Geoffrey Purcell wrote:
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> Well, cooked meat doesn't contain vitamin C, unlike raw meats. Plus, cooking reduces the nutrients in raw meats, in a sliding scale where boiling meats annihilates the enzymes and bacteria along with some of the vitamins and minerals, while harsher cooking methods do much worse damage.
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Personally, I'm not opposed to the idea that overcooked meats have less 
nutrients available. I just don't see why this then becomes a raw vs 
cooked argument, ie ALL cooking is bad.
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> Re Stefansson/Bellevue Experiment:- I generally wince every time Stefansson is mentioned as  a supposed authority on diet. For one thing, many things he states or claims are contradicted by other anthropologists such as Weston-Price(eg:- re the issue of organ-meats), plus he was famously condemned as a fraud for his other theory re the so-called "Blond Eskimoes" in Greenland, at one point.
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I don't think Stef is an authority on diet at all. He related his 
experience with the particular Inuit he spent time with - not ALL Inuit. 
Their diets naturally differed depending on where they lived. The ones 
he lived with (Mackenzie) did eat some organ meat, but not a ton. Other 
peoples in other areas ate more, or less, or had different attitudes 
about them. Anyway, I agree the man was hardly perfect (he was extremely 
arrogant). Doesn't discount his experience entirely though, does it?
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> More to the point, Stefansson is actually described as eating at least some raw meats during his Belluevue experiment(namely raw marrow), and didn't always eat his meats well-done, but sometimes rare. And the experiment lasted only 1 lousy year, and, after a while wasn't even rigorously supervised.
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So perhaps then even a little bit of raw/undercooked meat does the 
trick? Until we see a study comparing a cooked meat/fat diet to a raw 
meat/fat diet, we can't really say with any authority. Nor can we say 
that 'cooking' is the problem...perhaps rare, or even med-rare retains 
enough and/or keeps what it does contain bio-available. We simply don't 
have the data (or at least I don't, but if you do I would be really 
interested in seeing it). And does this apply to all flesh foods, or 
merely ruminants? What about fish? Poultry? etc etc.
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> As regards malnutrition, there are some raw vegans who don't even show b12-deficiency until many years later, as the body finds ways to conserve b12-levels from other sources etc.
Point taken. Other deficiency diseases, such as scurvey, can show up 
rapidly, sometimes in a matter of weeks. Depends. (And yes, I know that 
scurvey was often cured with raw meat)