Zephyr said:
>Yeah, I agree about the caged rabbit and Guinea pig thing.  I wouldn't
>want a cage, but if one was already living in apartment so out of the
>cycle of life, that would be a step in a more direct relationship
>with life.

This is true but I would be hesitant to comprise the life quality of an
animal to satisfy my nutritional needs even with animal foods only
being 5-10 % of my diet. I somehow do not see every apartment or house
supplying each household with the needs for these foods.  For one thing
a lack of space would make such a plan prohibitive.

>For me, I think it would be a regression, I'd like to make a secure
>but large outdoor space for such animals.

A luxury that is beyond the means of most people as there is so little
available land these days, and what is unused should be left for
wildlife habitat.

>I wonder if this is a solution on a larger scale.

Quality animal foods on a larger scale are going to require some mass
production.  How this can be done without comprising the quality and
the life of the animals is one of the major challenges facing
instinctive eaters today.

>Until people are again roaming nomadically, it will be basically
>impractical to set up the lives of our dependable animal foods to be
>that way too.

That is probably never going to happen. The planet is just too
overcrowded.

>(As a side response to an NFL post,  I wonder how many computer
>factories, book printers, oil refineries, or nurseries they've worked
>in?  I see myself as like a young child in my tribe.  I don't go hunt,
>that's what the older men do.  Unfortunately my culture of tribes is
>all fucked up and I can't learn from them how to hunt, but I don't
>have guilt at not killing all my meat, not in a I'm a fake instincto
>hypocrite way.

Great arguments!

>Peter, I think you're hunting up the wrong tree.  The whole paradigm
>of talking about vitamins and minerals etc. is a head trip, though a
>very reassuring and well founded head trip


Zephyr, I am not clear what you are responding to here. (in future
please remember to include some of the text you are responding to)  But
since we are live in such a polluted & alienated world,  I do not
believe that our natural instincts can protect us fully from the all
the adverse effects of it.  It is not in our genetic make-up to deal
with these complex issues.

>When I stopped thinking
>about food and started smelling and tasting food and feeling my own
>body I began feeling better, eating better, and making decisions about
>life that felt more bodily-based and fulfilling.  Deer and Dolphins
>don't think about vitamins and minerals, so why should I/we?

Many deer & dolphins would probably do well with some supplements as
they are coming down with all sorts of diseases these days.

>The key word in the subject of this post is magic.  There is magic in
>food, in meat, in life.  It cannot be fragmented and understood via
>the mind and such simplistic maps as vitamin B.  If we needed
>"vitamin B" there'd be a vitamin B plant or animal for us to eat.  I
>propose that what we need is the relationship, the communication, the
>experience, the surrender, and the desire that occurs in instinctive
>eating and living.  I relate with my food (yes, still at times
>neurotically or from my cerebral cortex); I don't want to analyze it.
>Thinking vitamin B is what we get from food is like thinking milk is
>what we get from nursing.  Milk is a significant part of it, but it is
>the whole bio-chemical, surrendered, tantric communication between
>mother, tribe, world, and infant that is feeding the baby, not merely
>the substantive milk. This is the story that I "buy," not the
>scientific materialism answer.

Words of wisdom spoken by a true idealistic romantic, but not enough to
repair the damage and get the job done.  IMO it is not about either or
but both and. Example:  Many nursing mothers would probably be able to
give their babies a lot more nourishment & love if they were on prozac.


Bob A. said:
>> True positive adaptation only occurs when selective pressures are
>>brought to bear. For example, in our society hamburger & fries
>>eaters have  many  more children than raw  vegans (which is the
>>case), this does not mean that our species is evolving toward being
>>able to thrive on this fare (or, rather, "unfair") because there are
>>no selective pressures involved. And they seem to make up for the few
>>cases where their diseases cause them to die young by much more
>>overbreeding in the aggregate vs us raw fooders.

