This is exactly what I think. I think it's also the reason for the success of "cleansing" and "detox" programs like Master Cleanse and juice fasts.

Maybe also for the meat & egg phenomenon. I still continued to have gluten symptoms 9 years into low carb from lc baked goods, soy sauce, etc. It wasn't till I went 100% gluten-free that I was relieved of chronic migraines, nausea, more.

In fact, I'll go further.

Dr. McCleary in his excellent book The Brain Trust Program* tells of a woman with chronic migraines who got relief from using a diet of whey protein shakes. He speculates that it was the ketones that relieved her migraines. I think it was the absence of gluten that did it. If you go onto the gluten-free and celiac forums you find countless people who cured chronic migraines by going gluten-free (and sometimes casein-free also).

The most extreme high-fat, low carb, ketogenic diet is sometimes recommended for epileptics. The proponents claim the ketones stop epilepsy. But epilepsy is strongly associated with gluten-intolerance. I think the reason the super-extreme ketogenic diet works for epilepsy is that it doesn't contain gluten.

Nancy LC has often speculated that the people who believe they suffer from candida overgrowth are really just gluten-intolerant. The anti-candida diet is gluten-free and when its followers go off their diet they suffer bloating, indigestion, more. They believe it's because their candida has come back strong, Nancy LC has suggested that they're just suffering gluten symptoms. I agree with her.
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* The Brain Trust Program is a low carb-friendly book

I've been gluten-free for about four years and I still have candida symptoms. I think going gluten-free is a necessary step, but there are other factors involved.

ok soo how much weight are we losing on this carniverous diet.?

well, I don't own a scale... but my clothes got looser and I feel pretty healthy!

I also think that any improvement made from a traditional sad diet is going to make people feel better for awhile... but definitely the dairy and gluten omission is probably causing the most dramatic improvements!

I know of several long-term raw vegans that have added in animal protein after feeling crappy. Daniel Vitalis was raw vegan for 15 years and reports in some podcast interviews that I listened to that since adding in animal products he feels so much more energetic

That is a very strange list. I have a bunch of raw food cookbooks and I've never ever seen a recipe using black beans. Buckwheat is extremely edible once it is sprouted as are a few other grains. But beans are indigestible even when sprouted.

But no raw foodist eats any grains or beans without sprouting them. And once you start the sprouting process it is a fine line between the time you are eating a seed or a young plant.

I've made an absolutely awesome raw granola using spouted buckwheat, shredded apples, walnuts and raisins that is blended and then dehydrated. But I would never touch a spouted bean. Tried spouted lentils once and they were still massively hard to digest.


Lol, I love your well researched numbers too.

I've poked around the web and it looks like 400,000 years ago is a much more commonly accepted time period for humans first cooking food. But archaelogical evidence for cooking is very difficult to interpret. Nobody can possible know what foods early humans cooked and what foods they ate raw because there is nothing left except a very crude fire pit.


People eat raw food because they try it and it makes them feel better. The typical raw food diet is basically fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds. So it is pretty much just paleo minus the meat and minus the cooking. Dropping the grains, beans and dairy is enough to provide most people with a massive improvement in health.

As you say, the number can't be proven and estimates vary from 400,000 years to 2.5 million. The best evidence I read stated 1.9M. It was a well researched number. My point was that it is well over the 40,000 years that we need to adapt to eating cooked food.

That's why they feel better. It has nothing to do with eating meat raw.

I agree with Tarlach's numbers on how long humans have eaten cooked meat. Neanderthals were cooking meat 200,000 years ago. I think everyone agrees humans regularly were cooking their food at least 200,000 years ago, and Tarlach has accurate numbers for the most likely time period. So humans should be well adapted to eating cooked meat. I think dogs are also well adapted to eating cooked meat. Bones for dogs should be boiled 15-20 minutes to help prevent splintering in their intestines. One excavation site did prove eating of cooked tubers, as somehow a partially digested cooked tuber was preserved - you can Google search Richard Wrangham and find this. Some say human jaws have weakened over time because humans learned to eat softer, cooked food.

