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This is somewhat a case of shooting fish in a barrel, but I was amused by the following passage in a Scienceblog review
scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009...g_made.php
"Obviously 1/4 more calories per unit has an adaptive significance. Aside from the anatomical and behavioral changes this might entail, there is an obvious natural experiment which might test what happens when humans shift away from cooked food. The "raw food" movement. Raw foodists tend to be thin. The reason behind this is simple: they gain fewer calories per unit from the foods they consume, and generally the foods they consume are lower in calories to begin with even if cooked. It is important to note that modern raw food enthusiasts have access to a wide array of goods thanks to modern agriculture, and can supplement their diet in a manner impossible in a premodern period such as adding a great deal of oil to their diet. Some research suggests that 1/3 of the calories for some raw foodists derives from these oils. I'm not particularly interested in the nutritional consequences, rather, more relevant are reports that 1/2 of female raw foodists stop menstruating and many of the males claim reduced sexual appetite. Raw foodists are generally loony New Age types, and apparently many believe that menstruation and ejaculation are processes which evolved to expel toxins from their bodies, so their decrease of sexual function is an indicator that they are no longer ingesting toxins. But from an evolutionary perspective this is a very strong argument that the ancient human diet was likely to not be raw; if modern raw foodists who have access to a wide variety of items exhibit such low potential reproductive fitness it is certain that pre-modern populations on the Malthusian margin would be far more likely to simply go extinct."
scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009...g_made.php
"Obviously 1/4 more calories per unit has an adaptive significance. Aside from the anatomical and behavioral changes this might entail, there is an obvious natural experiment which might test what happens when humans shift away from cooked food. The "raw food" movement. Raw foodists tend to be thin. The reason behind this is simple: they gain fewer calories per unit from the foods they consume, and generally the foods they consume are lower in calories to begin with even if cooked. It is important to note that modern raw food enthusiasts have access to a wide array of goods thanks to modern agriculture, and can supplement their diet in a manner impossible in a premodern period such as adding a great deal of oil to their diet. Some research suggests that 1/3 of the calories for some raw foodists derives from these oils. I'm not particularly interested in the nutritional consequences, rather, more relevant are reports that 1/2 of female raw foodists stop menstruating and many of the males claim reduced sexual appetite. Raw foodists are generally loony New Age types, and apparently many believe that menstruation and ejaculation are processes which evolved to expel toxins from their bodies, so their decrease of sexual function is an indicator that they are no longer ingesting toxins. But from an evolutionary perspective this is a very strong argument that the ancient human diet was likely to not be raw; if modern raw foodists who have access to a wide variety of items exhibit such low potential reproductive fitness it is certain that pre-modern populations on the Malthusian margin would be far more likely to simply go extinct."
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Montreal
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Re: Comment on Raw Foodism in review of book on the significance of fire in hominid evolution
Wed, June 24, 2009 - 10:59 AMheh heh
I love yoga, but I usually have to roll my eyes when an instructor starts going on about detoxifying the body. The detoxification myth is one of the most annoying things I come across within the new agey movement. I can't tell you how many friends take supplements and do lemon water detoxes... nuts I tell ya. -
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Re: Comment on Raw Foodism in review of book on the significance of fire in hominid evolution
Wed, June 24, 2009 - 4:03 PMThe thing that annoys me the most about the toxins talk is the vagueness, on a par with "spirit" and "energy" talk - they never seem to mention just what exactly they are, or how exactly their touted detox regimes are supposed to deal with them. I mean, there's no shortage of pollutants and carcinogens in our environment thanks to the carelessness of modern industrial societies, but have any New Agers actually done their homework on that? They seem content to use the fact of pollution only in the most general way - to motivate fear and generate customers for their approaches.
And then of course there's the simple fact that everyday digestive processes produce wastes that can be considered toxins if you don't expel them - but of course we generally do in the course of everyday elimination. There's usually an insinuation (rather than an outright assertion) that somehow we don't manage to expel digestive waste enough, and thus we have to go on regular cleansing fasts or whatever, but, again. I never see any concrete substantiation of this.
In ref to raw foods specifically, I'm often tempted to point out that certain vegetable foods *need* to be cooked to neutralize toxins present in them(!), and most generally release more nutrients when cooked. (You get more beta-carotene from a cooked than a raw carrot.) Raw peanuts interfere with digestion; the "raw" cashew nuts we get, and which are very popular with the raw foodies I know, are actually already treated - cooked, in a manner of speaking (google it) - to make them safe to eat.
Of course, these are the same hollow-cheeked people who like to say, "oh, there's protein in everything" (technically true, but rarely in nutritionally significant amounts), but have little idea how much a minimum daily requirement is, and who certainly can't name the 8 essential amino acids we can't synthesize.
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