BS

Question
Hello G!
I would rather be brief but this topic requires some careful analysis to do. It is insistently alleged nowadays by most of the modern "experts" in the nutrition field that heavy-meat diets are very dangerous and detrimental to human's health. However, some unenlightened folks (like you and me) do not agree and consume mostly meats with the only difference being in eating our foods raw (won't mend matters anyway).
Supporters of the raw food diet believe it is naturally more healthy than consuming cooked food. They argue that uncooked food contains live enzymes which give people more energy and, as a result, they require less sleep. The enzymes, however, are killed off when boiled or cooked at a temperature above 118F. Albeit raw or not but the general consensus is that this paleo approach may cause serious health problems and shouldn't be considered as a optimal diet in the long run. Hereby health and safety professionals believe the consumption of raw meat on a wider scale could be potentially fatal.
Yet Geoff has an amazing 6 years of experience and derived nothing but benefits from such a practice. Thereby I seek an information or assistance from him to disprove or explain an opinion generally held.
Some of the following remarks are obviously erroneous assumptions and lame conclusions and were previously disclaimed here. But some are less shaky claims and rouse interest as well as concerns. It will be instructive to analyze the results. Let's get it straight what is in store for us rawpaleo eaters...
1) excess protein intake put too much strain on kidneys and liver (as a result of excretion of nitrogen-containing substances in particular);
2) extremely high fat diet (over 60 of calories) leads to liver, pancreas and heart problems. Saturated fat is the main culprit. Cholesterol is to blame as well. Threat of atherosclerosis;
3) the parasites that cause trichinosis or cysticercosis. Chicken is sometimes contaminated with Salmonella enterica disease-causing bacteria. Helminths and other pathogens;
4) animal's diseases can adversely affect humans. Nervous system tissue can be contaminated with TSE prions, which cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, 搈ad cow disease?. The practice of feeding raw offal to dogs on farms and ranches can spread echinococcosis, a potentially fatal parasitic disease of animals and humans. Some animal intestines are very high in coliform bacteria and need to be washed and cooked thoroughly to be safe for eating;
5) acid/alkaline dietary load. Meat and fish have a high potential renal acid load;
6) calcium and magnesium deficiency;
7) phosphorous overload and resulting mineral imbalance;
8) lack of Vitamins K, E and C;
9) protein/Vit C imbalance. Both must be in balance with each other (1 g to 1 mg ratio);
10) rich in meat diet produce lactic acid accumulation and uric acid increase. Thus urolithiasis results;
11) the body can only handle (for muscle and organ maintenance) about 15 to 20 grams in a four-hour period (regarding Intermittent Fasting);
12) a heavy meat diet can cause impotency from too many animal hormones and steroids used in the growing of the animals;
13) offal very high in purines can precipitate an acute attack of gout. Too much dietary collagen is harmful as well;
14) intestinal putrefaction, which is primarily brought on by a high meat diet;
15) regular consumption of (red) meat has also been linked to bone loss, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and arthritis.
But even the best assessments of the health risks are far from complete. Do we have to fear? Now, let's have your point of view...
thank you
Yuri

Answer
The CJD-issue is a non-starter. First of all, the number of cases with CJD is incredibly low compared to more standard illnesses( 1 per million, according to wikipedia - and even vegetarians have died from CJD, so it's nonsense to suggest that meat-eating is responsible:-

http://tinyurl.com/22k9b5


As for the issues re parasites/bacteria, you should look more deeply into the hygiene-hypothesis theory online(there are many such sites) which show that the absence of parasites/bacteria has been a primary cause behiind the rise in modern illness.

- I've already shown relevant sites re bacteria improving mood  etc.- Vinny, on the livefood yahoo group,
also recently referred to an article re the importance of bacteria/parasites(The "eating shit" article!)

The other point made consistently by Aajonus was that it's not the bacteria/parasites that are the problem, but the  environment they live in. In one of AV's online interviews(or his book?), for example, he refers to a study which showed that c.38% of all US households had copious amounts of the salmonella bacterium in their homes(yet there was no widespread salmonella-epidemic in those households) etc. In other words, rather than relying on harmful antibiotics and side-effect-heavy drugs, one should instead resort to add extra beneficial bacteria to the body.

