I recently asked Ward Nicholson if his position re: possible adaptation
to consuming cooked food (as expressed in his Jan 97 "Health & Beyond"
interview), had changed. Ward provided a long, but illuminating and
very interesting response. I asked him if I could post it to raw-food,
and he gave his permission. So, here is our correspondence. I think some
of you will find it of interest.
>Tom:
>I am outlining an article (or 2) for a future SF-LiFE newsletter, on some of
>the myths of raw foods. The article is a listing of myths, which are
>then *briefly* debunked (no long sections). One of the myths I want to debunk
>is the slogan "raw is law". In your H&B article, you discuss that we may
>have evolved genetically to handle some cooked food. Is this still your
>position? If you have a chance, let me know. This is not urgent, and I
>know you have lots of other things to do.
>Oh yes - I know about the predators eating animals killed by fire, and the
>example of animals eating cooked (& processed) foods at landfills, suggest
>that the "law" of nature is that animals are opportunists, not dogmatists.
>They eat what is available, without regard to whether it is cooked or not.
Ward Nicholson:
Hi Tom, I waited until Saturday to reply, due to being on tight deadlines
the latter half of the week.
Yes, this is one of the strongest arguments against any absolutist eating
philosophy. All animals are opportunists, but particularly the primates,
and most especially humans. Were this not so, humans would not have
developed stone tools around 2 million years ago, nor discovered and
learned to control fire later. I mention this because if one is going to
take an extreme stance as to "absolute naturalism" and disavow
fire/cooking, one would have to go back even before fire and disavow any
kind of tool use such as the stone tools that preceded fire, and until
rawists do that, they aren't even demonstrating awareness of the root
issues underlying the question. To my way of thinking, the saying "raw is
law" and all the other absolut-"isms" can trace their roots back to the
religious impulse towards "purity," perfection, etc. The reality in nature,
though, seems to be that there *is* no absolute purity nor perfection, just
relative degrees of it.
My position on cooked foods is still that we have probably genetically
evolved to handle a certain amount, but I go back and forth on the level of
adaptation, depending on the latest evidence or arguments I hear. Recently
Loren Cordain about had me convinced that humans were not adapted to
cooking at all. (I believe I already forwarded you a copy of his and my
correspondence on the question a few months ago.) And I had a conversation
with Stefan Joest some weeks back about the question, in which I told him I
felt the percentage of cooked food adapted for in the diet of homo may end
up being below 10%. (I told Stefan he could post our correspondence on the
Raw-Food list if he wanted, since he seemed a little put out that I was no
longer contributing to the list. So you may have already seen what I had to
say to him.)
However, while I have the utmost respect for Cordain, I am now of the
opinion he may be overlooking some important evolutionary reasoning, and
depending too much on present-day lab studies which I am skeptical are
detailed enough yet to answer the cooking question. To me, not enough is
known at the biochemical level at this point to really answer the question
definitively. And frankly, I suspect we may never fully know the answer
until the entire human genome is sequenced and the field of genetics
sufficiently advanced that we have can establish linkages between the
proteins and enzymes that individual genes code for, with the target food
molecules they are designed to break down--at the most reductionistic
level. Short of that, uncertainties will remain.
But here is my reasoning, point-by-point.
1. Humans are the ultimate opportunists. Obviously we developed stone tools
long ago and learned how to control fire, later developed the
bow-and-arrow, metallurgy, and ultimate all of today's high-tech stuff.
2. We can't rule out adaption to cooking or anything else just because some
think it is "unnatural." Natural/unnatural is beside the point. Or, a
different definition of "natural" is needed: which is that "adaptation"
(what actually makes something "natural") has strictly to do with genetic
mechanisms, which only require persistence of changes in environment or
behavior over a long enough period of time for evolutionary mechanisms to
result in genetic changes.
3. So the key questions to whether we are adapted to fire are: How long
have we been eating cooked foods and how consistent has the behavior been?
And how long does, or would, evolution of genetic adaptation take, given
this behavior? Unfortunately--and I have kept my eyes and ears open for a
long time on these two questions--nobody knows the answer to either of them
with anything approaching the level of confidence needed to answer the
question. So everything is still speculative.
