great blog.. but I have a question about dairy. do you think your prohibition would also apply to real home-made kefir made from raw goats milk and real kefir grains? I have been eating this for a few months and think its spectacular, not like milk at all.

john

“You say you can easily catch chickens, goats and sheep.” No, I didn’t. I said I had chased them out of our yard when I was younger. I never actually tried to catch any of them.

“Even if an animal couldn’t run as far as a human, they could run away very quickly, and sit and rest and recover while the human catches up.” I think you’re making a number of mistakes here. First, you’re assuming that we have to hunt animals bigger than us, which isn’t true. I’m sure that as soon as we did find ways to hunt such animals, it was really helpful, but it certainly wasn’t necessary. Small animals would certainly be easier. Second, you’re assuming the equation is one human per animal, when humans are naturally pack animals. If you’re hunting something bigger than you, you can always gang up on it. Third, you’re making an assumption that the animal and the human(s) start at the same place, ignoring such options as relay running, driving animals over cliffs or into traps and ambushes. All of these options are used by other hunting animals, and are tricks commonly reinvented by human children at play.

“Meat has a very high likelyhood of containing lots of things very dangerous to humans, like salmonella, E. coli and trichinae.” I don’t worry about bacteria; bad raw meat is usually obvious to the smell and taste. And although I don’t have a study to cite, I’ve read that bacteria counts can be 20 to 40 times higher in cooked meat than in raw meat, before there is a noticeable difference in taste or smell. So, it’s actually a lot easier to get sick eating cooked meat, because you don’t notice and spit it out.

What’s more, I’ve found that if I eat raw meat, eggs, or fruit that I’m not entirely sure of, and there’s a problem with it, it will come back up out of my throat or stomach within minutes - usually in an entirely painless way, not unlike belching. It’s a funny thing, but it seems as though millions of years of evolution have provided us with a body that knows what is and isn’t good, as long as you are actually eating things it has evolved to eat. And it’s not specific to meat, either; I’ve had it happen with avocados or grapes, too, that in each case were just a little too old or tasted a wee bit off on the way down.

What’s interesting is that I get the impression that the mechanism is regulated by some “safe quantity” of bacteria or bacterial toxins, above which the response is triggered. That’s just a hypothesis, because sometimes I’ll get a warning feeling that if I eat any more of something, it’s going to come back up, but if I don’t, nothing happens, and if I do, then sure enough it comes up.

That probably sounds pretty disgusting, but I’m sure it was a lifesaving trait for our ancestors. However, judging by how many people become seriously ill due to ingesting *cooked* food containing salmonella or E. coli, I’d have to guess that the detection mechanism doesn’t work as well with cooked food. Perhaps it depends on some byproduct of the bacteria that’s different when the bacteria are eating cooked food.

As for parasites, I know someone who conducted experiments, first with dogs and then on himself, eating parasite-infested raw meat and trying to see if they could be transmitted that way. He was unable to get either the dogs or himself to end up with any parasites. I’m personally not that committed to science, though.

“Especially when there’s all these tasty fruits, veggies and wild grains just sitting around stuck to the ground, just waiting to be eaten.” Um, have you ever actually tried *eating* wild grains without cooking them? For that matter, how many of those fruits you’re thinking of are domesticated varieties? Grains are seeds; they aren’t made to be digested, and in fact plants do their best to make seeds indigestible on purpose. (As much as evolution can be said to have a purpose.) It takes a lot of prep work to make grains edible, and I believe it’s generally established that humans have only been eating them for about 10,000 years, vs 2.5 million years of meat eating.

Fruit is nice, of course, and I eat rather a lot of it. But I can only go a day or two of just that before I start hankering for a few pounds of nice raw meat, maybe with some tomatoes or avocado on the side. Yum. I don’t eat vegetation (roots, stalks, and leaves), though, although I suppose onions might be considered a root (but I don’t eat them very often at all). It’s kind of funny, because I used to like salads before I became a raw eater, but then at some point I saw lettuce on something and went, “ew, who put those leaves in my food?” I was rather surprised and amused by that reaction, because it was visceral rather than intellectual, and I hadn’t originally intended to quit salads. In fact, in my early days as a raw eater I tended to make steak or sashimi salads. Now I make ‘em with tomato and avocado, but leave out the (ugh) plant leaves and roots.

