For an interesting view on diet and exercise read Arthur De Vany, Ph.D.'s essay at: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/econ/personnel/devany/Essay.html I look forward to reading his book coming out next year. The excerpt below is the part that relates to raw foods. I find his reasoning that our use of fire to cook food is what enabled the human brain to grow to its present size quite challenging. It is in line with the inverse relationship that has been found in primates between the size of the brain and the size of the gut. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- De Vany: >The beauty of the 40,000 BC eating model is that you eat no canned, frozen, packaged, >or manufactured food; only fresh foods, vegetables and fruits that are edible raw (I >may grill or steam them or eat them raw, but if they are edible raw they will do no >damage). I don't eat meat raw as a number of primitive eaters do. I don't trust our >food processing industry to provide food that is free of salmonella and other >pathogens. Cooking also degrades many of the toxins, antibiotics and hormones that >infect animal sources of food. (Our small stomachs evolved along with our ability to >use fire and other techniques to predigest food. Fire may have been essential to the >evolution of a large brain as it released expensive metabolic tissue in the stomach for >our metabolically very expensive brain tissue.) Best, Peter [log in to unmask]