In the H&B interview, I used the observation that probably 85-90% of
natural hygienists did better healthwise with cooked foods to suggest there
must have been some event in evolution that adapted us to cooked foods and
made them necessary for most people. The problem with that argument of
course, is that hygienists don't eat animal flesh, which according to the
latest anthropological evidence made up fully half of the diet of
prehistoric homo. Maybe if hygienists were to eat animal flesh--a much more
concentrated source of bioavailable fat and protein according, supposedly,
to modern food science studies--the need for cooked foods would diminish.
Loren Cordain suggests that the true value of cooked foods for vegetarians
is not that they are cooked, but simply that the cooking makes available
foods with more concentrated nutrients in the form of grains/legumes, root
vegetables, etc. (Though of course, grains/legumes are now believed to have
a detrimental side that can cause long-term problems and probably best
avoided.) And since the human gut changed considerably compared to the
other apes when we diverged from them, and became adapted/dependent on more
concentrated foods to support the larger human brain (which meant eating
much more animal flesh), it became less able to efficiently process foods
high in bulk and roughage (read: raw fibrous vegetable matter). On the
other hand, raw instinctos by and large, from what I have heard, don't
succeed that well either on an all-raw diet. But as Cordain also points
out, not even instinctos follow the practice of hunter-gatherers in
concentrating primarily on organ meats--brains, tongue, eyeballs, liver,
etc.--and the mesenteric fat and other fat depots.
Then you look at modern hunter-gatherers who *do* eat the organs
preferentially, and from what I know, most of them *still* cook up to half
of their food, including meat, vegetables, etc.! So do they "know"
something we don't simply through the empiricism of actually having to live
in the wild? Or is the cooking due to the fact they must make use of
sub-par available to them on the marginal habitats they have now been
pushed onto by encroaching civiliation, and cooking is necessary for those
reasons?
Another consideration when using modern h/g's as a model, though, is that
you have to acknowledge that they are just that--modern--and extrapolating
backward from them to our Paleolithic ancestors is tricky. On the other
hand, optimal foraging theory (which generally states that organisms aim to
get the "most energy and nutrient return from the least expenditure of
energy" when foraging for nutriment from foodstuffs) does in fact suggest
that the relative proportions of foodstuffs in the ancient Paleolithic diet
wouldn't have been much if any different from that of modern
hunter-gatherers. Unfortunately, however, this doesn't help us much where
fire/ cooking is concerned, except to say that if it took extra work to
cook a food that would have otherwise been edible raw, then the cooking
probably would not have been done.
But that only brings us back to the crux of the whole matter! The whole
advantage of fire in the first place would have been exactly that: To make
available foods that otherwise wouldn't have been edible, or to extend
their use. But this then gets you into questions of seasonable scarcity in
the food supply due to dry seasons, or the winter, not to mention human
migration into different environments where seasonal patterns of food
availability varied. The aborigines cook up to half their food, but they do
it from just such necessity, not whim. Again, however, this may be because
they are living in a marginal habitat. But another spoiler to this
question/observation is that homo is such a mobile species anyway--with
such a propensity for migration over evolutionary timespans--who's to say
how much different the "artificial" pressure of encroaching civiliations
that force modern h/g's onto marginal lands is that much different from the
fact they might have been pushed onto marginal lands by "natural" climatic
changes?! The deeper you look, the more it begins to seem that as far as
the genus homo is concerned, omnivorousness (which might include cooking as
part of the omnivorous ability) and opportunism define us.
As Dean Esmay pointed out recently on the Paleofood list in opposition to
Troy Gilchrist (co-author of NeanderThin and adamant total-raw-foodist who
admits of stone tool use on the one hand as part of the human adaptation,
but doesn't acknowledge fire as a tool), it is hard indeed to imagine that
an animal as sapient and opportunistic as tool-using homo would not have
taken every advantage it could find, including fire. Do we really not think
homo erectus or homo sapiens of 100000, 200000, or 500000 years ago, gazing
into the fire not too many years after first control, idly doodling with a
stick or other tool, would not, by and by, have flipped a piece of meat
into the fire, and discovering it later, would not have sampled it? To me
it stretches credulity to suggest otherwise.
