Thank you, Geoff.  Excellent.
 
> Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 09:19:26 +0000
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Michael Pollan explains what’s wrong with the paleo diet | Grist
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
>  Pollan's  whole thesis is wrongheaded, based on bogus evidence.
>  
> 1) take his claim that  cooking transforms meat, making it tastier.  No, it does not. it is merely a matter of habits built up over years. For example, people who switch long-term to a raw, palaeolithic diet find increasingly that cooked meat  starts tasting  "burnt" and dry/dehydrated and unpleasant, and that raw meat tastes way better. A raw foodist stance is that cooking creates addictive opioids which influence the brain and cause cravings for cooked foods. Such addictive opioids, interestingly, also exist in dairy and grains.
>  
> 2) Then there is the Wrangham claim.  Wrangham's absurd claims have already been debunked and he is viewed as something of a fraud by most palaeoanthropologists. The latter point out, for example, that no genuine evidence exists to show that cooking existed c. 1.8 million years ago, and that the increase in brain-size occurred well before the advent of cooking. Then there is Wrangham's nonsense about starchy tuber-consumption expanding the human brain. Most unfortunately for him, it has been shown by scientists that the human brain-size decreased by 8% ever since humans switched to consuming lots of starchy, cooked foods in the Neolithic era.
>  
> 3) well, Pollan at least has made one good point, that wild game is far superiorin quality to even grassfed meats.
>  
> 4) There are so manz health problems now linked to grains-consumption that Pollan's advocation of grains is laughable.
>  
> 5)  His advocation of mircobes is ridiculous, in view of the fact that he, like so many wrongheaded dietary proponents, advocates cooking food thoroughly, a process which, of course, kills microbes.
>  
> 6) Then there are  the absurd anti-raw nonsense claims he makes.  First, the claim that cooking creates more nutrients is, in general, an outright lie, and not logical, even. I mean, if one cooks at high heat, eventually everything turns to inedible burnt charcoal. There is plentiful evidence online to show that, actually, cooking greatly reduces the levels of nutrients in one's food, and that, unsurprisingly, the higher the temperature, the more drastic this loss will be:-
>  
> http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O39-cookinglossofnutrients.html
>  
> http://nutritiondata.self.com/topics/processing
>  
> http://jn.nutrition.org/content/7/4/367.full.pdf
>  
> The only thing that Pollan is right about, is that cooking makes NON-PALAEO foods more "bioavailable" as cooking reduces the levels of antinutrients in foods like grains, thus making formerly  inedible foods barely edible.
>  
> Then there is the truly   stupid,  ignorant comment made, that chimpanzees need to eat raw food for 6 hours every day  in order to sustain themselves, while we(ie "cooked-foodists") need only an hour a day. First of all, we are not apes, and neither raw vegans nor raw, palaeolithic dieters need to eat food for 6 hours a day in order to survive! Indeed, raw foodists of all kinds spend far less time on food than cooked foodists  as they do not have to prepare it for ages, or add sauces or cook the food. So, a raw foodist culture would have far more time available for science, culture etc. than any cooked-food-culture.
>  
> The other  anti-raw comment  or two made shows that they have never actually bothered to find out any decent information on the raw foodist community as a whole. The claim re raw foodist women stopping ovulating only applies to those on 100% raw plant food diets as such diets do not provide all the nutrients humans need, such as vitamin B12 etc.. Any raw diet consisting of a small amount of raw animal food  would prevent this issue easily.
>  
> Oh, and then there is the comment that all human cultures cook their food. That does not mean that it is a healthy habit per se. Plus, many tribal cultures eat a substantial amount of their food in raw form, especially raw animal foods. Indeed, Weston-Price noted, during his travels, that the healthiest tribes he saw, were the ones who included some raw animal foods in their diet.
>  
> Geoff
>