-----Original Message-----
From: Paleolithic Eating Support List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Geoffrey Purcell
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2011 7:57 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Fire and Cooking and Calories. Old dead animals.

>Anyway, one of the main tenets of rawism is that, if one has to eat cooked
>foods, that reheating foods which have already been cooked  is even worse.
>Not only do the amounts of heat-created toxins rise in the twice-cooked
>food as a result, but the idea is that bacteria are only really unhealthy
>within a toxic environment such as cooked foods or grainfed meats and the
>like.  

>There is, of course, a big difference between the use of fire for warmth
>and the use of fire for cooking. It wouldn't surprise me if a long period >
>of time ensued between the two, say a 100,000 years or so.

I tend to think of raw-only PALEO as an oxymoron. We know that humans or at
least Neanderthals used fire for cooking at least 100,000+ years ago.
We survived as a species by being able to use fire to be able to extract
calories from parts of animals that would normally not be able to be eaten.

Letting meat decay can have a similar effect to cooking.  At some point our
ancestors realized that cooking tough meat was safer in the short term and
more reliable than letting meat rot to extract calories. I have no idea when
that happened.

Here is the rub. It MAY be healthier to eat raw only. (I personally eat my
meat rare, except the tough stuff that I slow cook.) Raw only is a
interesting theory that only time will tell if is correct as a long term
diet. In my opinion, raw only as an evolutionary concept is very
questionable. It is EXTREMELY unlikely we would have survived the ice ages
as a species if we only ate raw. 

I personally think that Garden of Eden eating theories (raw vegetarian or
raw animal foods) where there is some kind of mythical perfect diet under
ideal circumstances are very suspect.

-David