Many of the selective forces of evolution are still alive and well
today, but do not guarantee for the survival of the human species, just
that those with the best suited genetic make-up to fit the
circumstances will have the best chances of surviving.  That fact that
most diseases that kill SAD eaters occur after they have already
reproduced will not prevent natural selection from taken place.
Pottenger's cat studies made this clear, and in the US today already
something like 25% of men are sterile - no amount of overbreeding can
reverse this trend.  And as Ward has pointed out in stressing the
importance of kinship and old age, health & longevity are equally
important factors in the evolutionary equation as reproduction and mere
survival

Douglas said:
>You can't correlate reproductive rates with the health
>of INDIVIDUALS too well, maybe with the 'health' (defined in terms
>of total numbers) of the species as a whole.  Indeed, I could make
>the case that in many instances reproduction rates seems to
>correlate with unhealthiness.

No argument here.

>I sort of disagree with Ward here
>too, in that all evolution might do is select for
>survival/reproductive traits in the environment at hand.  Thus if we
>evolved in an environment (such as the Arctic) where meat was
>plentiful & plants rare, there would obviously be
>survival/reproductive benefits from selecting humans better suited
>to meat eating.  But this does not mean that if we take these humans
>& switch their diets back to predominately veg. that you will not
>also be doing them a favor (indeed, I strongly suspect you will).

Interesting perspective.  If eskimoes living in their Artic environment
were fed a high vegetable diet would they do better?  Or how about
eskimos who leave the Artic, but who go on a similar high vegetable
diet in their new non-arctic environment.  Genetic adaptation means
that those who adapt best to the limitations of a certain environment
have a good chance of surviving.  But that normally means adjusting to
small changes over a long span of time. What kind of elasticity is
built into the evolutionary process concerning sudden changes like many
of those confronting modern man today?

>All the evolutionary arguments can allow us to conclude (& again, I
>think Ward has demolished the Garden of Eden/fruitarian scenario) is
>that we evolved in an environment in which meat was present.  It is a
>logical error to then use this to conclude that meat is good.
>IT MAY be, or MAY NOT be, & this may be true for SOME, not ALL.

Since we evolved eating meat and since we are the only human species
alive today, it does not seem like a huge leap of logic to contend that
the rest of the hominoid species died out because they did not adapt
well to meat-eating.  Obviously it was advantageous for Homo Sapiens to
eat meat, yet you are proposing that even though our survival as a
species depended on eating it, some of us can now do optimally without
it.  I disagree (as much as I can as a vegan :-)), as meat has been
with us for many millions of years, though I do think that many of us
could probably get away by just eating small amounts.

Bob A. said:
>I'm probably going to start an uproar with this comment, but
>it does seem to me that the zeal with which the instinctos are
>preaching RAF (sounding at a higher decibel level to me than even the
>3Dudes) might be born of a guilty conscience.  It's sort of like, "We
>gotta convince all these vegans it's OK so we won't have to feel
>guilty about what we're doing ourselves."

What I find so healthy and refreshing about instinctos is that they
unlike vegans seem so devoid of any feelings of guilt, which  is not a
very constructive feeling anyhow.  Bob, the only way you can really get
to the truth of the matter would be to confront your own feelings of
guilt and give RAF a real chance by eating liberal amounts of it by for
a while.

Douglas said:
>I'm forwarding this snip which I got off another list.  Iron levels
>have a close correlation with heart disease & cancer, & I thought
>the RAFefarians might find this useful.  I'm starting to suspect
>that not just iron, but other minerals (particularly calcium) get
>absorbed in a pathological way when eating cooked and/or meat foods.

On a natural, whole foods diet I do not believe this is anything to
concerned about.

Ward said
>A brief clarification is required here. Yes, the scanning electronic
>microscope studies show that Australopithecus (roughly 2.5 to 3.7
>million years ago) and Homo habits (dating to roughly 2 million yea.)
>were largely frugivorous, but they also show that they ate some meat.
>They also show that some of the botanically-classed-as-fruit items
>eaten were tough and pod-like, thus more like "vegetables" in
>composition, as we might classify some of those items today [same
>literature refs as my "chimps and meat"

In your references are they specific about what fruits are the mainstay
of the chimp diet?
BTW, I have thouroughly enjoyed all your postings on this and related
subjects.

