[babyboy808]

I personally believe we should be eating raw food. (plant based foods etc) and not meat, although I still do :|

Some great points are:

+ Look at our teeth, they are made for eating plants/veggies and not meat, unlike lions etc.

+ Cooked foods kill the nutrients, unlike eating raw organic food.

+ Our digestive tract is long, apparently to process plant based foods, compared to a meat eating anmial like a lion, they have a short digestive tract, so they can process raw meat quickly.

+ Animal meat is the only food that gives us colesterol.

Get this movie and watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZmV8b1wr10

[briandw]

This is incorrect and naive. Our teeth evolved to eat a wide verity of things, molars to chew plants, and incisors and canines to rip meat. Look at the diet of chimps, they eat whatever they can get their hands on, meat included.

"Cooked foods are bad" is a crock. You can over cook foods, and maybe cooking some foods is bad, but cooking increases the nutritional value of many foods. Processing makes more nutrients available to the body. Humans don't have a super efficient digestive system (despite your claims otherwise) and cooking is one way to pre-digest. Besides the fact that cooking kills off critters so you don't have to.

Meat might be the only source of cholesterol, but so what? Cholesterol doesn't enter the body as cholesterol, it's broken down into fatty acid and glycerol, the liver puts it back together later. You can be vegetarian and have high/bad cholesterol. What you eat is only one part of the cholesterol story.

This "all food should be raw" crap is just reactionary, anti-science ludditeism, as are parts of the "organic" movement, specifically the no GMO part.

[da5e]

"specifically the no GMO part"

That's a huge unscientific leap to say that. We don't know GMO is safe. And it's certainly not logical to say that concerns about them are crap.

[whatusername]

We've been modifying and breeding plants and animals for thousands of years. All that's happening now is the process is speeding up. We know that sometimes it doesn't work (see Banana's), but in general things get better.

Better == What we optimize for. Which lately has unfortunately been appearance and shelf life, not taste and nutrients.

[Bdennyw]

Whats more unscientific; genetics are scary and we should never intentionally modify genes for our benefit, or lets investigate what can be done with this new tool? I'd say that investigation and experimentation would be the scientific thing to do.

[da5e]

Sure experimentation is great, but they're doing it on people. Those food aren't even labeled as such in the markets in the US and the effect they are having on agriculture is enormously problematic. e.g. Monstanto suing farmers. And how do they modify those organism? With radiation. This is not your father's brand of genetics.

[rubashov]

> Processing makes more nutrients available to the body.

This is certainly true, but it's just as important that processing eliminates toxins. Despite the moaning you hear about processed food, a major problem is that our modern diet is under-processed.

There are many foods that used to universally be soaked & aged, sprouted, fermented, or treated with lye, or a combination of these steps, in order to eliminate anti-nutrients and allergens. This is rarely done on the modern industrial scale for reasons of cost. Modern flour is not the same thing as people were eating 150 years ago. The native americans always treated corn with lye. The settlers didn't and consequently got pellagra, and we continue to eat untreated corn.

Read Stephan Guyenet and the Weston Price Foundation have literature on various traditional processing steps and chemically what they were achieving.

[jvdh]

Lions are carnivores, their teeth are specifically targetted at tearing and eating meat, which is why they have large incisors. Cows are herbivors, their teeth are flat, and have no incisors at all.

Humans have a combination of the two, and also the rest of our digestive system is also built to makes us omnivores.

[rubashov]

This is a ridiculous point because for over two million years human related hominids have been using stone tools to kill and butcher meat.

Humans have massive predator fangs that look like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Bifaz_de_...

[sliverstorm]

Teeth serve two purposes- catching and chewing/ripping/tearing.

Long fangs are for catching. Cats don't really chew food, nor do snakes. Both rely on their teeth to stab and hold prey, which is why they are sharp like needles.

Our cutting teeth are for slicing and chewing- in other words, processing the meat after it's been caught. The 'massive predator fangs' take care of catching it, but have you ever eaten meat without biting off a piece, ONLY cutting it up into little bits and chewing it? There's a reason that's relegated to high society, it's not worthwhile for everyone else, and it'd be ridiculously hard with stone tools.

[rubashov]

> have you ever eaten meat without biting off a piece, ONLY cutting it up into little bits and chewing it?

Uh, pretty much every day? I'm pretty sure that's what pre-humans did, too. They butchered, cooked, and cut it up. Dentition is irrelevant.

> it'd be ridiculously hard with stone tools.

They were kept razor sharp. It would not be hard.

[sliverstorm]

They cut it up into bite-sized pieces? I really doubt that. Notice only people who worry about etiquette tend to do that, and I don't think etiquette existed when we were cutting things with rocks. Perhaps chunks were sliced off, but I can't help but laugh at the thought of a Stone Age man cutting his meat into little cubes.

As a further argument, notice how most people eat a drumstick? It comes naturally.

[seldo]

Cooking food is a form of external pre-digestion that actively increases the effective nutritional content of most food, especially vegetables, which are otherwise too hard to break down (have you tried eating raw potato?).

Some evolutionary biologists believe that learning to cook food was crucial in providing us with the extra calories required to fuel our gigantic brains.

[sliverstorm]

I haven't got the study, but apparently our brain size shot WAY up right after we figured out how to cook food. It was a very strong correlation.

[sliverstorm]

Have you ever carefully examined how hard it is for a vegetarian, or especially a vegan, to get all the right nutrients?

I got news for you, primeval man did not have the discretionary ability we have today in our food.

Protein is an excellent example. The primary sources for vegans are nuts/seeds, and legumes. If you can't cook, it's very hard to eat legumes- have you ever tried eating a raw pinto bean? They are literally hard as rocks. Plus they cannot be found across the globe. Nuts and seeds are very seasonal, leaving man high and dry in certain seasons, and it's much much more of a challenge to harvest 6+ oz of nuts every day than it is to buy a jar of them at the store.

[biotech]

It seems to me that humans evolved as herbivores. I've never heard anyone argue that humans should be carnivores, but it seems like that's what you're arguing against.

1. Our teeth evolved to chew plants and veggies, true. As omnivores, we have to eat plants, not just meat. Plants are more difficult to digest, so most of our teeth resemble herbivores' teeth (chewing is the first step in digestion). Notice that we also chew meat just fine. I don't know anyone who can't chew meat because their teeth are too flat. We can even rip it right off the bone with certain teeth. Is that not an evolutionary adaptation?

My point is that just because we chew plants relatively well, that does not mean we also don't chew meat well.

2. Cooked foods kill the nutrients

Since I'm addressing the herbivore vs. omnivore argument, I'll ignore this one, as it obviously applies to plants and not meat.

3. Our digestive tract is long, apparently to process plant[s]...

Similar to #1. A long digestive tract may be necessary to process plants, but it does not preclude digesting meat.

4. Animal meat is the only food that gives us colesterol [sic].

.... which is okay in moderation. People can't survive on fruits alone, either. That doesn't mean that fruit should be eliminated from our diet.