I'm taking advantage of new internet connection at work to have a look at Raw-Food list for a day or two. I wanted to correct a one or two errors in Tom's "Myths about raw foods" , and to congratulate Jean Louis for his diplomacy in pointing out many exaggerations, although I concur with the overall spirit of the Tom's post . { Hi, Jean Louis, it's been a long time ....You are too kind with allopathic medecine, and probably too naive on some aspects : the terrific successes in the art of surgery, from the XIX th c. onwards, should not be related to the modest improvements made in the practice of the therapeutical art. I would advise you to read books on the history of hippocratic medicine. Hygienism, Vegetarianism, Raw-foodism and the likes share a basic common philosophy of health and disease which was still alive and well in the middle of the XIX th c., and which could be traced back to the so-called hippocratric tradition of western medicine . If one is to judge by the books which were published by some of the highest medical authorities right before Pasteur (circa 1850), the hippocratic tradition of "Nature Cure" had a much higher official profile than today. Amongst the various hippocratic schools, the " instinctual current of thought" which is our main concern, represented nothing else but the "anti-rationalist" , romantic, elitist, rightist wing of hippocratic medicine, which boasted many eminent personalities in arts and science at the beginning of the XIXth c . Rationalists (mostly anti-instinct) and vitalists (mostly pro-instincts, even though the frontiers are not that obvious ) fought for the supremacy on the world of ideas throughout the XIX , in all the fields of human knowledge ( biology, medicine, physiology, economy... ) . Finally Pasteurean rationalism succeeded in invading medicine and throwing out supporters of healthy dieting and food ethics from their strongholds in the faculties of medicine ( I have at home an "anti-Pasteurean" treatise of "Natural Immunology", which can be considered a 1895 "swan song" book of hippocratic medicine, written by some eminent physician at Paris Faculty of medicine) Starting from 1890 , no further studies of man's immunity and how to strenghten it without vaccination and other allopathic tools were considered on an official agenda in France's Facult? de Medecine (it took more years in America... because of the strong opposition of the churches to vaccination ) . Opponents to Pasteur were then left to play in the burgeoning field of Medical Anthropology where their "Nature knows it all" anthem could not do any harm to pasteurean medicine (since it was considered that "what is right for the savage, is not necessarily right for the civilized" ) . Medical anthropology was at that time a haunt of rightist and racist physicians... Wilfully and unwilfully the heirs of Pasteur have ruined the cause of hippocratic medicine in order to be able to impose to impose their own interventionnist conception of health. It is their fault if hygienism is nowadays relegated to small circles of "weirdos" without decent representation in official Faculties (with the exception of homeopathy which proved easier and more valuable to recuperate and promote, for a couple of reasons not worth mentionning here... ) . History, Jean Louis, tells you were your enemies hide . } Now to the beef, if a (quasi) vegetarian may say so : - Mental hygiene and raw food : yes , of course raw food has definitely beneficial effect on mental health. This has been proved again and again at the turn of the century by the so called group of "alienists", french, english and italian psychologists and psychiatrists experimenting the so called "synthetic diet" in jailhouses ( synthetic in the sense of synthesis of all necessary nutrients in a meal not in the sense of artificial feeding ) . Eugenist physicians further amplified these early research . I'm simply amazed to read that raw fooders should protect themselves against the deleterious mental after-effects of raw diet. If anything, Tom himself probably didn't protect himself enough from his own infringements to the 100% raw diet ....As far as I'm concerned I have witnessed a sharp drop in my paranoid tendency after my dietary change (this change was most noticeable at work, where I can easily claim to be less paranoid than a large number of my colleagues ( Please note that I wrote paranoid and not paranoiac ). I leave it up to you to decide whether this claim is in itself a sign of increasing schizophrenia .... - Definition of Natural Food : Tom wrote something like "foods with which we have evolved throughout prehistory" . This is too deterministic in my view. I would rather keep to the definition given by a long forgotten american naturopath back in 1914 (from heart) : "The natural food is whatever food which , unprocessed, appeals to the sense of sight, smell and taste" . There is a fluctuating, undetermined, relativistic sound in this definition which brings it closer to the spirit of instinctive nutrition. We have not evolved with eggshells as a regular part of our diet but eggshells can be excellent when needed (supposedly strong deficiency in calcium...) - It was said that Caffeine is toxic but doesn't kill. This is wong. Honore de Balzac,one of french foremost fiction writer of the XIXth c died in 1850, at the age of 51, of cardiac hypertrophy , a very rare disease due to caffeine abuse. It was him who wrote : "Any excess is based on a pleasure which man tries to repeat beyond the ordinary laws promulgated by Nature." Strangely, in one of his book , he gives a premonitory account of his own death : (translation dpeyrat) "The english government has allowed to dispose of the lives of three condemned, to whom were given the option between being hanged, as is the custom in this country, or to live exclusively one on tea, another on coffee, another one on chocolate drink, without resorting to any other food of whatever kind, nor to drink any other liquid. The drolls agreed. May be any other person sentenced to death would have done the same. As each aliment offered more or less chance for survival, they drew lots. The man who lived on chocolate died after eight months The man who lived on coffee lasted two years The man who lived on tea succumbed only after three years I suspect the East India Company (ndt: they had monopoly on tea trade...) to have sollicited this experiment in the interests of its business. The man with chocolate died in an appalling state of rottenness, devoured by maggots. His limbs fell one after the other, as those of the spanish monarchy The man with coffee died burnt, as if the fire of Gomorrah had charred him. One could have made lime out of his remains. It was proposed but the experiment looked contrary to the immortality of the soul. The man with tea became meager, and almost diaphanous he died of consumption , looking like a street light : one could see clearly through his body; a philantropist could read the Times , with the help pf a light placed in the back of his body. English decency prevented a more original tentative. I cannot but remark how philantropic it is to use the condemned instead of guillotining him brutally. ... That the condemned be brought to the savants instead of bringing him to the headsman. " He concluded by : "Public nutrition , taken as a whole, is an immense part of politics (ndt: Balzac was an ardent reformer) and the most neglected; I even dare to say that it is in infancy." Honore de Balzac 1839. Denis