Re meat-diet/hormones/impotency:- I've only ever come across  the impotency/infertility allegations from Vegetarian sources(or medical-associations which are fronts for vegan groups like PETA) - and they claim such effects for even a healthy, organic meat diet. There's no doubt that the hormones/steroids widely used in the american nonorganic-meat-market are very harmful but  fortunately the UK has laws against that - in short,  I rather doubt the specific impotency allegation, plus all these studies have been done on cooked-meat diets, rather than raw, with junk-food diets being targetted. And if the impotency/infertility allegations were, indeed, true, then one would expect the Eskimos to have long since died out - which, obviously isn't the case!


Obviously, all these allegations centre around cooked-diets high in cooked-animal-food so are pretty irrelevant to raw-animal-food diets, anyway. Then there are the Eskimos whose vigorous health(pre-19th century)  tends to debunk these ideas. One explanation that palaeo-gurus like Cordain have come up with is that the Eskimos are very large amounts of seafood, implying that the huge amounts of omega-3 fatty acids/PUFAs more than compensated for the effects of the large amount of cooked-saturated fats in the diet.

On the other hand, various scientific studies have indicated so far, that cooked-saturated fats has similiar(though less harmful) effects as processed-trans-fats.  But I am in no doubt that raw saturated fat is fine, by comparison to cooked-saturated fats. I guess, we need more scientific research on this whole issue, specifically on raw saturated fats.

Lack of vitamin K/C  and E:- Vitamin K is produced by bacteria in the gut, so you don't need food-sources of vitamin K if you have a healthy balance of bacteria in the gut.

Re high-fat/high-protein:- The only absolutely conclusive evidence is that high-protein diets with very little to no
carbs or fats are harmful. There were attempts to do liquid protein diets in the 70s which were absolutely lethal. In other words, as long as you incorporate enough fats/carbs you're fine. I generally disagree with Stefansson et all re amounts of fats needed(Stefansson recommended 60 to 80% of diet as fats, but Cordain rightly points out that scientific studies show that the Eskimos' average fat-intake, in terms of calories, was c.47%).

Vitamin C is supposed to be present in raw meats. It's only when it's been cooked that the levels of vitamin C disappeared. Also, Stefansson showed via his bellevue experiment, that you don't get scurvy even on a cooked-meat diet - so, presumably, something else in the meat does the same job for human health as vitamin C?

Vitamin E is also found in meats, even cooked-meats, so there's no problem re deficiency:-

http://tinyurl.com/2mot5v


I've never heard of this protein/vitamin C ratio. Could this just be vegan propaganda?

Re IF and 15 to 20g over 4 hours:- Never heard of this, can't verify it.  Couldn't find anything online re this, either.

Re magnesium-deficiency:- Only a problem if your diet is high in dairy. Phosphorus overload should only be a problem, I would think, if one is drinking lots of phosphorus-rich soft drinks like Coca-Cola etc.

The calcium-deficiency is explained by Cordain as not being a problem if you're on a 65% meat/35% plant-food diet - and, as I pointed out before, the Eskimos were not exactly known for having bone-problems, before the white man came. Here's a standard weston-price page which debunks the study
re Eskimos and bone-loss:-

http://tinyurl.com/37vpfw


As for the rest, again, I should make clear that refined carbs(not necessarily simple, unrefined carbs) have been repeatedly implicated as the worst offenders as regards harming human health. I'm sure that there is also plenty of evidence against cooked-animal-food(for example,
I have noticed that the older people I know tend to do better, re arthritis symptoms, if they reduce the amounts of cooked meat in their diet) - but, as I've pointed out earlier, any study referring to cooked-meat has little relevance to raw-meat diets, for obvious reasons - after all, one of the central points re raw-food is that AGEs(advanced glycation endproducts) from cooked/processed foods accumulate in the human body, thus harming health, and that lack of enzymes/bacteria as a result of eating cooked-foods is harmful in the long run.

RPG

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