On Monday, February 23, 2004, at 10:31 AM, Lurisia Dale wrote:
> I guess my question is just
> why, in theory, are yams bad at all? Is it
> simply because they need to be cooked? Do
> enough toxins remain after cooking for them
> still to be unhealthful?
>
In the case of yams, I don't know. A lot of roots are full of strong
poisons. Cooking reduces these to the point where there is no
immediately notable effect. The question is whether there is a long
term effect. If your whole diet is mainly made up of things that have
small long term negative effects, by the time you are my age,40s, you
feel like sh*t. This is why so many middle aged people are so dopy all
the time. Constipation, headaches, allergies, hay fever and asthma,
skin troubles, overweight etc etc, it just all adds up. Add to that
modern junk foods and you see why so many kids are now affected by
diseases normally associated with old age, like diabetes.
It is even worse if you come from a group not adapted over the long
term to a particular food. Wheat is our favorite example. Middle
Easterners have maybe 10-15,000 years of history eating wheat. My own
probable ancestors, what I know of them, didn't eat much wheat until a
few hundred years ago at most. They did eat grains, but mainly oats and
other cold tolerant grains. So it is not surprising that wheat, not a
part the paleo diet, nor even my ancestors neolithic diet, gives me
trouble. I guess that wheat eating is a lot less troublesome for most
Middle Easterners, and yams don't bother South East Asians much either.
The people who were most sensitive died young a long long time ago.
For myself, I still eat the occasional sandwich or cake, and yams,
potatoes, soy etc too. But never enough to make any a major part of my
diet. Humans have tremendous abilities to adapt to various foods, as
long as most of what we eat is good. In the paleo context, foods like
wheat, or wild, highly poisonous yams, were starvation foods, mainly
eaten when regular foods failed, or seasonal foods that gave plenty of
off time for the body to cope with them.
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