@Nish… LOL, you’d probably find a group of vegetarians at the end of the study!!

From what I’ve heard, quadrapedal locomotion is roughly 8 times more efficient than bipedal locomotion. So it sounds to me like the reduction in body hair and the development of sweat glands might not be an advantage over other animals, but rather some compensation for inherent inferiority. Most animals are faster than humans as well. Even if an animal couldn’t run as far as a human, they could run away very quickly, and sit and rest and recover while the human catches up.

You say you can easily catch chickens, goats and sheep. However, those animals all have a very important common characteristic: domestication. These animals have been specifically bred for millenia so that people might catch and eat them. I think it would be far more telling for a human with no tools or vitually no tools, to catch a wild animal. It would then be somewhat compelling to see a group of humans live entirely off of animals they caught and killed and whatever else they scrounged up along the way, without any level of technology.

Chasing wild animals around also sounds really dangerous.

The other obvious issue here is food poisoning. Meat has a very high likelyhood of containing lots of things very dangerous to humans, like salmonella, E. coli and trichinae. Things that are also destroyed by heat. Granted, much of this may result from contemporary animal raising and meat packing techniques, but it seems like it would be a huge issue for a modern American raw meat eater. While some of this risk may have been reduced for the hypothetical pre-industrial raw meat eater, but I imagine some level of elevated risk would remain.

While I don’t reject your claims out of hand, they are very counter-intuitive and are not inline with my personal body of knowledge. I thus request much more evidence here. Especially when there’s all these tasty fruits, veggies and wild grains just sitting around stuck to the ground, just waiting to be eaten. No running about for hours, wasting energy, required.

I have asked one of my friends who is a doctor about the chinese diet. He has experience with this because he studied in China for 6 months on a grant (to study accupuncture).

He told me that the diet of the AVERAGE man in China is very bad:

- They eat a lot of smoked fish. They use food smoking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_%28food%29 a lot to conserve fish and other kinds of meat.

- They eat their food with A LOT of condiments.

- They eat their food very very hot.

Because of these factors the incidence of cancer in the Chinese is higher than normal.

It is no wonder that when they stop eating heavily smoked meat (which causes cancer in the long run) they are healthier and live longer lives.

Other things my friend (who is a doctor) told me yesterday:

The toxins contained in the fat in your body are a myth. Fat cells don’t contain toxins. These “toxins” are a myth that circulates in the alternative health circles because they are an easy to understand concept (and also a FALSE concept unfortunately).

If you are a meat eater and you stop eating meat, your metabolism has to adapt to your new eating style - that is, it has to lower the production of some enzymes, it has to start making some enzymes in higher quantities, etc.

This is why when you go from being a meat eater to a vegetarian you feel bad in the first 2-3 weeks, and not because of the (non-existant) “toxins”. Exactly the same thing will happen if you are a vegetarian and start eating meat - your metabolism will have to adapt and you will feel bad in the first weeks.

Here is more information about enzymes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzymes

The proteins are made of amino-acids. The problem is that proteins from plants don’t contain some amino-acids which are necessary for humans.

This is why doctors say that protein from plants is low-quality protein.

If you don’t eat meat at all, the body will extract the missing aminoacids (which you don’t get from a vegan diet) from your muscles and then from organs such as the heart, weakening your body.

This is well-understood and well researched information. Many scientific studies and biochemestry experiments were done about this.

The body needs 0.9 grams of high-quality proteins per body kilogram, every day.

So if you weight 70 Kg (about 154 lbs), you will need 0.9*70 = 63 grams of high quality protein per day.

