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Ward Nicolson on raw food
When I was in Costa Rica - I came across the Raw Food Diet popularity -
The idea is eat what yourbody is designed for. You are a monkey and monkeys don't cook so eat only raw food. And that man your body is dying cos you are putting all those dead things in it... you need to eat living food. Interesting philosophy. Also it seemed that people were using it as an extension of a vegetarianism so it becomes a fruit and veg diet.
Live food has enzymes in it which helps you digest it. So by cooking it you not only lose a lot of vitamins, but make it more difficult to digest your food.
: I stayed at a raw food community for a week but my teeth started to rot write up raw food and I felt hungry all the time. I researched it and found a huge article written by an expert called Ward Nicholson. He concluded 1. Yes a lot of modern health problems can be traced to modern diet so a more natural diet is good BUT 2. Vegetarian is not natural - other apes do eat meat lots of insects and small tings and occasionally each other. Of course humans can't eat a cow withitout tools, but they can catch and eat a fish like salmon with their bear hands. 3. We are different from apes, archaelogists say that human beings have been cooking for 200,000 years so have become genetically adapted. And in fact N Europeans have been eating milk for7- 20,000 years 4. Fruit today is not like old fruit we have bred it to be much sweeter. 5. He was a runner and the anacdotal evidence showed that balanced, omnivore partially cooked diet seemed the best. A nutitionist told me that raw carrots don't relase vitamin A only cooked ones do.
Beware of fads they can be dangerous, but do eat a lot more fruit and veg.
| "Those who maintain that the only "natural" food for us is that which we can catch or process with our bare hands are by any realistic evolutionary definition for what is natural grossly in error,since stone tools for obtaining animals and cutting the flesh have beenwith us almost 2 million years now." My views on the Raw Food Diet
I find it quite an attractive idea idea and I was willing to give it a try. It has lot of advantages you save a lot of time of energy cos no preparation or washing up just stick it straight in your mouth. Great before I didn't each much meat, and I prefer to buy fruit and veg over sweets. Though I do like to each cereals and grains and thought they were quite healthy.
On raw food I think I felt OK I felt lower on energy, but when I went for long walks in the forest mountain I didn't get tired normally I don't get tired anyway . I seemed to have a lot of gas, but I didn't regard this as a problem. After a week I got tooth ache, cos I think the fruit is very sweet and the citrus very heavy on the teeth and gums.
I kept it up for a few days though I did buy some peanuts and raisins.I often felt hungry and craved carbohydrates. I had to end it after 11 days cos then I was staying with a family and had to eat what they ate.
I realised that we ate a lot of food which wanted to think is good, but is actually crap eg there is a big difference between good cake and dry cake, or good coffee and normal drudge.
Like most people they ate few fruits, while I continued to suppliment with oranges and bananas.
an illusion of black-and-whitethinking not supported by real-world investigations.
So uncooked live = good
, And cooked=poison
... Is a simplistic untruth
Natural food is full of toxins which is why we have liver and kidneys to remove them.
Nutritionist told me fish is important to diet and in carrots the vitamin A is only released through cooking.
And what % cooked
the largest component of the diet
should be raw (at least 50% if not
considerably more),
Makes sense doesn't it, if a yak went by and you can bash it on the head, it's an easy source of food.
Eskimos have an almost
all-meat diet (less than 10% plant
intake)
- I long been aware that there is in a capitalist society a natural push to promote processed food e.g Mar's Bar and beer. Whereas there are far less profits in apples and water so far less promotion. |
Update 2008 - An evolutionary biologist did some deep research and concluded humans are quite different from other apes, because of the benefits of cooking. Other apes have to have huge facial muscles and have to spend a great deal of time eating.
- Cooking means humans get more nutrition from less food.
Update 2009 - In the RI Christmas Lectures the biologist explained plants are full of poisons to protect them against being eaten, but humans stronger stomachs and cooking helps humans cope with them.
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