Ric:
>Since other
>mammals in their wild state are basically free of the diseases of
>"civilization," and get them quickly upon having their normal food simply
>cooked, I think it's not too unreasonable to at least suspect that there
>may be some sort of "law" operant in nature that establishes certain
>"specifications" about the fuel our bods were designed to require for
>proper function.

I'm with you so far.

>Trouble is, we have primarily animal examples to go on,
>since no known cultures advocate a sort of sacred respect for not damaging
>food by fire and other similarly destructive processing.  But what's the
>matter with what the animals show us?

While I'll probably agree with you on all this till I die, I nevertheless
end up playing devil's advocate with myself (via you ;)) precisely because
of the idea above. Why is it that there is no known
culture--pre-industrial, pre-agricultural, or even pre-historic, past or
present--that isn't all raw? Now several answers are bantered about in
response to this (and I've bantered them about a lot myself!):

--that cooked foods are so "addictive" that once a culture started cooking
they would/could never go back. This, of course, jibes well with the idea
of why well over 90% of our rawist contemporaries are unable to eat a 100%
raw diet--in other words, less than 10% of the folks who would like to be
all-raw (for intellectual, "ethical", "spiritual" or other reasons) simply
don't succeed.

--that we need to evolve to the "next plane" of evolution which no other
culture has ever attained (or even aspired to)

--or my particular version: that we need to give our DNA the chance (raw
foods, etc) it may never have had since our species has been cooking even
before its "final" touches of evolution--in other words, to finally take
the evolutionary step we "skipped over" when our culture drifted from
biology

--that our species is in such a sorry state from generations of
misnourishment (or on another level, from decades of personal
misnourishment) that we will never be able to easily attain all-raw, that
only the select few (whether by luck, fanaticism, genetics, or sheer
superiority of will) ever attain the all-raw ideal

There are, of course, more "reasons" given than the above for why we find
no human culture eating the supposedly "natural pure" diet. It probably
goes without saying, but raw-vegans have the further "difficulty" of
justifying the unnaturalness of RAF since, while we find all wild primates
eating unfired foods, we find no higher primates eating a vegan diet.
Still, whether instincto or fruitarian or anywhere in between, there is a
squirrel in the works when we look at human cultural history: no human
culture has ever been found eating instincto or fruitarian.

The much simpler explanation for that fact--at least simpler than the
reasons above--is that an all-raw diet is _not_ the "true" human diet and
that is why there is such difficulty aspiring to it, and why we find no
human culture in history and much of pre-history doing it.

Anyway, I feel that in order to be clear that all-raw _is_ proper for me,
that I will experiment in the future with simply cooked foods (esp leafy
veggies). I should be able to judge their utility much better from the
perspective of a decade raw (coming up in a couple years for me) than I
ever could have before raw. In other words, I went from lots cooked (26+
years) to 2/3rds raw-vegan (3-4 months) to all-raw including RAF (8+
years). How can I be sure there is no value in, say, a 90% raw diet
including RAF and cooked leafy green veggies. Or how will I know if insects
are the most beneficial form of RAF until I try?

And furthermore, aren't other rawists in a similar state: How will
fruitarians know that their health wouldn't improve with the addition of
raw veggies if they never try? How will raw-vegans know that there is no
value for them in raw dairy or other RAF if they never try? How will raw
vegetarians (eating occasional raw eggs and/or raw dairy) never know that
shellfish, raw fatty fish, liver and other RAFs may be highly beneficial if
they never try?

(Granted, you found raw dairy bad for you, but from hindsight, not as an
experiment from a non-dairy stance. But anyway, there is mcuh more to the
picture I am trying to sketch here than dairy...)

>No placebos even required in their
>scene, since they don't seem to be plagued by the kind of intellectual
>dishonesty and confusion that plagues our species.

Yes yes yes! But isn't it entirely possible that when we decide that a
particular regime is the "most natural" and refuse any other possibilities,
all-raw or not, (especially experimentally on ourselves) that we are being
quite guilty of intellectual dishonesty as rawists ourselves?

We may simply have a gentleman's disagreement on the matter, but I hold
that those few amoung us who are doing fine on an all-raw diet have
something of a duty to keep an open mind to the idea that all-raw is not
for everyone, and that people may not thrive on an all-raw diet because the
diet is "incomplete" somehow, not because they are failures in some way.
(If I find by experimenting that cooked veggies are a positive addition to
my diet, I don't really want to have to say 10,000 hail marys to make up
for it, if you get my drift ;)

Beyond that, there is the issue of RAF and it's usefullness in anyone's
diet, all-raw or not...but that's best left to another unethical day.

