cooked fat and raw dairy

Question
Hi
I've been reading your past answers and have noticed that you are very anti- cooked animal fat and dairy, but there are some things I don't understand..
First of all you say cooked animal fat is toxic and full of HCAs and AGES etc. But isn;t this only for animal fat heated to very high temperatures? What is the evidence that animal fat heated below 100C is equally toxic? I agree that raw fat is superior but surely animal fat (which is stable anyway) heated at low temps is not that toxic or poisonous?

Secondly, I agree raw dairy isn;t for everyone as many are allergic to it, but what about people who can tolerate raw dairy very well? The masai come to mind - I have been to kenya and seen them up close, as well as reading about them in Weston Price's book, etc and they are extremely healthy. Other groups have also thrived on raw dairy. Do you think they would be even healthier without the raw dairy?

I just wanted some clarity, so I can fully understand these topics.
Thanks

Answer
There is a lot of deliberately misleading info from nutritionists on the web with claims that "boiling doesn't create toxins". These are completely wrong, and if you check online studies and reports done on boiled foods, you'll find that they do indeed contain some heat-created toxins(eg:-

http://bastyrcenter.org/content/view/976/&page=
(see boiled chicken at 1,011 units of AGEs)
. Granted, toxins found in , say, chargrilled meats, will be much higher than in lightly-steamed vegetables, for example, but any kind of cooking will create toxins to some degree.

As regards the claim that animal fats are stable during heat(I presume you mainly mean saturated fats), that's erroneous. Scientific studies have shown that cooked animal fats produce far more heat-created toxins such as AGEs/advanced glycation end products)than  cooked plant-foods:-

http://www.newcastleyoga.com.au/links/Food%20AGEs%20text.pdf

(Note how butter, rich in saturated fat, is shown in the above report, to be extremely high in heat-created toxins like AGEs).

As a result, it's been theorised by several scientists that the reason for all the multitude of studies damning saturated-fat-consumption may be, not due to the saturated fat, per se, but to the fact that the studies focus on the effects of cooked animal foods, which happen to contain large amounts of those heat-created toxins:-

"Another confounding issue may be the formation of exogenous (outside the body) advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) and oxidation products generated during cooking, which it appears some of the studies have not controlled for. It has been suggested that, "given the prominence of this type of food in the human diet, the deleterious effects of high-(saturated)fat foods may be in part due to the high content in glycotoxins, above and beyond those due to oxidized fatty acid derivatives." The glycotoxins, as he called them, are more commonly called AGEs.[31]" taken from:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat

[31](scientific study reference above):- http://www.pnas.org/content/94/12/6474.long

Re cut-off point:- Basically, foods are not meant to be heated above 40 degrees Celsius for various health-related reasons. After 40 degrees Celsius/104 degrees Fahrenheit, some changes already start happening to the food:- enzymes in raw foods get quickly denatured above 40 degrees Celsius and destroyed at c.60+ degrees Celsius(enzymes are proteins), then the bacteria get killed off and  nutrient-loss occurs re vitamins and minerals. All these factors are important. I haven't found studies on very mildly-heated foods(they all just  focus on boiling or lightly-steaming or more extreme cooking methods, but it seems clear that if boiling creates toxins and there is a sliding-scale of increasing toxicity as one increases the amount of heat in cooking(to grilling/frying etc.), then there must also similarly be  a sliding-scale of toxin-creation on the opposite side so that the closer you go down the scale to 40 degrees Celsius, the more negligible the toxin-levels become.

There are other concerns, of course. Animals raised on ultra-unhealthy raw foods(eg:- grainfed cattle or intensively-farmed chickens) will inevitably have high levels of AGEs even if no cooking is involved, as they are not meant to eat those diets in the wild so develop inflammation etc.(AGEs are agents of inflammation in a big way). But, of course, eating grassfed cattle and similiar healthy raw foods avoids this issue.

Now, there are ways to reduce the amounts of AGEs consumed in cooked food(eg:- always cooking water as that reduces AGE-production) or whole-day-fasting(ie not eating cooked foods here and there allows the body more time to get rid of the AGE-levels already present in the body). But, ultimately, the benefits re health quickly start decreasing as one goes above 40 degrees Celsius.

Re dairy:-  I do not doubt that the Masai would be healthier without the raw dairy. For one thing, they have pretty short lifespans. While some of that can be attributed to lack of modern medical care re broken bones or whatever,it's not a very encouraging fact.

I once went to Kenya and was also quite impressed by the Masai physique. But, of course, they spend endless hours each day running around and herding cattle etc. and are therefore super-fit, regardless of diet.They do seem to include grains in their diet, to some extent, despite assertions by cooked-low-carbers like Barry Groves, which makes me doubt some claims re health. But, overall, the Masai also live a very tough life, so that, any masai growing up who turned out to be dairy-intolerant, wouldn't be likely to survive to adulthood, IMO. Oh, and they do eat only fermented raw dairy, unlike many Westerners(the fermentation improves digestion and reduces allergenicity to some extent).

My main concern, though, is that not only have I come across numerous people with food-intolerances towards raw dairy, but I have also come across people who've sworn blind for years that they did OK or fine on raw dairy, but who, years later, admitted that they became much healthier after cutting it out completely from their diet. Consuming a lot of a particular allergenic raw food can often block the body's natural detox process, so that one doesn't immediately notice any overt symptoms, but it still means that the person's health can be significantly damaged over a long period.

HTH,
RPG.  

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