I'm taking advantage of new internet connection at work to have a look at
Raw-Food list  for a day or two.
 I wanted    to correct a one or two errors  in Tom's "Myths about raw
foods" , and to congratulate Jean Louis for his diplomacy in pointing out
many exaggerations, although I concur with  the overall spirit of the Tom's
post  .
  { Hi, Jean Louis, it's been a long time ....You are too kind with
allopathic medecine, and probably too naive on some aspects  : the terrific
successes in  the art of surgery,  from the  XIX th c.  onwards, should not
be related to  the modest improvements made in the practice of the
therapeutical art. I would advise you to read books on the history of
hippocratic medicine.   Hygienism, Vegetarianism, Raw-foodism and the likes
share a basic common philosophy  of health and disease which was still
alive and well  in the middle of the XIX th c., and which could be traced
back to the so-called  hippocratric tradition of western medicine . If one
is to judge  by the  books which were published by some of the highest
medical authorities right before Pasteur (circa 1850), the  hippocratic
tradition of "Nature Cure"  had a much  higher official  profile than
today. Amongst the various hippocratic schools, the  " instinctual  current
of thought"  which is our main concern,  represented nothing else  but  the
"anti-rationalist" , romantic, elitist,   rightist  wing of hippocratic
medicine, which  boasted many eminent personalities in arts and science at
the beginning of the XIXth c   .  Rationalists (mostly anti-instinct) and
vitalists (mostly  pro-instincts, even though the frontiers are not that
obvious  ) fought for the supremacy on the world of ideas  throughout the
XIX , in all the fields of human knowledge ( biology, medicine, physiology,
economy... ) . Finally   Pasteurean rationalism succeeded in  invading
medicine and  throwing  out supporters of  healthy dieting and food ethics
from their strongholds in the faculties  of medicine  ( I have at home an
"anti-Pasteurean"   treatise of "Natural Immunology",  which can be
considered  a 1895 "swan song" book  of hippocratic medicine,  written  by
some eminent physician at Paris Faculty of medicine) Starting from 1890 ,
no further studies of man's immunity and how to strenghten it without
vaccination and other allopathic tools   were considered  on an official
agenda in France's Facult? de Medecine  (it took more years in America...
because of the strong opposition of the churches to vaccination ) .
Opponents to Pasteur were then left to play in  the burgeoning field of
Medical Anthropology where their "Nature knows it all" anthem  could not do
any harm to pasteurean  medicine (since it was considered that "what is
right for the savage, is not necessarily right for the civilized" ) .
Medical anthropology was at that time  a haunt of rightist and  racist
physicians... Wilfully and unwilfully the heirs of Pasteur have   ruined
the cause of hippocratic medicine in order to be able to impose to impose
their own interventionnist conception of health. It is their fault if
hygienism is nowadays relegated to small circles of "weirdos" without
decent representation in official  Faculties  (with the exception  of
homeopathy  which proved easier and more valuable to recuperate and
promote,  for a couple of reasons not worth mentionning here...  ) .
 History, Jean Louis,  tells you were your  enemies hide  .  }

Now to the beef, if a (quasi) vegetarian may say so :

- Mental hygiene and raw food : yes , of course raw food has definitely
beneficial effect on mental health. This has been proved again and again at
the turn of the century by the so called group of  "alienists", french,
english  and italian psychologists and psychiatrists experimenting the so
called "synthetic diet" in jailhouses  ( synthetic in the sense of
synthesis of all necessary nutrients in a meal  not in the sense of
artificial feeding )  . Eugenist physicians   further amplified these early
research . I'm simply  amazed to read that raw fooders  should protect
themselves against the deleterious mental after-effects of raw diet. If
anything, Tom himself probably didn't protect himself enough from his own
infringements to the 100% raw diet  ....As far as I'm concerned I have
witnessed a sharp drop in my paranoid tendency  after my dietary change
(this change was most noticeable at work, where I can easily claim to be
less paranoid than a large number of my colleagues ( Please note that I
wrote paranoid and not paranoiac ). I leave it up to you to decide whether
this claim is in itself a sign of increasing schizophrenia ....

- Definition of Natural Food : Tom wrote something like "foods with which
we have evolved throughout prehistory" . This is too deterministic in my
view. I would rather keep to the definition given by a long forgotten
american naturopath back in 1914 (from heart) : "The natural food is
whatever  food which , unprocessed, appeals to the sense of sight, smell
and taste" . There is a fluctuating, undetermined, relativistic sound in
this definition which brings it closer to the spirit of instinctive
nutrition. We have not evolved with eggshells as a regular part of our diet
but eggshells can be excellent when needed (supposedly strong deficiency in
calcium...)

- It was said that Caffeine is toxic but doesn't kill. This is wong. Honore
de Balzac,one of french foremost fiction writer of the XIXth c died in
1850, at the age of 51, of cardiac hypertrophy , a very rare disease due to
caffeine abuse.
It was him who wrote :
"Any excess is based on a pleasure which man tries to repeat beyond the
ordinary laws promulgated by Nature."
Strangely, in one of his book , he gives  a premonitory account of his own
death  :
(translation dpeyrat)
"The english government has allowed to dispose of the lives of three
condemned, to whom were given the option between being hanged, as is the
custom in this country, or to live exclusively one on tea, another on
coffee, another one on chocolate drink, without resorting to any other food
of whatever kind,  nor to drink any other liquid. The drolls agreed. May be
any other person sentenced to death would have done the same. As each
aliment offered more or less chance for survival, they drew lots.
The man who lived on chocolate died after eight months
The man who lived on coffee lasted two years
The man who lived on tea succumbed only after three years
I suspect the East India Company (ndt: they had monopoly on tea trade...)
to have sollicited this experiment in the interests  of its  business.
 The man with chocolate died in an appalling state of rottenness, devoured
by maggots. His limbs fell one after the other, as those of the spanish
monarchy
The man with coffee died burnt, as if  the  fire of Gomorrah  had charred
him. One could have made   lime out of his remains. It was proposed but the
experiment looked contrary to the immortality of the soul.
The man with tea became meager, and almost diaphanous he died of
consumption , looking like a street light : one could see clearly through
his body; a philantropist could read the Times , with the help pf a light
placed in the back of his body.  English decency prevented a more original
tentative.
I cannot but remark how philantropic it is to use the condemned instead of
guillotining him brutally. ... That the condemned be brought to the savants
instead of bringing him to  the headsman. "
He concluded by :
"Public nutrition , taken as a whole, is an immense part of politics (ndt:
Balzac was an ardent reformer) and the most neglected; I even dare to say
that it is in infancy."  Honore de Balzac 1839.

Denis