>But, in summation, I think that the principal common denominator to ill
>health the world 'round is found in how we cook (destroy) our food's
>quality, converting it into something different from what nature, in its
>infinite wisdom, created.  Nature gave us the pure item, we use heat to
>covert it into another chemical substance.

But nature also gave us a big brain, able to modify our foodstuffs (and
childrearing practices) to the point that they aren't useful, and in many
instances destructive. We can use that big brain to idealize diets to the
point that we are not considering the complexity of the issues
involved--that is, the variance of individuals, individual's personal
histories, and individual's genetic history.

In my study of nature I find no universal law whatsoever. I find nature
ever complex, dynamic, and shifting--and our attempts to understand it in a
simplified fashion, while attractive for psychological reasons, are
structurally limited. There is always an exception in any Law we abstract
from nature. Forest fires, lava flows, and geysers--all events which would
occur whether humans were on the planet or not--assure that nature will
never be all-raw. Whatever tidy abstraction we force nature to adhere to
will be seen evetually to have an exception. (The "platypus factor"?).
Bumblebees can't fly, and humans can't digest cooked foods usefully--except
that the former do, and the later may.

>>Do you really think that a less than 100% raw
>>diet is "not right", and that any cooking should be rejected verbatim? You
>>sound so reasonable, but there is a creeping edge of "rigidity" that comes
>>through sometimes.
>
>Call me rigid or absolutist...and maybe be on mark.  But that mental
>rigidity is only applicable to my  _own_  status...not anyone else's.

This is so important to me (and I love to hear it from you)! Personally,
when anyone is an expert on anything beyond their own experience my ears
start melting like the wicked witch of the west when doused with water
(law: witches are not freshwater animals :)). This is, in part, why I take
such exception to NFL: they very clearly (and tragically, I think) consider
anyone cooked (or RAF for that matter) as somehow less Right than they are,
perhaps even Evil.

>Relativism is safe...and temporarily quite comforting... when one is in a
>fog or suffering from insufficiency of evidence, but to me the facts are
>blatantly visible, so why go around, as we humans are so expert in doing,
>in our incessant state of denial?

The opposite may also be true: that absolutism is comforting when one is in
a fog or suffering from insufficiency of evidence. For myself, the denial
that I am in has to do with this: I deny that there is any absolute
_anything_.

>I think most of us are born with the
>logical tools we need to perceive the truth, whatever that might be in this
>area of our concern.  It's not at all like the fundamental religionist who
>"knows" he or she is privy to the only truth.  Their "knowledge" of that
>"truth" is almost always derived from  what they have been "taught" by
>others, usually "experts," but, in the final analysis, their belief is
>predicated on "faith" in the interpretations and other traditions passed
>down to them...often from ancient times, no less.  This food issue is
>entirely different.  The evidence is not hearsay, or needn't be, since we
>can look all about us and see the fresh facts.

This is the weakest part of your post to my eyes. There is _heaps_ of
anecdotal evidence that people's health declines in the long run on various
raw regimes. To believe in the efficacy of a raw-vegan diet in the face of
overwhelming evidence to the contrary is indeed like a fundamentalist
religionist who has Knowledge of the Truth taught by the Experts. There are
kids who appear to thrive on their parent's raw-vegan diet (though the
details of the kid's diets are ultimately heresay, unless we keep them
locked in a closet), and there are kids who become _seriously_ ill on the
same regime. It simply is _not_ for everyone. When NFL gets on the soapbox
about "saving our children" my ears nearly combust. If someone is going to
get on the Podium and tell the rest of the world what is Evil and what is
Good, what is Poison and what is Perfect, they are duty-bound to keep their
eyes open to the counter examples as well as the examples.

>We get our emotions into an otherwise starkly black and white picture, at
>least as I see it, and ascribe all sorts of shades of gray or even color
>where they don't even exist.

I feel the exact opposite. Black and white don't exist anywhere except as
abstractions in our neural curcuitry. It may be our fear of gray that makes
us perseverate on the stark, simple Truth, even if it is
false-to-experience, false-to-facts.

>To this minor observer, the very infinite aspect of our creation, and the
>universe we appear to have all about us, speaks the immensity of the
>mystery we will doubtfully ever even begin to comprehend...BUT, on the
>other hand, and consistent with this sort of awesome perspective, how could
>a Perfect Creation be so imperfect as to hide from our faculties the
>inherent laws we must obey in order to be "free" (from illness, etc.)?

Wild animals do become ill. They suffer from disease, though less so than
improperly cared for domesticated animals. Nature isn't Perfect. It works
is all. It is the eventual resting of idealistic diets on the mantle of
Perfection which mimics religios thought/action, and, I believe, keeps them
from ever succeeding in any important sense.

