Mary:
>Why don't you like paleo?

Did I say I don't like paleo? I love paleo--some of my best friends are
paleo ;)

I do however see some of the same ideological tendencies (and logical
leaps) on the paleo-list as one sees among some raw paradigms. As much as I
am "against" grains, the idea that one can eat _anything_ as long as it
isn't dairy or grains, while probably in the ballpark, isn't much different
than the idea that one can eat anything as long as it is not of animal
origin. Just plain too simplistic. And like with raw regimes, there apears
to be a great variety of individual variation in response to the same basic
paleo regime. In all, I would but the hardcore paleo-dieters in the same
league as most other fringe diets--which isn't to say there isn't useful
stuff there, just that they are subject to many of the potential pitfalls
of any fringe diet...

>Couldn't you be paleo and also raw, or mostly raw?

Sure. Technically, that is what instinctos are aspiring to: pre-ag raw.
Personally, I found that I could not keep up daily meat/fish consumption
when eating it entirely raw. Interestingly, some instinctos report that
they grow tidy little tumors when eating lots of (raw) meat for several
weeks/months. The tumors reportedly go away when meat is avoided/minimized.
I'm still waiting to hear of a similar tumor resulting from a (cooked)
paleodiet. Or the folks on Aajonus' heavily raw animal foods regime. Some
of them and the paleo folks eat huge amounts of animal foods but don't
appear to have the trouble that some instinctos report with huge amounts of
raw animal foods. Hmmm...

Of course, this is all _entirely_ anecdotal, but I am curious as to whether
somehow raw meat _exclusively_ might be more problematic than raw meat in
combo with cooked meat (or cooked animal foods in general). The word from
the researchers is that hunter/gatherers eat on average 65% calories from
animal foods (never all raw, but usually some raw I would guess), whereas
Burger (and others) is now apparently arguing for less than 10% animal
foods (or is that just meat???). That's more like a primate diet, but it
seems unlikely that humans could ever have evolved their big brain on such
a regime...

The problems frequently seen in raw vegans are probably similar to those
we'd see in primates if we eliminated all their animal foods sources.

But what if we gave a controlled group of primates virtually unlimited
access to raw animal foods? (like instinctos have in a way). Would they eat
"too much" and grow tumors and have problems with parasites? Would they
"evolve" big brains over a hundred thousand generations?

What if we gave primates unlimited access to cooked animal foods? (like the
paleo-dieters in a way)

Cheers,
Kirt