[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.