>Nope, Kirt, if mother or father nature created us, then obscured the laws
>we must obey to enjoy our clearly designed capacities for health and the
>freedom that such a condition entails, then nature is one mighty perverse
>and wicked (oops, an emotive value term!) master indeed!

We are exceptions in nature: our _huge_ brain has the potential to screw
everything up. What that makes me is very humble about any pronouncement I
can verbalize, and doubly so when Perfection, Black and White are involved.

Nature isn't evil or good. It just works. Computers work too--by adhering
closely to the "laws" of physics as approximated by mathematics. But a
computer is a joke compared to a square yard of wilderness, both in terms
of complexity and "working". I can get mighty upset when my computer
doens't work, or when Nature doesn't work according to my ideations about
it. It's not a matter of whether emotion is good or bad (IMO it's
_glorious_) but a matter of ascribing characteristics to nature (perfect,
good, bad) that it doesn't have.

>Again, I just don't believe it.  Do you?

No.

>When you say, "Do you really think that a less than 100% raw diet is 'not
>right,' you get to the crux of the real issue.
>
>"Right" is a value marker, isn't it? Now we are in an entirely other arena,
>aren't we?  This is the venue of ethics, morals, in general; in the league
>of our "belief constructs" and other emotionally based perceptional issues
>and considerations.

Isn't _all_ the foregoing in the same realm? I feel like a broken record
playing different angles but: aren't your (and mine!) ideas about nature's
laws, in the end, "'belief constructs' and other emotionally based
perceptional issues
and considerations"? If so, they might be seen as limited at best (since we
can not abstract but a tiny portion of Nature) and subject to exception at
worst (since we find all sorts of exceptions to any law we care to
make/abstract about nature and nature's plan--if it has one in the accepted
sense)?

>>Any details about these observations, or do you mean the appendix chart in
>>NFL--that kinda thing?
>
>Haven't yet finished the book, but will report back in when I do.

I am looking forward to your impressions of the book and approach. I, and a
few others, are more or less "up in arms" over the book and it's message. I
remain very puzzled as to why so many others--many of whom I consider very
reasonable folks--do not find NFL (the book) unacceptable on moral,
intellectual, and "plain old human kindness and common sense" grounds. Mix
in the ethical vegan superiority stance and I am left to shake my head in
sadness at both the medium and the messsage, not to mention the
"massage"--which is more like one of those bolts/blows the slaughterhouse
folks find so efficient, than anything that is going to save humankind from
it's own folly.

>I've heard many complaints from readers of the NFL book about that chapter
>ending, "Cooked food is poison," but I frankly love it.  They are really
>clever and I applaud their creative use of that shocking statement.  It
>sounds radical...and it is.  This kind of calling a spade a spade is
>probably, in my mind, the only way we can wake up our fellow humans to the
>insanity (my honest opinion) of cooking (destroying) our food before eating
>it.

I suspect, in the end, we may differ radically on the issue. But that is OK. ;)

>I just glanced at something off the web the other night...was it by Dr.
>Bass...that read with the title of a Raw Food Diet Regime...or something
>similar.  As I skimmed along I noticed that he had some cooked food recipes
>in the mix!  Now how is cooked the same as raw?  Reminds me of the
>government's clever use of the euphemism to hide the hard realities;
>calling death insurance Life Insurance; talking of our Health Care System
>rather than our sickness care system, etc.  Subtle but effective.  The
>techniques of brain-washing are alive and well all about us.  Bass, or
>whoever it was, didn't say that these cooked items were inserted because
>it's better to move slowly into an all raw diet...or at least, if he did,
>my skimming overlooked it.

Dr. Bass has made a _very_ important contribution to NH and I hope you do
more than skim over his experiences and theorizing.

>>Words of wisdom in there!

>Of course, what else!   ;)

A nativity scene carved from fruit? ;)))

>>>So, Axel, it would seem there is probably not just one narrow healthy path
>>>to follow...as long as it's raw (and that's the LAW!), and that will surely
>>>be music to the ears of you instinctos.

>>It's music to _my_ ears. Have you taught the three musketeers to whistle it
>>yet? BTW, were any of the over 100 enthusiasts at the big bash admitting to
>>any RAF consumption?
>
>Didn't encounter that sort of statement, but suspect (I'm paranoid, you
>see) there were instinctos lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce.

Instinctos don't seem to pounce in the ways that vegans expect them to. NFL
has the pouncing market cornered and I only hope they go out of business
due to lack of interest in pouncing.

No, I take that back. Zephyr has been known to pounce on chickens, but that
is another story ;)))

Thanks for coming out to play here on raw-foods Ric! I'll join you in not
proofing this--whoa, just flying by the seat of my panties, ah...damn, I
mean pants. :)

Cheers,
Kirt