Many scientists, nutritionists and even Sally Fallon (who advocates raw milk and other raw foods) say that we need to eat cooked food. They say that cooking releases many nutrients that we cannot digest and assimilate otherwise. What's your opinion?
Most academically informed people (I am reluctant to say educated), believe that cooking releases many nutrients and therefore we get more from our food by cooking some or all of it. Consider another theory: that we are able to digest exactly what we need to grow and remain optimally healthy when our balanced diet contains 99.9999% raw foods that meet our gastronomical needs.
I will try to prove my theory. Consider that our systems have developed over millions of years to digest, absorb and utilize all of those nutrients we require from raw foods and that any excess will result in decreased health, stamina, body development and clarity. Consider that such an excess will store in our bodies and cause biochemical and physiological changes that may not be optimal.
Compare the physiological structures of John Travolta, Blaire Brown, Kevin Costner, Steven Segal, and Mary Beth Hurt. I refer to them because most people know who they are and can easily rent their early and later movies. Compare each of them to how they were in their 20's, lean, muscular and relatively medium-boned to now in their 50-60's, very thick and full-bodied people. They do not have radically high fat levels but have concentrated tissues full of excessive minerals and proteins that are swollen and cauterized from cooked foods. Also, they have extreme water retention.
Considering only their present girth and not age, are they more agile and resilient now or when they were young and svelte? Are they more energetic and facile mentally and physically now or when they were younger? Why did they gain so much girth as they aged? Not everyone adds such girth with age but most people in the USA do, especially those born after World War II when processed foods became so prevalent.
We know that athletes who are svelte and muscular without being skinny are usually much more agile and quicker with excellent endurance. The only miraculous exceptions are people such as popular professional wrestlers; those relatively facile acrobats perform amazing feats but are rare individuals.
Consider that with our wealthier economy, we consume so much more cooked and processed food that we have become the most unhealthily obese civilization on Earth. Consider that on the balanced Primal Diet, 95% of us have to force-feed ourselves[1] to become obese. And, as soon as we stop force-feeding ourselves, 90% of us immediately begin to lose weight and girth. The other 10% do not because their bodies are in serious need of excessive fat because of extreme quantities of harmful toxins stored in their bodies. Are the celebrities I mentioned above thick now compared to their younger years because their bodies are protecting themselves from excessive stored toxicity as well as excessive minerals and protein from cooked foods?
Most people eating cooked and processed food have great difficulty being satisfied and want to eat a lot of food, unless they have certain digestive problems. Or, they may eat only to survive because they do not like food much. If cooking releases so many health-promoting nutrients, why are most people nutritionally unsatisfied, lack energy, are excessively thick and thick-skinned, obese and/or have diseases? Why do most people require caffeine, theobromine, stimulating drugs or nicotine to have energy? Why do most people eating a combination of cooked and raw foods shrink in height and their bodies distort with age?
Why, when I ate cooked food even though supplemented with some raw food, did I get so many diseases? Why, if cooked foods provided more needed nutrients, did my shoulders and chest not develop throughout my childhood and adolescence? Why, 2 months after I began eating raw meats (chicken, beef, fish, pork, snake and eggs) and 5 years of no cooked foods at age 29 did my shoulders and chest bones finally begin to develop and mature? Why did it only take my body one year of eating unfrozen raw meats to completely build and settle my shoulders and chest growths if raw food does not supply enough nutrients?
I have been eating 99.999999% raw foods for 36.5 years. During that time, I consumed no more than a total of 5 pounds of cooked food in the form of bread, air-popped corn or steamed rice with lots of raw butter. I have eaten raw meat for 32 years as of this month (September 2008). I am exactly the same height I was at 18 years young. All of my brothers who ate cooked foods supplemented with some raw foods have shrunk 1.5-2 inches. My father shrunk 2 inches by the time he was 62. When I am at the bottom of my travel-induced weight-loss cycle (once yearly traveling where I cannot get enough raw dairy), my waist is the same 30.5 inches as it was when I was 18 years young. Because my shoulders and chest developed only 31 years ago, my chest is 6 inches larger and weight is 20 pounds more than when I was 18. My brothers have not seen anything below a 33.5-inches waist since they were 30 years young.
I do not advocate that we should have thin waists. In fact, I advocate we have large fat-filled abdomens so that we will have enough fat to protect us from toxins already in our bodies as well as those that enter daily from our toxic environments. What I am representing here is that it is fairly easy to lose the weight once we have detoxified enough to safely lose abdomenal fat and water retention. Still, because I live in a toxic world, I prefer to have excess fat on all of my body. Finally, science supports that fat people have some healthier indications than skinny people, especially healthier hearts (which was just the opposite of what the medical profession has been saying for over 50 years).[2]
After my unnecessary appendectomy the week of my 12th birthday, I began to grossly overeat. I was never culinarily satisfied eating predominantly cooked foods. Within months of that week in hospital, I became obese. My brothers ridiculed and called me Fatty Arbuckle.