But this is still speculation of course. Ultimately, the question is not
answerable right now, I don't think. The two strongest arguments are that
fire has been around at least a good 200-300000 years, if not 500000. Even
if it were only around 100000 where regular cooking is concerned, that is
about on the cusp of the amount of time the bulk of most current forms of
human genes took to reach their latest forms--again, making the question
hard to answer.
Earlier I said that I believe relying on current-day food science to the
exclusion of evolutionary reasoning about cooked foods can obscure the
issues. This is because just because a food carries some degree of toxicity
doesn't automatically mean it is "bad" for us in the sense it should be
avoided--because no food is without it's digestive costs. I think what food
purists completely miss is the "cost/benefit" viewpoint. Evolution is a
compromise, a best-fit compromise to be sure given competing selective
pressures sometimes at odds, but a compromise nonetheless. This means
adaptation is probably not ever completely perfect. The question then
becomes, when you are analyzing any toxins in foods: Just where do you draw
the line at what the body can normally safely handle within it's
evolutionary design parameters, as far as processing out impurities or
non-usables in foodstuffs? This is what the kidneys, liver, and intestines
are for, after all. To me, this is the key question, not whether there are
toxins or not in foods.
This brings up the question of "safety margins." There was an interesting
piece on just this question a few years ago in Discover magazine, when they
looked at the question of why isn't the skeletal system stronger than it is
to better resist any broken bones. And what it came down to was that,
again, there are costs and there are benefits. To devote any more metabolic
resources than necessary to building a stronger skeleton means resources
that are closed off to other uses. You are back at evolutionary compromises
between competing selective pressures again. An interesting statistic from
the article was, if I am remembering correctly, in many biological systems,
there is a safety or "ultimate peak stress load factor" of around (I hope I
am getting this figure right; I may not be) about twice the average peak
load experienced. That is, the bones/muscles can handle freak momentary
impact forces of twice normal peak impact forces before breaking or
tearing. Whatever the actual figure is, and with variations in the safety
margin, the same applies to other biological systems.
Thus, you have to look at "ranges" rather than absolute amounts where the
body's ability to homeostatically handle and derive benefit from inputs and
stressors is concerned. Again, this mitigates against "absolutist"
viewpoints that say absolutely no toxins should be tolerated. Were that
really the case, we would probably be dead within minutes of eating almost
any meal of anything. So to bring this back to the cooking question, the
fact cooking may carry with it certain costs such as increasing levels of
certain toxins would have to weighed against the fact it can decrease the
levels of other toxins as well as make a food more edible (root vegetables,
etc.). In a rough-and-tumble evolutionary environment, this may have been a
worthwhile advantage. We just don't know yet.
What absolutists don't like to look at it is that nature and evolution
simply aren't perfect. Ultimately, we all die no matter how well, or what,
we eat. That is the final proof that nature is not perfect--at least not
from the individual's point of view. One current theory of aging says that
the very stuff of life--oxygen--may at the same time be the ultimate agent
of aging since it is oxygen that makes free radicals and the slow
cumulative damage they cause over a lifetime possible. The body has it's
systems for limiting the amount of free-radical damage, but they too, are
in the end not perfect.
Actually, the way I see it from a more philosophical point of view,
imperfection is part of the very mechanism of evolution itself, because
another way of saying imperfection is to call it "variability." And it is
variability--and the fact certain organisms with unfavorable variations in
a generation die out before leaving behind their full quota of
progeny--that allows nature to select the most fit (notice, not perfect,
just "most fit") organisms to try again the next time. Nature/evolution is
a game of try/try again without ever getting it perfect, because the
playing field is always shifting. It's a dance, a journey, not a
destination (absolute end).
