Don,

>Moreover meat also is much more digestible after cooking.

I have to disagree with you there.  The simple fact that eating cooked
meat produces body odors and putrefactive stool odors while eating raw
meat does not should be sufficient to contradict that statement.

>Cooked meat is much easier to chew and
cooking denatures the proteins more completely than the stomach's HCl,

And therein lies the problem, since digestion is a carefully regulated
and controlled process of enzymatic activity yielding recognizable (to
our body cells) end products, whereas the destruction wrought by heat is
uncontrolled and produces many noxious compounds our bodies are not
equipped to deal with.  Those that have been tested on laboratory animals
have been shown to be carcinogenic.

This applies equally to the delicate fat contents of the meat as well as
to the protein contents.  There is no biochemical equivalence between
digestive catabolism and heat degradation.

I don't know about you, but every time I used to eat cooked eggs, my
stools would reek of sulfur (hydrogen sulfide?), but no such putrefactive
odors occur after I eat a raw egg.

>I know of no evidence indicating that any known modern human tribe ever
maintained itself on an all raw food diet. Stefansson reported that even
the
Eskimos ate much of their food cooked.

I don't know of any such tribes either, but I know of individuals such as
myself who do so, and with superior health results to show for it.

>Cooked plant food, on the other hand, is a viable fallback food for
early
humans because it fits the changes in digestive anatomy and solves the
ecological problems of surviving periods of food scarcity.

What's likely to "fall back" are your gum lines when you eat it.  In 10
years of all raw, I have had NO new cavities or any increase in
periodontal disease, yet my teeth are full of existing holes from my
prior cooked diet.  I believe that cooked food is the primary cause of
dental caries, which is certainly not a natural occurrence.

>Living humans appear unable to live on a diet of raw food in the wild

This would be an astounding finding were it true, considering that 100%
of all other Earth creatures are able do so, and at the cellular level,
our biological needs are much the same as for any other life form.

Bob Avery

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