Immediately after my 3rd Polio vaccine at 15.5 years young, I turned diabetic and developed angina (the vaccine caused those problems[3]). From 1.5 years young, I disliked most cooked starches such as pastas, noodles and breads until I became diabetic at 15.5 years. When I became diabetic, I began to eat massive amounts of cooked starches and lose weight. Literally, over night I went from despising pasta to eating several plates of it at one meal with 4 slices of bread. I stopped digesting, assimilating and utilizing most food over night. I became thin for the first time in my life. I still suffered fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.
To have as much energy as my peers, I smoked 2 packs of cigarettes, drank up to 11 cups of black coffee and consumed benzedrine daily. To calm my body at night so that I could sleep, I drank up to 3 cups of alcohol, mainly hard liquor and consumed aspirin. The week of my 20th birthday, I began vomiting blood because of stomach ulcer. The alcohol and aspirin cause my stomach ulcer. Treatment for ulcer caused me to develop stomach cancer. For that, I received surgery and 10 weeks of intense radiation treatment. From radiation therapy, I developed blood and bone cancers (multiple myeloma) within one month. Chemotherapy was then administered for the blood and bone cancers from which I developed lymphoma within one month. I refused any more therapies.
For the third time, I was told I was going to die within 3 months. An 18-year young African- American boy who was a volunteer hospice-worker coerced me into drinking raw carrot juice and raw milk. Those foods changed and saved my life. If cooked foods are nutritious, why did I recover from such devastated health when I stopped eating cooked foods? If we were not getting enough nutrients from a 98-99.9999% raw diet, why are thousands of us doing so much better now than when we were eating so much cooked foods supplemented with raw foods? Why do we have more indications of increased health than people who eat 60%, 70% or even 90% raw?
Finding the answers and fine-tuning my Primal Diet
My progression throughout development of my diet was experimental. I did what worked and then suggested that others do the same. Everybody's health increased. By December, 1982, my Primal Diet was 70% developed. I had yet to discover that eating too much high-carbohydrate fruit and juices was deleterious. I had yet to learn that great benefits resulted from eating certain foods, and at certain times daily.
I was so addicted to high-carbohydrate fruits, I could not envision my diet without lots of it. However, I occasionally felt extremely over- emotional. When I auditioned for commercials, TV and films, I could not help but revert to my childhood fears of being expected to read in front of classmates when I was autistic and could not comprehend written or spoken words. I was ridiculed and punished for not reading; actually for being autistically unable to read. Adrenalin soured in my body and I stood dumbfounded in fear of usual discipline/abuse. By 23 years young, I began using meditative techniques to counter and harness those experiences but I lost many parts that I should have gotten because my work looked emotionally pushed and/or restrained. While eating so much high-carbohydrate fruit, I had difficulty creating balance behavior.
I knew that my adrenalin-charged states were not normal. I asked myself: What in my biochemistry caused those adrenalin-stupored conditions? Could I do anything about them? I noticed that I could easily become hyperactive and manic within 90 minutes after eating lots of high-carbohydrate fruits or juices. Until then, I had viewed those states as healthy high energy. Then I realized that because I could not control them enough, they interfered with what I wanted to achieve. I experimented with different eating patterns until I reached a point that I could control those conditions by 90%. I experimented endlessly. I began by reducing my consumption of high-carbohydrate fruits. I experimented with eating certain foods at certain times of the day.
By reducing my high-carbohydrate fruit intake from 30% of my diet to 5%, and eliminating high-carbohydrate fruit juices, my clarity and focus vastly improved. I could remain calm in most storms. That stage of my Primal-Diet development was realized and proved by experimentation (trial and error) on several hundred people by the year 2002. I listed the preferred eating schedules in my recipe book on pages 40-41. (With those suggestions, you may very well enjoy all of your life more, sooner than later.)
In 1999, I found other scientific support for my carbohydrate problems. Researchers at Columbia University found that glycogen byproducts (Advanced Glycation End-Products) produced many ills for humans even if our bodies made glycogen from raw fruits. However, I discovered that if our bodies made glycogen from raw proteins, the byproducts did not store, thus creating manic behavior or producing illness. It is my experienced and scientific conclusion that eating cooked food does not add anything to human needs, with one exception. That exception is cooked starch, such as rice, bread or pasta made with only water and yeast. It is useful for certain individuals at specific times to bind with excessive hormones or toxins when my raw Nut Formula is not effective. For more information about that, please read or re-read my books.
===
[1]: Fat binds with and neutralizes toxins, therefore I ask people to force-feed themselves to gain excessive fat levels to harness and bind with toxins that are stored in their bodies. Excessive fat allows our bodies to cleanse faster, safer and more thoroughly with less symptoms. Resultantly, we heal faster, safer and more thoroughly.
[2]: The Obese Without Cardiometabolic Risk Factor Clustering and the Normal Weight With Cardiometabolic Risk Factor Clustering;Prevalence and Correlates of 2 Phenotypes Among the US Population (NHANES 1999-2004), Arch Intern Med. 2008; 168(15):1617-1624.
[3]: Vaccines contain at least 5 poisons, most often they are liquid mercury and aluminum, formaldehyde, eather and detergent.