raw cougar

Question
Geoff, I have been eating mostly raw for the past year, influenced by A.V. and yourself.  It's working great for me.  But someone sent me a newspaper article about a hunter here in the U.S. who shot a wild cougar, ate it raw, and got trchinosis and was hospitalized.  I'd love to eat wild meat; why did he get sick? Thanks, Mienks

Answer
One of the interesting points made by pleomorphists like AV is that it isn't the bacteria or the parasites that are the problem, but the environment that the bacteria/parasites find themselves in. In other words, someone on a cooked-food/junk-food diet will have a lot of toxic material in his body's organs(plus poorer immune-system etc.), and since parasites feed upon dead  material in the body, that would be bound to cause side-effects. In a raw-food-eating person, parasites would mostly  be pretty harmless, given a healthier environment. I can only go by my own experiences and that of other RPDers on my groups, and I've only heard of two absolutely definite accounts of RPDers experiencing negative side-effects from parasites. In both cases, the two had been to the tropics, and had had some worms coming out of stools - they both reported only mild effects, lasting only a few days or  a week.

Anyway, here are a few articles showing the beneficial effects of parasites(the 2nd one is of most interest):-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6268585.stm

http://tinyurl.com/ft5ug

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

My personal view is that the issue of parasites is more complex than either AV or the FDA claim, given the evidence. The mere fact that I haven't had a single problem with parasites after several years on the diet convinces me  that AV's take is 99% correct, but I don't discount the possibility that I might get a minor parasitic episode, ten years down the line, say.

One interesting  point made by a member of my group, a long while back,  was that some horses(?)  she'd come across, who'd been living relatively wild, being left to feed on their own, suddenly came down with parasitic infestations when they were brought in and fed on an unnatural diet by their handlers. Clearly, the "parasites" were already in the horses' bodies as they were more exposed to them in the wild. In other words, it's probably best to only eat meat from relatively healthy wild animals as they are most likely to be on a healthy diet. Wild animals fed on garbage would be another matter, of course.

Anyway, all this is unlikely to convince you, at this stage in the diet. I was equally scared of parasites/bacteria when I first started the diet, and only experience taught me, over time,  that it was an irrational fear. What I would suggest is that you try out various well-known herbal anti-parasitic  remedies for a while, until you get used to the diet etc.. In the first year or so, I used wormwood tincture(probably not a good idea as it contains alcohol as a preservative) but I also used things like cayenne pepper, raw garlic(obviously don't use smoked garlic)  and pumpkin seeds.

RPG

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