Frederic Patenaude Talks

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9 Ways to Stay Raw and Healthy During the Winter

(The following article comes from my 60-page recipe book the “Raw Winter Recipe Guide” that I wrote during my many winters in the North. This book contains amazing raw recipes for the winter based on seasonal ingredients, and more tips and ideas for staying healthy during the winter. This book is available as a special bonus only as part of the Raw Vegan Mentor Club. Click here for more information)

Here are some of my favorite tips to help you to stay warm and healthy during the coldest days of winter:

1. You don’t need more fat during the winter.

Most people imagine that they need to eat more fat during the winter to stay warm. This is a misconception, as fat on your skin is not necessarily related to fat consumption. What you might need more of are calories, if you spend a lot of time outside. The energy required to maintain your body temperature will be manifested in an increased caloric need.
But for most people, that’s not an issue because they tend to exercise less during the winter, and they wear warm clothes. So either they’ll need the same amount of calories, or actually less.

2. Not everything has to be so cold!

Get your vegetables out of the fridge a few hours before dinner. Before going to bed, select the fruits you’ll want to eat in the morning, and keep at room temperature.

3. You can warm up a soup.

Use the recipes I’ve included in this eBook for warm soups, or make your own. The process is the same.

4. You can drink hot drinks.

This is a trick I picked up from Joe Alexander in his book “Blatant Raw Foodist Propaganda”. Drinking hot drinks doesn’t alter the “buzz” or high-energy you’ll get from eating a raw food diet, as long as you take in only the liquid. For example: herbal teas are okay, as is the broth made by boiling vegetables (only drink the broth, don’t eat the veggies). The one thing to avoid however would be caffeine.

5. Stay warm!

You might get colder on a raw food diet because you’re body is getting used to a lower, more natural and healthy body temperature. To overcome this obstacle, wear additional clothing.

6. The best way to raise your body temperature is to exercise.

But don’t just exercise at specific times! Plan exercise “breaks” during the day, to raise your body temperature and avoid afternoon fatigue. Short exercise breaks can last only a few minutes, with jumping jacks, a short jog or sprint, lifting weights, etc.

7. Don’t Skip a Day of Exercise .

According to known research, skipping exercise for two days in a row has bad effects on health. (Source: http://walking.about.com/od/healthbenefits/a/skip2days.htm)

8. If you’re looking for an indoor exercise, try rebounding.

Want an exercise you can do on a snowy day? Try rebounding. It can be a great cardio-endurance-toning workout if you know what to do with the rebounder. Get a good rebounder. Not those cheap ones at Walmart. Get something that will last and will give you a real bound. My rebounder is a NEEDAK that I got on E-bay.

9. Hydrate & Nourish Your Skin

Take plenty of hot baths, give yourself a footbath or try a facial mask. The recipes in my book will give you some ideas for what to add to your bath. Be sure to use a heavy moisturizer after you bathe and before you step outside in the cold and you’ll be sure to be ready for the coldest days.

Raw Food Recipes for the Winter

(The following recipes comes from my 60-page recipe book the “Raw Winter Recipe Guide” that I wrote during my many winters in the North. This book contains amazing raw recipes for the winter based on seasonal ingredients, and more tips and ideas for staying healthy during the winter. This book is available as a special bonus only as part of the Raw Vegan Mentor Club. Click here for more information)

Favorite Layered Salad

Ingredients:

o Green or red lettuce leaves
o 3 red bell peppers
o 4 branches of celery
o 2 avocados
o 1 lemon (juice)
o 1 handful of leeks, chopped finely
o 1 handful of dill or fennel, chopped finely
o Cumin, fennel seeds (optional)
o 1 zucchini, grated

Method: You will make 2 different layers of lettuce and vegetable mix.

First, you need to make the veggie mix. Chop the vegetables and mix them together in a bowl. Mash the avocado so that you can mix it well with the others ingredients.
On a plate, put a lettuce leaf and some of the veggie mix. Then, add another lettuce leaf and some of the mixture, as you would for a lasagna. Put some tomato sauce (see below) and more lettuce leaves. Add grated zucchini on top.

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients:

o 2 tomatoes
o 4 sundried tomatoes (soaked in advance)
o Basil (fresh)
o 2 tsp. of agave nectar (raw) or 2-3 dates.

Method: Blend all of the ingredients.

Pomelo and Pear

Ingredients:

o 1 pomelo
o 3 pears
o 1 apple
o 1 handful frozen raspberry

Method: Cut the pomelo in large slices; take off the skin and the envelope of the pulp. Put the pulp in a bowl with the chopped fruits. Crush with the potato masher and mix. Some juice will be created with the pulp and raspberry. The pomelo pulp must be in very tiny pieces. This is a favorite winter recipe!

