QuestionYou mention that fasting longer than a few days could be dangerous. Have you experienced an extended fast or know anyone who has and been damaged by it? You might be interested in Herbert Shelton's works, he fasted about 40,000 people over a lifetime, many over 30 days and has maintained that there is no danger in doing so as long as it doesn't persist into 'starvation' phase which takes weeks, even months.
Another brief thought, i'm very much into the paleo style of eating and it makes sense when you look at the evolution of humans. I was fortunate enough to discover it a year ago at the age of 23 so I got in early. There is loads of evidence how-ever, that humans have been cooking thier food (slow cooking) for more than 130,000 years, (up to half a million years) which is probably ample time to adapt and evolve to cooked meat and vegetables. Many people do extremely well on a lightly cooked paleo diet, what makes you think raw is necessarily better? Perhaps you are carrying over your raw prejudices from your vegan days.
AnswerI've never dared do fasts lasting longer than a week or so . The reason being that I've heard of reports of a few people dying after doing only 13 days, etc. I'm not suggesting that there is anything inherently bad about long-term fasts(pre-emaciation-phase!), but it seems that people who are already ill from conditions such as liver-disease etc. are already in a weakened state, so that the various minor side-effects from long-term fasting can be seriously detrimental, or even fatal, to their health. So,as a result, I was, understandably, extremely reluctant to undergo long-term fasting during my initial period of recovery from cooked-food diets.When I recovered, I was happy to go in for Intermittent Fasting, but I'm still wary of doing long-term fasting as I've come across various reports by people following caloric restriction diets on a long-term basis, with a view to extending their lifespan - these invariably report constantly feeling weak etc. So my stance is that frequent short-term fasting is an extremely good idea but that long-term fasting is probably a bad one. That said, a few raw-animal-foodists have mentioned doing 20-day-fasts between switching from a cooked- to raw-animal-food diet, and they've reported good results, re reduced detox symptoms etc.
Re raw-prejudices:- I was never actually "pro-raw" during my Vegan days, nor was I ever a militant Vegan - in fact, I was always pretty dubious re the standard pro-Vegan arguments. The sole reason for my going in for Raw Veganism/Fruitarianism was that I'd, over the years, slowly developed constant stomach-aches from eating any cooked-animal-food, whatsoever. These stomach-aches became much worse and far more frequent until, by my mid-20s, I had no choice but to try Raw Vegan/Fruitarian and then, finally, Raw-Animal-Food diets. I did attempt to try a lightly-cooked Palaeolithic diet before going Vegan, but, given my particular condition, the attempt was a failure.
As for the issue of raw versus cooked:- cooking destroys enzymes and reduces bacteria-levels. (One of the central tenets of the modern Hygiene Hypothesis theory is that a number of modern illnesses are on the rise, precisely because we, nowadays, live in such an overly hygienic bacteria-free environment). Bacteria have also been shown in recent studies to reduce depression/enhance mood, quite aside from the benefits re digestion.
There are also other factors. Our modern stoves/ovens etc. simply weren't available in the Palaeolithic - this meant that meats were unlikely to be as thoroughly cooked, with raw parts of the meat being found in the middle - also, I've read about the practices of various,hunter-gatherer tribes in Siberia and other areas, who would routinely eat the organ-meats raw before cooking the rest of the meat - there's no reason to suppose that the Palaeolithic would have been any different.
Also, there's my own personal observations to take into account. I used to go on a large number of camping trips in my time, years ago, and, even with modern solid fuel etc., I had a hell of a time starting and keeping a fire going in the wet, windy climates of Wales and northern England. Given that Palaeo hunters had only sticks and stones, without tinderboxes/matches, I can only assume that starting a fire, let alone keeping it going for long periods, would have been an uphill struggle for those people
And, of course, the available evidence from the Palaeolithic era is extremely sparse and so contradictory that it's very difficult to reach a conclusion re a specific date for cooked-food. Palaeo sites such as www.beyondveg.com admit that the likeliest date is c.130-160,000 years ago, because of the existence of hearths which appeared at the time. Cited data from even earlier periods is viewed as extremely dodgy and unreliable, and most point out that natural wildfires are a much more likely explanation for any evidence found. There is one scientist, Wrangham, who has tried to push the date of the invention of cooking back as far as 2 million years ago,by citing faulty evidence, in order to support his theory that cooked-tubers were responsible for the growth of the human brain. However, his data has been shown to be full of
holes -(www.beyondveg.com has an excellent article pointing out some of the major flaws in this theory).
One last point to make is that cooked-food is a radically different type of nutrient, in that no other species cooks its own food, and switching from a raw to a cooked-food diet is a far more radical step, evolutionary-wise,
than merely switching from one type of raw food to another.
. This means that it's doubtful that humans could ever fully adapt to the process of cooking, though partial adaptation is a given).
Also, if you look at the various charts showing the diets of our primate ancestors, you'll find that our ancestors took millions of years to change their diets(from insectivorous diet to fruit/veg diet to a mainly-meat diet). So, a couple of hundred thousand years to switch to switch to such a radically different, cooked-food diet isn't all that much, by contrast.
RPG
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