Kirt said:
>Kirt here:I woke up figuring this out and just couldn't _not_ share
>this one with y'all...(and remember: it's a _joke_!!)

Your veg-raw heaven piece was a stroke of genius!  Though, I was a
little surprised not to find three naked men in the vegan Hell serving
RAF to their leader. ;-)


Sandy said:
>Peter, I bet we were at the same workshop!  It was held at the
>Metaphysical Church 12/92 and I didn't know all you other people at
>the time but only knew who Elysa was.  Had to be the same event, he
>hasn't returned as far as I know. What were your impressions of him
and the event?

The food was delicious, and I enjoyed the workshop very much.  Gabriel
Cousins is very knowledgeable man, though I find his spiritual practice
a little invasive & tiresome and his fees for private consultations
quite exorbitant.

Ward said:
>>microscope studies show that Australopithecus (roughly 2.5 to
>> 3.7 million years ago) and Homo habits (dating to roughly 2 million
>> yea.) were largely frugivorous, but they also show that they ate
>>some meat.

Douglas said:
>And I would add that this is precisely the same with modern chimps
>(who eat about 2/3rds fruit), so it looks like diet has not changed
>all that much & there has been a remarkable consistency in hominid
>diet for a long time.  This would not have been the case unless
>there were strong arguments in favor of this evolutionarily, & the
>question needs to be answered just what is it in RAF that is
>beneficial?  Is it simply an adaptation designed to grant survival
>during times when plant foods were scarce, or is it also designed to
>provide specific nutrients? Are we having trouble answering these
>questions because there are one or more undiscovered nutrients?

Excellent questions.  But since there has never been a time in hominid
development where amimal foods did not play if just a small role in the
diet, it would seem that they were also needed for their nutritional
value.

>It may be that both are more concentrated in animal than in
>plant foods, & certainly there is a possibility of mineral
>deficiencies in any local soil.  By eating animals there is a
>greater chance of taking in minerals picked up by animals
>(especially fish or birds & their eggs) which had traveled into a
>region from afar, even if they are several animals removed from the
>final animal you eat.  This meshes well with Weston Price's work, in
>which he pointed out how some inland peoples went to great efforts
>to insure they had a little seafood to insure sufficient minerals.

This argument can not be used for our hunter & gatherer ancestors whose
diet was abundant with minerals, which leaves us with the conclusion
that even under the most optimal of conditions, some meat plays an
integral part of the human diet.


Douglas said:
>Can Roy or somebody expand on adrenal depletion symptoms (& why
>they might appear) & B12 deficiency symptoms?  Thanks,

Having a low threshold for stress and unstable blood sugar levels are
typical symptoms.  A too high consumption of fruits will over time in
most people exhaust the adrenals which play an important part in
regulating the blood sugar.

Peter said:
>Digging through "The Retardation of Aging and Disease by Dietary
>Restriction" by Weindruch and Walford, they say on page 8:
>"The lifespan extending effects seem to depend quite specifically on
>energy (calore) restriction alone, since restriction of fat (...),
>protein (...), or carbohydrate (Dalderup & Visser, 1969) *without*
>entergy restriction does not increase the maximum species-specific LS
>of rodents."
>The reference is "Dalderup and Visser: Influence of extra sucrose in
>the daily food on the life-span of Wistar albino rats.  Nature,
>222:1050, 1969". I haven't read this, but it is on my list now.  I'll
>report back if/when I get to it.  This is by no means definitive; lots
>of rat research this old failed to give adequate vitamins and
>nutrients, thus invalidating results about lifespan.

Douglas, from the life extension newsgroup I picked the above, which
suggests that restricting specific macronutrients like protein only
does not extend lifespan. I still have not had time to check out the
references you pointed me to, but if the studies that you refer to use
fragmented /synthetic proteins to prove that too much protein has
deleterious effects on health & longevity, I would seriously question
the results. (if I have made this point before I do not recall your
response)

Best Peter
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