So while begging off and saying I don't know the answer to the cooking
question--other than to say I lean at this point towards believing based on
the evidence so far available that we are adapted to it to some degree--one
thing I'll offer in closing to perhaps give a new twist is that I actually
don't think the cooking conundrum is the most important one about foods
anymore. I believe I said somewhere in some post to someone that recent
evidence posted on the Paleo lists seem to make it clear that whether a
food is cooked or not is overshadowed instead by the proportions and
amounts of nutrients in the diet *overall*--and from what sources they come.
That is, it's more important to look at the balance and quality of fat and
protein in the diet and their sources (animal vs. plant), and avoiding the
real killers which seem to be the trans-fats and high levels of carbs and
especially refined carbs in causing insulin resistance, which can lead to a
whole host of problems. My money at the moment is on
hyperinsulinism/insulin resistance (basically caused by eating too many
carbs, especially refined ones, but even fruit) as one of the underlying
tectonic plates in the puzzle piece of diet leading to many of our
civilizational diseases.
In this analysis, from a psychological point of view, the raw vs. cooked
question looks to me to be more of a diversion that vegetarians occupy
themselves with so they can continue to avoid the more important question
they have already closed off all inquiry about: the value of the fats and
proteins in animal flesh. Especially when brain encephalization research is
showing more and more strongly that the large human brain could not have
evolved without large quantities of dense animal food, you have to wonder
what vegetarians are doing ignoring the role of animal flesh in making us
into the very species we are in the first place.
Basically, to justify vegetarianism in the face of this kind of evidence, I
can only see 2 logical "outs": (a) that we must now become conscious agents
in evolution, take the bull by the horns, and make ourselves into
vegetarians (through genetic engineering if we have to) because we flat-out
reject eating animals, even if we evolved eating them; or (b) we must
become vegetarians for *ethical* reasons even if we are by nature omnivores.
Needless to say, I look dubiously on either approach. However what is
interesting to me is both of these are philosophical/ ethical questions
rather than biological ones. It will be interesting to see how much longer
the vegetarian world can continue to ignore the ever-more overwhelming
evidence that our ancestors were not even close to vegetarian but more than
likely an equal-opportunity omnivore.
Musing a bit about this, here, I would suppose one might look for
vegetarianism to inevitably be forced towards a mostly ethical rationale in
the future--at least if the scientific findings make their way public
(which is no guarantee). Right now it is based perhaps half on "science,"
half on ethics. When the scientific rug finally gets pulled out from under
the vegetarian community's feet to the point the majority understand it and
cannot deny it, it will be exceedingly interesting to see what transpires.
This might be awhile, of course, given the American public's distaste for
evolution as a population with a Judeo-Christian heritage. However, one
would suspect given our country's governing subconscious religious code and
heritage, it will be very likely that the vegetarian movement would become
even more ingrained in its "religious" approach. Either that, or it will
have to learn as the modern environmental movement has that walking more
softly is more effective in the long run.
Hope this tome did not wear on your patience, Tom. My answer to the cooking
question comes down to: "I don't know for sure, but I think so; and I think
cooking is not the most important question--rather vegetarianism vs.
intelligent omnivorism is."
--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS
P.S. Thanks for the refs on the insectivory of gorillas. Very interesting
to see more up-to-date citations and more detail than I had before. Muchas
appreciadas!
>From [log in to unmask] Sat Jul 26 13:36 PDT 1997
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 15:40:08 -0500
To: "Thomas E. Billings" <[log in to unmask]>
>P.S. 1) can I post your e-mail to raw-food? Others there would find it of
>interest.
>2) Attached below is some more material you might find of interest.
Hi again, Tom, thanks for the feedback, and sure, feel free to post my
email to Raw-Food if you think it would be of interest there. And thanks,
too, for the additional refs on brain/body-size and metabolic energetics!
Nice to have on hand. Take care,
--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS
Tom:
Thanks to Ward Nicholson for giving permission to post the above!
P.S. my article on the myths of raw foods will be posted to both raw-food and
veg-raw, of course. I have a list/partial outline, but it will be a while
(maybe a few weeks) before I write the article, as there are items to be
done before it....
Regards,
Tom Billings
[log in to unmask]
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