NOTE: You can find the pomelo at the Chinese market. It is like a big grapefruit.

Plantain Pancake

Ingredients:

o 5 plantains (they should be really ripe with a dark peel)

Method: Peel the plantains. With the blender or the food processor, make a pudding. Spread the plantain pudding (1 cm thick) on the platter of your dehydrator (lined with a wax paper), and let it dehydrate for a total of about 5 hours. After 2-3 hours you can turn it over (you will know it is ready to turn when the corners curl up). You can keep them in the refrigerator and eat it when you want. They are delicious with fruit or fruit sauce.

Watch the preview YouTube Video to get a peak at what’s inside this DVD series. For more information on the Low Fat Raw Vegan DVD Series, click here. On the video, click “HQ” after it has started for better quality.

Opening my Bag of Hatemail!

Today, I’m opening my bag of “hatemail!” Yes, sometimes I receive negative comments, and I feel I have to address some of them today. Watch the video below to watch me answer my bag of hatemail!

Did you like this video? Let me know in the comment section! Below I’m answering some more “legitimate” questions… If you’d like to ask your own questions, contact me at www.replytofred.com

Fermented Soy

Can fermented soy powder be part of a raw food diet since the soy is “predigested”? Same question regarding soy yogurt since beneficial bacteria “predigest” it.

ANSWER:

Soy is not really a health food at all. It is now widely grown as a GMO and you find it in many refined packaged foods for extra added protein, just like wheat and dairy seem to lace everything Americans ingest these days.  It was actually used by the rural Chinese to add nitrogen to the soil for other crops and not eaten as a food unless they were experiencing famine.

Soy is being fed to grazing animals as well and getting far more praise than it deserves.  Just because a food is high in protein is no conclusive reason to eat it.

Soy is mostly marketed to vegans and vegetarians as a complete protein because of it’s amino acid profile, but we know that humans do not need to eat foods with all the amino acids present in one single meal, as we have a store and recycle them as needed.

Yogurt bacteria is not similar to bacteria in our gut so there is no reason to consume it for beneficial bacteria as likely all of the bacteria gets destroyed when it hits out stomach acid.

You are asking if this should be part of a raw food diet. You should be asking is this a healthful food? and then based on your answer decide if you’d like to include it in your diet for health reasons or for personal reasons.

I don’t see any benefits from eating soy that you couldn’t get in a safer form from fruits and vegetables.  I personally try to stay away from GMO’s and mass produced filler foods.

Olives

Hi Frederic! I really enjoyed reading your “Raw Secrets” book. What do you think of eating olives? Do olives have a high nutritional value? Some of the gourmet olives taste great although they use too much salt so I usually soak the olives in water and rinse them before eating to reduce the salt. I like olives, but I am just concerned about the excess salt. Since olives are also high in fat, how many do you recommend eating for one serving? Thanks.

ANSWER:

Olives, like avocado, are much higher in fat than other fruits, and will increase your overall fat percentage exponentially.

They cannot really be eaten raw, they must be salted or put in vinegar which isn’t a healthful reason to eat them either.

I have on occasion eaten them to enjoy the taste, but my opinion is to enjoy them sparingly or go for the canned ones.  Most raw-foodists will tell you to eat large amounts of raw olives without care, but these olives are very high in fat and salt. Canned black olives are dramatically lower in fat and have much less salt and vinegar than any jarred or homemade ones. I’m not saying I recommend canned black olives, but they would be a better choice than even raw, heavily salted and oiled olives.

You can check out the nutritional content and fat content of any food on www.fitday.com . It is free to join as well to track your daily calories.

Digestion and Supplements

The idea that one can get all of one’s nutrients from fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds is good. I heartily agree. However, I am 63 and found out that I have celiac disease about 5 years ago. My problem is malnutrition, brain fog on occasion, etc. I need additional help. Also, my digestion doesn’t seem to be working as well as when I was younger. Consequently, I do take some supplements. Anything your research turns up to help us older folks digest our food better is welcome. (I do take enzymes to help digest food).

ANSWER:

On a raw or even high raw diet based on fruits and vegetables you should have no problem finding enough foods to get calories while avoiding the harmful wheat gluten that is in almost every packaged food and spice.

I have found that my digestion is optimal when consuming blended or pureed raw fruits and greens.  You can do fruit smoothies, green smoothies or blended salads, aka veggie stews.  Essentially you are breaking down all of the cellulose and making more of the vitamins and minerals bio available as they are almost pre digested by your blender.  This especially helps growing bodies and those who want to gain weight or maintain proper nutrition with compromised digestion.

