Jo:
"You'll just have to trust me when I tell you that for all the time
and effort (12 years) I put into making the raw vegan diet work, the
results were nonetheless largely dismal for the long run."
Arjen:
With all due respect Jo, but I will have a hard time to trust you on
that if you didn't even take any B12 supplements during that time. It
is like Gary said: your failure on raw vegan might be totally due to
B12 deficiency.
Jo:
If I were to apply your logic, then I would have a hard time trusting
that your health was nominal because you don't consume any animal
source foods. But I'm very willing to accept that you're having
success on your diet because I'm not bound to any ethical or
evolutionary arguments. In any case, I would like to resume this
discussion in ten years time, provided you're still a raw vegan. ;)
Arjen:
As I explained in my previous posts, I believe our original diet to
be mainly frugivorous with some greens and maybe some invertebrates.
With greens I basically mean wild plants, including the roots. So if
you are raw vegan, take no B12 supplement and clean your fruit and
veggies too well, you most likely will develop a B12 deficiency. If
raw food vegan still doesn't work for you then, you might want to
include some insects to your diet. But vertebrate meat is in my
opinion definitely not part of our biological make-up! I know that
modern fruits are manipulated in such a way that their nutritional
properties have changed a lot, but I still believe that you are doing
your body more harm with eating meat that doesn't support your
biological make-up. If "modern" raw vegan doesn't work, you need to
do more foraging and eat more foods in their wild stage.
Jo:
I also believed what you believe now. What you wrote is sublimely nostalgic.
Frankly, I can't conclusively state man's biologically correct diet.
There are many views about this; all I can do is analyze the data to
which I have access, then evaluate through trial and error what my
body thrives on. I'm fairly confident that raw foodstuff is superior
but I'm not going to turn myself into the Food Police if I have a
bite of mesquite smoked salmon. LOL
I realize that you've probably arrived at your dietary choices by
similar avenues of logic and experimentation. I think that's groovy.
While you may believe that eating flesh or animal fats is very
sub-optimal, maybe even outright harmful, the bottom line is that my
body is telling me otherwise, especially with raw fats. The health
problems I suffered at the end of my raw vegan days were completely
resolved through RAF. Personally, this fact needs to be weighed as
well as your well-intentioned viewpoints.
And I haven't forgotten your suggestion to eat insects. If I ever
head down to Australia, one of the first things I'm going to do is
scarf down one of those roasted wood grubs for fun. But only after a
cold pint of Fosters. ;)
By the way, I don't have any children that I know of. ;)
Arjen:
Feeling stronger and being stronger don't exclude each other! I still
think my comparison with taking steroids is perfectly valid: you are
stronger, but it will affect your health in a negative way in the
long run!
Jo:
Yes, I am stronger; and I've already covered the issue of animal
source foods being harmful for me because you believe it to be so.
Jo:
"I wonder if a junk food diet from childhood might affect gamete
quality which would then affect fertility. And you still haven't
specified your version of a "health conscious" person."
Arjen:
A health conscious person can be anything you want it to be,
excluding a junk food eater.
Jo:
But to you, what does a health conscious person eat?
Arjen:
We can all observe that the junk food eating families have a higher
reproductive rate than virtually any other socio-economic class, for
whatever reason that might be.
Jo:
I've tried to recall such a correlation based on my long term stays
in North America and parts of Asia, but so far, nothing stands out.
Perhaps this may be local to your area (Central Europe) or you're
just more observant. I don't know.
Cheers,
Jo
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