Lean meat is about 60% protein - the rest is made of fat and carbs.

If we make a simple calculation, we came to the conclusion that according to these numbers, an average human who weights 70 Kg needs about 105 grams of lean meat per day in order to be healthy.

My friend the doctor also told me that eating too much meat is dangerous - people eating 500-800 grams of meat per day get cholesterol and many other problems.

So, in order to be safe, the optimal intake of meat should be of around 150-200 grams of lean meat per day.

He also told me that your needs may vary according to your metabolism.

I personally have little trouble tearing raw meat with my teeth and swallowing fairly large chunks of it, so an opening is all that’s really needed, and of course convenient forelimbs (aka hands) to hold the meat steady while tearing.

As for the taking-down of large animals, I understand that there are modern humans who, to prove the point, have run down large herbivores until the animal literally drops from exhaustion and is unable to move or fight back in any way. So it’s not really a question of a struggle - breaking its neck, bashing its head in, or cutting or tearing the throat open would all suffice for the coup de grace.

So, it’s not so much a matter of theory as of experience. If you’ve chased wild animals before, if you’ve eaten raw meat with your hands and teeth for a few years, if you’ve tasted the difference between warm and cold raw meat, and felt the difference it makes to your body between eating even dried raw meat vs. fresh raw meat, you’ll just know. And among the things you’ll know are that we’re born to run, to kill, and to eat meat - warm and raw.

For that matter, it only takes open eyes to see that the most visible differences between us and other kinds of monkeys are differences that make us more suitable for hunting. We walk upright, have less fur, and sweat more. These three changes make us fast and let us run without overheating, even in the noonday tropical sun.

A long-term study by the german cancer research center found out that a vegetarian diet “dramatically reduced the mortality risk”. Within the studied group of vegetarians (vegans, Ovo-Lakto-Vegetarians, moderate Vegetarians) the mortality risk of “moderate vegetarians” (eating occassionally meat) is lowest (in numbers: if the risk for vegans is 1, ovo-lakto have 0.66 and moderates have 0.60) This might be because the lack of B12 vitamine. (from the german wikipedia entry of veganism http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan )

@Elaine: For the past few weeks I’ve averaged about 30 miles per week, which would be the equivalent of roughly 3000 kcal/week. When I was doing marathon training and Tae Kwon Do at the same time, it was more than double that. If I were to increase my exercise though, I’d also eat more food. After marathon training runs with the L.A. Roadrunners they’d have a table full of bananas set out for us. After a long run I’d eat as many as nine of them (about 1000 calories). I used to be very much into the calorie theory in the early 90s, and it actually seems to work if you eat like most Americans, but if you stray from the norm and eat very differently, the theory just isn’t accurate. It’s like how Newton’s laws of physics lose accuracy as you approach the speed of light.

But these studies pretend that “meat” means “cooked meat”, when cooked meat is absolutely nothing like real meat. Pasteurized milk is also chemically quite different from unpasteurized milk, and the pasteurization process actually destroys the milk’s natural antibiotics.

Human beings evolved as hunters - and we ate the meat raw. Fire was initially used to warm cold meats back to a palatable temperature, and to improve the taste of meat that would otherwise be spoiled. However, as with any method of food preservation, the quality of the food declines. The idea that humans are naturally fruitarians or vegetarians is a myth; our entire anatomy is designed so that we can be distance runners who chase our prey as a pack until it drops from exhaustion. We’re not as fast as other animals, but we can run marathons, and they can’t.

Cooking *is* processing, and pretending that it’s not is just a convenient rationalization so you can continue to eat things that don’t fit into your theory. Don’t get me wrong, I *love* oatmeal cookies, especially one of the “all natural” brands, and I hated giving them up, but I prefer how I feel without them.

Thanks for sharing the calorie info. That is simply fascinating! How many calories of energy do you burn working out every day? You’re a runner, right? So, maybe 600-800?

Keep up the great work! This is far and away the best blog I’ve found!