the Carnivore subforum. Why not call it RAF or all-meat, or hypercarnivore or near-ZC or VLC to avoid this confusion? There was even a point where several people at ZIOH were experimenting with drinking milk, including Charles, and for some reason didn't see this as a contradiction of ZERO Carb.
Even when organs are included, such as by you and Lex, I think it's an unnecessarily restricted diet that has caused problems for most who have tried it. Few last more than a couple years on it, based on Internet reports.
Since you started cooking, do you think your calorie intake increased? I don't think 100% raw is necessary for all and it can be counterproductive if it results in stressful undereating, especially if the body shifts into starvation/survival mode.
Anyway, clearly people can be healthy on RPD, and clearly people can become healthier than they were before, but does this mean they could not be healthier with the right cooked food? I don't know, I doubt they tried Paul Jaminet's PHD for example.
This is an excellent question. I think that the cooked potatoes, sweet potatoes and rice in the PHD are stand-ins for roots, tubers, bulbs, corms and rhizomes that were edible raw in the past, and I've discussed it before. I know it's heresy here, but I think it may be better to include some cooked tubers in the diet than not eat any underground storage organs at all due to raw purism. I even tried adding cooked tubers to my diet, though it didn't work well. I think it may be due to system malfunction relating to so-called "pyroluria".
Anyway, from my experience RPD is no good for me. PaleoPhil, I have actually recently started eating along the lines of the PHD.
I suspect that's a good choice. The PHD seems to be one of the better Paleo diets and Paul Jaminet is one of my favorite dietary bloggers. I hope you'll share your results from the PHD. After all, the description of the forum says somewhere that it's OK to eat some cooked foods.
When I was doing the RPD, there were many people doing this ZC/animal foods only/a few berries/one piece of fruit a day type thing. There was Lex Rooker; PaleoPhil; TylerDurden; KlowCarb; Sully; Ioanna; Inger; RawRose; Raw; Magnetic; Hannibal; KD; etc etc etc, more than half of the people were doing ZC/VLC diet. Pretty much everyone spent most time talking about the diet of the eskimoes also, I guess because they are the only culture in recorded history eating mostly RPD.
It's pretty much died out since then. You might want check out the more recent posts in this forum. There was even quite a backlash against ZC and VLC, as I recall. For me near-ZC was a temporary experiment that worked so well that I started to wonder if a VLC intake of say 5-15% carbs might be optimal for humans in general, but my research did not support that, and when I learned about Eskimo potato, which I'd never heard about anywhere in any of the Paleo forums, that really nailed it home for me. Every HG population I've examined ate some sort of starchy food, even the Eskimos (and even the coastal Eskimos who couldn't get Eskimo potato ate lots of seal liver, high in animal starch). I think Paul Jaminet is on the right general track with starchy foods.