Try it out, before you go for supplements start your morning with a fruit or green smoothie.  Add a little water and bananas and some frozen berries or some juicy fruits like mangos or papayas and bananas,

Try just eating another smoothie or two or some fresh fruit.  Make sure you eat enough that you are not still hungry, fruit is lower in calories than refined foods and starches.

For dinner have some more cut up fruit and try a blended salad!  It is so much easier to get your daily dose of greens and in larger quantities than you might want if you had to chew them.  Blend a tomato or two, cucumber, celery stalks, some dates or mango (for sweetness to offset the blandness), some fresh herbs of choice and 2 heads of mild lettuce or romaine and any other seasoning you like. Blend it on low to medium so that it is not a puree like your smoothie. I like to chop some additional veggies and put it on top.   Try out some different variations and see what you like and I’m sure you will get all the nutrition you need. A great program I love for easily digestable raw foods is the Savory Veggie Stew program by Roger Haeske.

Problems with Frozen Fruits

Aloha Frederic! You mentioned in one of your Q&A’s that frozen fruit created problems. What kind of problems? I really like my smoothies cold, but I want to get the most out of them. Smiles, Lynda

ANSWER:

It would be too many frozen foods that could negatively affect the digestive flora, and associated production of vitamin B-12. Dr. Graham claimed that his vitamin B12 deficiency he experienced many years ago was caused by a regular period of consuming ice-cold smoothies.

Also, now with it being winter, you don’t want to consume foods that are too cold because it will truly make you shiver. Make sure to keep warm if drinking cold drinks during the winter.

I enjoy some smoothies cool, but anything that is too thick and too cold I wait until it melts a bit before consuming it. In my opinion, cool is okay, but “cold” should be avoided, most of the time.

The Truth About Chiropractic and Massage

Thank you for all your work fred! Question, what is the truth about 1) Chiropractic and 2) massage?

ANSWER:

Chiropractic services can be great for people with specific issues that need immediate attention, but some chiropractors do make false claims about what it can do for the overall body’s health.  In many typical American more or less sick individuals it is a temporary fix to a poor lifestyle and requires regular treatments for them to see any relief.

I personally don’t get it done regularly but I have in the past if I had an urgent problem.

Massages are great for relaxation and improved circulation. I certainly enjoy them on occasion.  They can be quite expensive as a temporary fix though.  Also every massage therapist has a different level of training and their techniques differ so I can’t really say much as each person’s experience isn’t the same. You will never fix a problem that is nutritionally-based with a quick-fix like massage.

I find that proper hydration and exercise are two of the best ways to maintain a healthy back and circulatory system. Treatments can offer a temporary fix for a few days, but if your problems keep coming back turn to your lifestyle for the answer to that.

Enzyme Controversy

Hi, “Enzymes Perhaps you should drink wheatgrass juice for enzymes? As I explained before, enzymes are molecules produced by organisms (plants or animals) to use on their own for certain chemical reactions. The plant produces its own enzymes to digest the nutrients that it needs! You produce your own enzymes for your own needs. Taking it plant enzymes will not benefit you in any way, as these enzymes are not compatible and are destroyed anyway in the stomach. ” Now, that statement really confused me. Because of enzymes (at least it is one reason) we eat RAW food!!!! Do you really mean that all that Dr Ann Wigmore had written, studied and so on has been rubbish???? I use wheatgrass juice, and it doesn’t taste so bad. And why do you think that cows are eating it all the time. In wintertime it is not available at all, at least fresh… BR, Raija

ANSWER:

Eating raw foods for enzymes is a widely accepted reason, but just has no basis in fact at all. We eat raw food because it is healthier, contains all of it’s natural vitamins and minerals and is higher in water than cooked food which is dehydrated and adulterated by cooking.

The body produces its own enzymes according to what is required in the stomach.  If it didn’t and you simply RAN OUT of enzymes and were eating let’s say a steak, your body would have a hard time indeed trying to get the food out of your stomach before it’s next meal.

I think you are taking this a little too personally.  I am not discrediting the work Ann Wigmore did to promote sprouts and raw foods, but there are easier ways to go about a healthy raw food diet. If we did not take what we learned in the past and tried to improve it for the future we’d still be stuck in the stone age and probably NOT be eating a healthy vegan raw food diet.

Also I am not sure what your reaction to the taste of wheatgrass has to do with why cows eat grass.  They are designed to eat grass! Humans are not. If you gave wheatgrass juice to a baby or a child, I’m sure you get an interesting reaction indeed.  Carnivores have sensors on their tongue that pick up amino acids, they do not taste meat the same way we do, if they did you can bet they wouldn’t be eating dead flesh.  Not all pastures of grazing cattle experience winter either, but those that do I’m sure the rancher takes care of them and has dried grass or hay to feed during that time.

