> But that's just it, rawists don't view all cooked food as equally bad, they see it as a sliding-scale where raw is best and the less you cook the food the healthier the food is for you. It's the cooked-food-advocates, by contrast, who usually state that since lightly-cooked food isn't  supposedly "all that harmful", that  therefore all cooked food is fine. At least that's a common argument I hear from them.
>   
Ok, I understand. Now, does this apply to all foods? And what is used to 
define 'healthier'? Is it nutrient availability? What about certain 
plant foods wherein the nutrients are more bioavailable when they are 
cooked? I guess I don't understand how healthier is defined in this 
context and perhaps what foods are involved and which, if any, aren't.

I suppose my next question would be even if nutrients in raw meat (for 
example) are present in greater quantities than in cooked, does that 
then mean that the nutrients in cooked meat aren't present in ENOUGH 
quantity to be useful? How does one know? At what level of cooking do 
the nutrients become unavailable? How do we know?
> re Stefansson:- His study can't really be described as meaning anything as he was allowed to go unsupervised for the latter part of the experiment.Plus it was far too short for any possible conclusions to be drawn, quite aside from the other flaws already mentioned.
>   
He and Andersen were routinely tested throughout, but I agree it wasn't 
ideal metabolic ward situation. That would be difficult for a year! I 
don't at all agree that we can't extrapolate anything at all from it.
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> I suppose the only definitive way to show the benefits of cooked or raw food would be to do a study comparing an all-cooked diet with an all-raw one. However, since raw meats are frowned upon by the establishment re ridiculous concerns re bacteria etc., it's going to take a long time before that happens. Still, it would be fun to see someone trying to survive, long-term,  on a diet with everything thoroughly cooked, even fruits.
>   
Even still, one would have to control for the effects of the type of 
food in the diet. Some people do not react well to the fructose in 
fruit, regardless if it's cooked or not. Some people react to certain 
veggies, cooked or not. Sometimes cooking/not cooking effects how a 
person reacts to a plant food especially. I'd think it would be hard to 
control for the variables in the foods themselves in order to isolate 
the effects of cooking/not cooking food. Perhaps the testing would have 
to be on just raw vs cooked meat - even then, degrees of cooking would 
have to be tested as well (raw through well-done & shoe leathery)
>  That's what I was saying re the hunter-gatherers, the fact that they generally ate some raw animal foods as a sizeable  part of their diet(eg:- masai/inuit), along with the standard cooked foods, helped to reduce or eliminate some of the (modern) health-problems they would otherwise have incurred. As regards Stefansson's study, again, it's too short-term and too flawed for any conclusions to be drawn therefrom.
>   
But how do we KNOW that it was the inclusion of some raw foods that was 
protective, and not that they were effectively NOT eating 'civilized' 
foods that was beneficial? What do you mean by the standard cooked 
foods? Are you sugegsting that if, for example, inuit had cooked all of 
their foods they would have fallen ill? Or only if they had cooked all 
of their foods well done?
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> Geoff
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>> Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:13:33 -0400
>> From: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: How fire made us human
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>> Geoffrey Purcell wrote:
>>     
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>       
>> 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.
>>     
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>       
>> 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?
>>     
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>       
>> 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.
>>     
>>> 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)
>>     
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