>From:	Michael Clingman <[log in to unmask]>

>> Kirt wrote:
> >There's no all-raw culture either. Hmmm...

> Yeah, this may now be true, but was it always true for our
> species,  the only one which is not all-raw?  How is it that every
> animal in nature can do just fine without eating any cooked food,
>but  we need  it?  I don't buy it.

>What about eskimos?  It doesn't seem like they would have
> much wood to cook things with.

Thank you Mike, you are of course correct.  The Eskimos enjoyed
supurb health on an essentially raw diet, and Arctic explorers who
attempted to eat a cooked meat diet got into trouble until they
adopted the Eskimos' diet.

>From "Cancer: Disease of Civilization?" by V. Stefansson:

page 55 et seq. [quoting Dr. Hutton] 'Some diseases common in Europe
have not come under my notice during a prolonged & careful survey of
the health of the Eskimos.  Of these diseases the most striking is
cancer.  I have not seen or heard of a case of malignant new growth
in an Eskimo.  In this connection it may be noted that cookery holds
a very secondary place in the prearation of food- most of the food
is eaten raw, & the diet is a flesh one.... Plain raw flesh is the
Eskimo's favorite food;'  [He goes on to note that dried & boiled
meats are also eaten, but the vast majority of the diet was raw
meat.  During the warm months shellfish & fish are eaten, primarily
raw, but some is boiled.  Almost no plant foods.  These reports are
from Labrador.  A tendency of the Eskimos to hemorrhage was
observed.]  'Old age sets in at 50 & its signs are strongly marked
by the time 60 is reached.  In the years beyond 60 the Eskimo is
aged & feeble.  Comparatively few live beyond 60 & only a very few
indeed reach 70.'  Pass the protein please.  Who needs Kervorkian
when we've got meat?  He's just a little faster.

It seems to me that many are entering the meat/veggie and/or
cooked/raw debate with a view toward finding evidence to support
their pre-conceived notions or proclivities.  I know I do.  Schmid
did the same, & my sense of his ideas is close-but-no-cigar.  He
knocks fasting, does not have a clue about the value of fruits (what
we are best adapted to eat) & insists on a high-protein diet,
something which will age you a lot quicker & give you much higher
odds of contracting cancer than a low protein one.  The recent
flurry of excitement about all the wonderful protective properties
found in the countless phytonutrients is entirely accurate, & a
powerful argument for a plant-based diet.  He is an intellectual
lightweight compared with Shelton if you ask me.  He gives as an
example a mother who messed up her 4-year-old on a NH diet.  But
this does not disprove NH, only that the particular diet/lifestyle
the child was on was to blame.  On page 61: "While many claim
Vilcabambans live so long because they consume little food of animal
origin, I believe that the evidence indicates they live so long in
spite of it.  What they do consume [of animal foods] is of the
highest quality; they would simply be better off with more."  This
is called deductive logic, first establishing a thesis and then
going out looking for the data to support it.  This is the worst
sort of science, which operates best when it uses inductive logic:
first assembling the facts, & then forming a thesis which explains
all the facts.  In the quote above Schmid ignores evidence which
does not fit his pre-conceived thesis.

Ward's stuff:  When I first read his interview on Chet's WWW site, I
was blown away by the detailed knowledge the West has been able to
assemble about our ancient ancestors. It boggled my mind that we
have been able in such a short period to amass all this knowledge
from scattered skeletal remains & other clues.  But my question is:
how much validity do evolutionary arguments have?  There is no
question that humans strayed from the raw diet every other species
is so well adapted to, but the laws of metabolism still apply.
There are certain things which just can not be bred out of a
species' metabolic needs, no matter how many generations we are
talking about.  Things which work in fruit flies or even simpler
organisms often still apply to us.  We still carry around metabolic
pathways which were put down as far back as uni-cellular organisms &
prior to the arrival of plants.

Do raw-vs.-cooked arguments apply equally to all of us?  Some
clearly do fine on all raw, but I am undecided if all should, but
suspect that everybody would do best on raw provided the food is
grown on soils that are not demineralized. You need fats, proteins,
carbohydrates, minerals, vitamins and co-factors such as
phytonutrients to flourish, & it seems to me that an intelligently
selected raw veg. diet should easily be able to provide all our
needs & then some.  I think the burden of proof falls on those who
ascribe magical properties to cooked or flesh foods.  Let's not
forget that all the supposedly magical stuff in meats originally
came from plants which the animals we are eating ingested.

I think he does not have it saved, but Bob Avery made a marvelous
posting to the CR list concerning experiments on extracts from
cooked foods, and the toxicities of these extracts.  If anybody has
it it should be posted to this list because it gets to the heart of
why I don't accept arguments for cooked foods.  If not, we can get
it after the end of the month when the CR list's Nov. messages are
archived to the WWW.  [this assumes that the CR members will not all
try to kill each other prior to Dec. 1]

--Doug Schwartz
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