From: Bruce Kleisner
> Sounds like arm-chair science there. We have lots of evidence
> that primitive humans cooked food regularly over fire. Inuits
> are one group. They also did not eat all raw. Edward Howell &
> other frauds started the myth of the raw diet. No culture in
> the last 125,000 years has EVER been shown to eat all-raw or
> highly-raw diets. Stefansson and other explorers refute lies
> put out by dietary extremists with no credibility - Aajonus
> Vonderplanitz and Edward Howell, in particular.
>
> http://www.beyondveg.com/
> http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson1.htm
> http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-3h.shtml

I have read Dr. Edward Howell pretty extensively as well as the comments on
him by beyondveg.com. Some of the arguments made against Dr. Howell by
beyondveg were problems I also had with him...and I will admit that the
above links even made me rethink a couple of things. However, just because
you post links to beyoundveg.com does not mean that information is
automatically right. Nobody is perfect and sitting around picking out errors
in someone's work doesn't mean that all of their work is in error. Dr.
Howell's book Enzyme Nutrition is an *excellent* book and one that I think
should be read by everyone.

For instance, Dr. Howell gave vivid example of something that beyoundveg.com
says is true:

http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-2c.shtml
   In general, cooked starches are easier to
   digest than raw starch foods; see
   Kataria and Chauhan [1988], Bornet et al.
   [1989] for some specific examples. Note that
   cooked starch is extremely easy to digest
   (humans and cattle are easily "fattened"
   with cooked starch),

Dr. Edward Howell wrote in Enzyme Nutrtion:

   Technical men in the business of extracting the
   maximum profit from farm animals found it was
   not economical to feed hogs raw potatoes. The
   hogs would not get fat enough. Cooking the
   potatoes, however, produced the fat hogs that
   brought the farmer the kind of money required
   to make a profit. This in spite of the extra
   expense of labor and energy involved in cooking!

Dr. Edward Howell went on to write:

   As a general rule we may say a raw potato is
   not as fattening as the same potato cooked.
   A raw banana is not as fattening as a baked
   banana. A raw apple is not as fattening as a
   baked apple. A spoonful of raw honey is not
   as fattening as the same amount of calories
   in the form of white sugar. Two ounces of raw
   walnuts are less fattening than the same
   amount of roasted walnuts. A glass of raw
   (freshly squeezed) fruit juice should put on
   less weight than a glass of ready-made juice.

And, as pointed out by beyondveg.com, Dr. Howell has been scientifically
been proven to be right (Kataria and Chauhan [1988] and Bornet et al.
[1989]), because cooking increases the amount of digestible sugars in
starches.

In fact, in almost every argument AGAINST raw food, one of the main reasons
given is that cooking increases the absorbability of food.

Well folks, with obesity in our population running at over 50%, do we really
need to absorb any more out of our food?

I maintain that what Dr. Howell taught was a form of calorie restriction,
taught before anyone even knew about calorie restriction (Howell was born in
1898). If you go on a raw diet, one of the first things you eliminate are
foods you can't eat raw...so you end up with a diet close to paleo (unless
you throw in some raw dairy) by eliminating grains and starches. Another
thing you do is decrease the amount of food used by the body (calories
absorbed, although I'm not one for counting calories).

Another fact offered in proof of this is to meet and talk to anyone who has
ever done a raw food diet. They will tell you the challenge in the diet is
not in losing weight, it is in keeping weight on. Personally, I lost over
100 pounds on a raw food diet. My own personal experience with the diet was
that I had to add a portion of cooked food back to my diet to stop losing
weight and maintain it at the level I desired! What is ironic is that while
the whole dieting world sits around trying to cut calories, I actively
sought out the most calorie dense foods I could find and still lost weight.
(note: I have before and after pictures on my web site:
www.roadtowellsville.com).

Dr. Howell had great insight into why calorie restriction and fasting worked
(now scientifically proven) and was using it as far back as the 1920s:

   During a fast the stress on the organism for
   the digestion and assimilation of food and
   elimination of its waste is drastically reduced.
   The manufacture of digestive enzymes is cut
   down to a trickle, so the body has a better
   chance to supply what is needed to overhaul
   what is often a neglected and run-down piece
   of machinery. It has been estimated that 50
   percent of the daily production of protein in
   the living organism goes for enzymes, a major
   share of which is for digestive enzymes. During
   a fast the need for digestive enzymes is eliminated.
   Released from the burden of some heavy chores,
   the enzyme potential helps to remodel the body at
   an accelerated pace.

Not coincidentally, fasting is one of the oldest recorded treatments for
disease, and Dr. Howell didn't invent it, he only had great insight into the
how and why it worked.

I will leave everyone with some of Dr. Howell's great research into the
difference between raw and cooked calories:

Some intriguing experiments were performed on normal people and diabetics by
Drs. S.M. Rosenthal and E.E. Ziegler at George Washington University
Hospital in 1929. The subjects ate almost two ounces of raw starch and then
had blood tests for sugar. Eating cooked starch, as is well known, causes
the blood sugar of diabetics to skyrocket, unless they use insulin. The
diabetics in this study used no insulin and yet after raw starch ingestion,
the blood sugar rose only 6 milligrams the first half hour. Then it
decreased 9 milligrams after 1 hour, and 14 milligrams 2½ hours after
ingestion of the raw starch. In some diabetic individuals, the decrease in
blood sugar was as much as 35 milligrams. In the normal persons there was a
slight increase followed by a slight decrease in blood sugar in 1 hour. This
is convincing evidence that there is a difference between raw and cooked
calories.


Jay
www.roadtowellsville.com
www.vitaminb17.org