I saw the TV episode with Andrew Zimmern visiting the Masai, and they start fires like the Boy Scouts - rubbing two sticks together, it works. http://blogs.mspmag.com/chowandagain/2008/07/

Our primate-like ancestors may go back 47 million years?
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/st...=7603618&page=1

I disagree. You've never provided a single source for this opinion, because there isn't any. For someone who doesn't know the first thing about species adaptation, you sure talk like you do.

Sorry to be mean, but it is time for you to stop. Lots of people find raw meat revolting, but there is no reason to rewrite everything we know about natural selection because of it.

(New book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, goes to show just how little data there is and how weak the theory is. No thermodynamic analysis in this book. Can you believe it?)

You are good at dropping in and criticizing everyone.

I don't have to prove my opinions to you. I also don't have to maintain a library of everything I have ever researched, so I can pull out pertinent links every time I post anything.

I found this link and this link in about 3 seconds with Google. Anyone can do this themselves if they don't agree with me or want to learn more.

I know enough about species adaptation to keep myself happy. I don't really care if you 'think' you know more than me or not. If I am so wrong (and you are such a believer in evidence), why not get off your high horse and provide some reading material so we might all learn something?

I am excited to start a discussion on Wrangham's book, which includes the few sources that have been cobbled together to make it a popular science book instead of a well-written apology for cooking. Let it be known that I am disappointed in this book, considering Wrangham wrote an earlier book that is one of my favorites.

It's funny, I was just checking around for reviews and the Amazon link for Catching Fire also suggested this book called "The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution".


Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Arguing that human genetic evolution is still ongoing, physicist-turned-evolutionary biologist Cochran and anthropologist Harpending marshal evidence for dramatic genetic change in the (geologically) recent past, particularly since the invention of agriculture. Unfortunately, much of their argument-including the origin of modern humans, agriculture, and Indo-Europeans-tends to neglect archaeological and geological evidence; readers should keep in mind that assumed time frames, like the age of the human species, are minimums at best and serious underestimates at worst. That said, there is much here to recommend, including the authors' unique approach to the question of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, and their discussion of the genetic pressures on Ashkenazi Jews over the past 1,000 years, both based solidly in fact. They also provide clear explanations for tricky concepts like gene flow and haplotypes, and their arguments are intriguing throughout. Though lapses in their case won't be obvious to the untrained eye, it's clear that this lively, informative text is not meant to deceive (abundant references and a glossary also help) but to provoke thought, debate and possibly wonder.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Cochran and Harpending dispute the late Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that civilization was “built with the same body and brain” Homo sapiens has had for 40,000 years. Humanity has been evolving very dramatically for the last 10,000 years, they say, spurred by the very civilizational forces launched by that evolution. They initially retreat, however, to Gould’s 40,000-year benchmark to consider how H. sapiens replaced H. neanderthalensis and to argue for genetic mixing such that modern humans got from Neanderthals the innovative capacity for civilization. Later, agricultural life created problems necessitating adaptations, most importantly to disease and diet, that persist to this day among inheritors of the populations that made them. Lighter skin and eye color arose from other genetic reactions to environmental challenges, and less immediately obvious changes further discriminated discrete populations, as recently as late-eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jews, among whom intelligence burgeoned in, Cochran and Harpending contend, adaptive response to social pressure. A most intriguing deposition, without a trace of ethnic or racial advocacy, though directed against the proposition that “we’re all the same.” --Ray Olson


Anyone read it? Maybe we should have a sticky for "Paleo" books.

Yes! Not read it yet, but a perfect example of an attempt at a synthesis approach that allows for an idea to come to print without having been beaten to death by experts in each individual field. This is a popular way to publish. Folks like Wrangham and these guys (I presume) are prohibited from working up theories for a variety of reasons, and it must be frustrating. So they do this. They've got a book that will sell, and if we need to backdoor some theories, then we need to backdoor some theories. Even though they are buying the books, the layfolk can suffer instead of the experts. It works, but you're kind of trusting the reader not to believe you too much on your way to becoming famous, if not rich.

I had a chance to page through it a few months ago, but I didn't see the math I was hoping to see, so I sent it back without a read. It might have information on what kind of society we should expect to see if natural selection is able to work on us in such a short timespan. People who know their stuff can't decide whether human evolution has stopped or speeded up since civilization (or agriculture) started to work its very obvious magic on our behavior.