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.

Hey, Doug, I was just throwing it out as a teaser, not concluding that
humans need cooked foods. The kicker to me is that our species may have
been cooking BEFORE the "final" touches of homo sapien sapien evolution was
more or less complete. I can find no definitive answer to when cooking
became a widespread practice in prehistory. My own take on it (totally a
guess) is that we are the real "bastards" of the animal kingdom, in that we
may have never had the environment (ie raw foods only) which gives our DNA
its fullest chance of properly expressing itself. If so, then rawists today
are participating in a pretty fascinating experiment.

It seems that those who include raw animal foods in their all-raw regime
are in general more satisfied (though perhaps they are overeating!) and can
go years w/o cooked cravings, whereas raw vegans are constantly battling
their internal urgings to have an "exception" which are often reported to
be animal foods (as well as grains). There are no studies on this and it's
all just my reading of the anecdotal evidence. But you are not the only one
who finds themsleves "breaking down" and having non-plant foods while
aspiring to a 100% raw-vegan diet. Though not aspiring to a vegan diet, my
experience (when eating only raw plant foods for months at a time) is that
I become unbalanced. For me that manifested itself as the return of a
low-grade nervous tension, dissatsifaction with my raw plant meals, and
(since I aready had experience with RAF) was willing to to great lengths to
load up on RAF. If I hadn't RAF to satisfy my imbalance, it is very likely
I would have be going for cheese or yogurt or grains.

I have experience (!) detoxing and am pretty confident the tension was a
"true" biological yearning for nutrition unobtainable from raw plant foods,
not a detox, but I'm sure many will think otherwise.

Given the evolutionary evidence (and instincto experience) that animal
foods are part of the human menu, is it not at least a possible hypothesis
that if those aspiring to a 100% raw-vegan diet "weaken" and make an
"exception" by eating, say, raw cheese, that it may just as well be that
there is no weakness, but instead an unshakable biological demand for
nutrition only providable by RAF (or cooked grains)?

Perhaps RAF is a "necessary evil" (in small amounts?) in a balanced human
diet. If RAF costs you longevity points, so does every beat of your heart,
well, that's part of your biology. You can slow your heartbeat/basal
temp/etc, as you might minimise your RAF intake (if it really is
counterproductive) but you may not pull off a decade as 100% raw vegan
without serious cravings. Who knows?

Cheers,
Kirt