Nieft / Secola wrote: > >Cooked food is not only a cause of health problems but also of the > >crazy modern nervous behaviours called wars, urban violence, rioting... > Perhaps that's a bit overstated, Bruno? Perhaps. But I do believe that raw food plays a major role if not the major role, in a number of abnormal human behaviours commonly observed, and in the average degree of nervousness of an individual or of populations. Since 10 years I have done something like 50.000 measurements with the Stressometer on raw and cooked eaters. Rawies are not always calm, and cookies not always nervous, and each of us sees his microscopic nervous tremor move up and down depending on daily stress, work, food, powersleep or yoga sessions, making love or not, exceptions or not to the diet... But, on the average, raw eater's microscopic tremor at rest in the 3 to 20 Hz zone is about half that of those on a "normal" cooked diet. This is very clear : when you take any group of 10 persons including some raw and some non-raw, the raw ones almost always get the lower and better TNR (Tremor of the Nervous System) scores. On the opposite, nicotine, caffeine, and cooked cereals, especially whole grain bread, have the most intense effect and produce a high increase in the TNR levels. However the high level TNR people also have high variations in their TNR levels and therefore are sometimes as low as raw eaters, enough for the rule not to be absolute, but they will bounce up again at another moment, while the raw non-smoker's results are both lower (on the average) and more stable. If you don't beleive me, check by yourself. Results can and have repeatedly been obtained both by measuring human tremor or on mice tremor. If you don't have a stressometer but have raw children or if you practise a fairly strict raw diet and have been strictly abstaining from all neuroactive drugs (including cooked foods and heated cereals) for at least a few months, the experiment of eating whole grain bread and/or drinking coffea and/or smoking is very instructive. In a few minutes (cigarette or coffea) or 1/2 hour (neuroactive foods), it makes you feel (or makes your children act) as if you'd been taking neuroleptics of some kind. Dreams, behaviours, nervosity, subjective stress are affected. This I believe and have observed, does lead much more easily and in a not-well-controlled way, to disputes, agressivity, insatisfaction and various disorders. On a whole population, it could logically trigger wars, jealousy, or other forms of nervous tensions between groups of population more easily than would have been the case in nature. But I do agree that sexual jealousy, social injustice, etc, also play a role. Violence obviously does exist in nature in all primates and animal groups. Even insects which I spent years observing can be violent enough to reach, but these forms of violence I beleive are controlled by nature (or "instinct") and respond to a specific need useful for the individual. Jealousy or violent impulses in sexual relations or human relations I beleive are the consequence of mistakes, and are there to point out these mistakes. But cooked food will amplify them so much that they don't even play their role anymore. Humanity would surely be very different and more peaceful with another type of nutrition. Algerians and a number of muslim countries have fanatical attitudes today. Those countries are also those on the planet who eat the highest percentage of whole bread or flour-foods. Given the Stressometer data,... it isn't stupid at all to imagine that food is the major factor in making populations nervous or stresed or fanatical, this being enhanced or triggered by the well known other social, overpopulatio, sexual and so on factors. Hitler was a vegetarian, but he was also a regular whole-bread eater (like many vegetarians)... In fact, whole grain bread and cigarettes have much more effect on the nervous system (at least according to stressometer measurements) than eating meat (even cooked) and I would think that the abnormal neuroactive molecules in the bread of Hitler's vegetarian diet is what made him crazy (+ of course, or enhanced by, his own personal, sexual, etc., history). In some cases, personal, historical situations can also be enough to put you off-track even if you are on a strict raw diet (not so easily though). Myself, I used to be rather jerky when I was a greedy vegan whole grain bread eater in the early 80's before coming to a raw intinctive and insect diet. When a subject is vital and unknown it may be more useful to overstate it a little bit to attract attention to it. In a sense, your response shows that at least there's a reaction and my overstatement was at least useful to trigger an exchange. But you're right, raw food isn't everything. Health and happiness is a larger program... Please receive my rawest salutations. Bruno COMBY. A few pages of info on the Tremor Monitor - Stressometer (in English) : http://www.lookup.com/homepages/70485/tremor/ADTM50.info.eng.html