Why natural tribes don't eat raw?

[zbr5]

I have just read     "Going Tribal" thread on the forum (by Aura) but I did not want to hackjack her wonderful topic so I create separate one to ask you about what I found interesting there.

Namely, many posters  said no natural tribes on the planet eat raw meat now. They all mostly cook their meals.

How come? Why do you think it is like this?

[TylerDurden]

Pleased put all such controversial topics into the Hot Topics forum in future! Thanks! I have shifted the topic now.

OK, there are certain points to be made:-

1) These tribes do not have limitless access to foods, so they will need to process/cook some of their foods in order to remove some levels of antinutrients, For example, a study I cited ages ago stated that the Hundza would rely on tubers as starvation-foods/fallback foods  if they had no other better-tasting sources available. Tubers are better eaten raw in order to remove the antinutrients in them.

2) What is fascinating is that the Arctic-dwelling tribes all incorporate a large percentage of raw animal foods in their diet. Now, living in a cold climate, one would naturally expect them to cook all their food thoroughly for reasons of immediate warmth, but this is not the case.

3) Weston-Price stated that the healthiest  tribes he visited all incorporated some percentage of raw animal foods into their diet.

4) Cooked foods are highly addictive, containing brain-influencing opioids. So, cooked foods are like drugs.

[Iguana]

I just posted this:

Not only are processed foods (even raw but ground, juiced, spiced or mixed), grain and dairy addictive, their consumption is not properly limited by our instinct, which induce overloads. In turn, these overloads prevent us to eat the unprocessed equivalent since we fall directly on the instinctive barrier with it.

That explains why the humanity as a whole came down to cooking and agriculture as soon as it found the way to do it. It also explains why wild animals are fond of cooked and processed food.  Thus it’s so easy to slide down if we stray a bit away from  the narrow  path at the top of the crest: our situation is unstable. We have to constantly compensate this instability with our intelligence and with our will to stay on the top, and the more ideal is our nutrition, the less we have to compensate and easiest it is.

_It’s worrying to think that if one eats, even once, a food cooked, one already has trouble finding it good in its raw state. You make the act of cooking sound like a sort of unforgivable sin.

o In actual fact, it’s much worse. All it takes is eating a single type of cooked food to trigger off a general overload in several nutrients whose amounts instincts weren’t able to gauge properly. The following day, any raw food will taste less appealing. That’s why instinctotherapy isn’t easy to carry through unless one eats everything raw.

_You mean to say that those tribal people, the day after they ate cooked sweet potatoes, couldn’t even bring themselves to eat fruit?

o At least not as enthusiastically as usual.
The excess sugar taken up the day before inevitably made their instincts less attracted to all other foods high in sugar.
Maybe they didn’t find fruit so insipid as to refrain from having it altogether, but its fragrance must have seemed less appealing. They found it impossible to put away their usual amount.
At the end of the day, they felt so frustrated they had to compensate for it. So, how did they cope?

_They boiled up more sweet potatoes.

o Possibly, but that wouldn’t quite meet the need for greater pleasure, at least palate-wise. Filling up just for filling up’s sake is hardly enjoyable.

_I get it; they came up with the first recipe!

o How else could they have got their pleasure’s worth, besides trying out cooking artfully? Unfortunately, there’s no way back; it’s a descending spiral. Every recipe makes one eat more and results in an ever-increasing overload that dulls one’s instincts and further reduces pleasure, thus leading to ever more elaborate recipes ad infinitum. Sophistication in cooking can be accounted for in this way. All it took was cheating against instincts once to lead mankind into an endless quest of gluttony that has stranded us, to this day, in a state of perpetual frustration.