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“Who Else Wants to Live a Healthier Life With Sunny Weather, Less Stress and Access to an Abundance of Fresh, Cheap, Organic Fruits and Vegetables… for Less Than You’re Currently Spending Now?”

Watch the preview YouTube Video to get a peak at what’s inside this DVD series. For more information on the Low Fat Raw Vegan DVD Series, click here. On the video, click "HQ" after it has started for better quality.

To order the Low Fat Raw Vegan DVDs, click here.

Raw Health Starter Kit The Best Value Bundle! Over $500 worth of products bundled into one, low-priced starter kit. You can get started on the raw-food diet and learn how to use it for boundless energy, detox, rejuvenation, or achieving your ideal weight. Instant Raw Sensations — sprial bound recipe book by Frederic   The Raw Secrets — fresh perspective on raw food diet by Frederic Health & Energy With Raw & Living Foods CD   How to Create Passive Income in Health CD   Starter Kit CD   Digital bonuses - and more! For More Information, Click Here!

Did We Adapt to Cooked Foods?

Recently, a book was published that seems to contradict a lot of the established raw food theory. The book is called “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” by Richard Wrangham, who’s a British primatologist.

A few of my readers have asked me what I think of this book.

So I spent the time reading the 300 page book, initially with some skepticism. I expected another meat-eating scientist trying to rationalize their habits by some unsubstantiated arguments. Instead, I found the book “Catching Fire” to be quite fascinating, bringing light to a lot of controversies that raw-foodists will definitely find interesting.

It also destroys the foundation of many common raw-food myths (that I didn’t believe in anyway), but surprisingly, the basic conclusions of Mr. Wrangham’s research partially support the low-fat, fruit-based diet that I recommend.

Before I go into the details the theory presented in “Catching Fire”, let me review some of the current beliefs common in many books on the raw-food diets (including some of my own):

•    Humans are apes. Other apes we know eat a plant-based diet of fruits and vegetables. Chimpanzees and bonobos, which are the types of apes sharing the most DNA with humans, eat a fruit-based diet. Therefore, our natural diet should also be diet of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.
•    Before the advent of cooking, humans lived essentially on fruits, vegetables, and perhaps some nuts and seeds and animal products (when they could find them).
•    There must have been a “golden period” of time, before cooking, when we lived for much longer than we do today (some claim 120 to 140 years is our natural lifespan). The advent of cooking and processed foods brought the “descent” of man, as far as our health is concerned.
•    Humans have not “adapted” to cooked foods. We ate cooked foods for survival purposes, but our bodies are still wearing down from the consumption of these foods. Because cooked food is toxic, the most natural diet would be a diet of 100% raw foods.
•    Humans are not carnivores. Meat has no place in the human diet.
•    Grains are not our natural foods. We have been eating grains for only a tiny fraction of our history on this planet. Our natural diet, the one we’re the most adapted to, is one of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.
•    We should eat a raw food diet because of the enzymes and other essential nutrients that are destroyed in the cooking process.

As you may imagine, the book Catching Fire demolishes most of these claims. The book’s central claim is that cooking played a very key role in our evolution. 

"I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals. Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time, and our social lives. It made us into consumers of external energy and thereby created an organism with a new relationship to nature, dependent on fuel."

Now most raw-foodist will definitely deny these claims. After all, cooked food is "poison" and couldn’t possibly have played any role into making us into who we are (at least not in a positive way). Raw-foodists would disagree strongly with the statement that "cooking increases the value of our food." Raw-foodists believe that cooking only destroys and cannot possibly "improve" anything. However, objectively speaking, Wrangham is correct about something.

The Quest for Calories

All over nature, it seems that the biggest challenge for all animals trying to stay alive is getting enough to eat. Modern humans, on the other hand, spend only a fraction of their day eating.

"Because the amount of time spent chewing is related to body size among primates, we can estimate how long humans would be obliged to spend chewing if we lived on the same kind of raw food that great apes do. Conservatively, it would be 42 percent of the day, or just over five hours of chewing in a twelve-hour period."

The main thing that cooking does is it increases the overall caloric content of our diet, our at least it enabled us to obtain more calories in less time and with less energy.

it allowed us to eat many rich foods we wouldn’t have been able to eat in nature, such as roots and starches. This was certainly a key element in freeing our ancestors from having to search for foods and chew tough fruits with few calories all day long.

So according to Wrangham, the main appreciable thing that cooking does is simple: it increases the amount of energy we could obtain from our food. By that, of course, he means calories.

"Studies of digestibility show that we use cooked starch very efficiently. The percentage of cooked starch that has been digested by the time it reaches the end of the ileum is at least 95 percent in oats, wheat, potatoes, plantains, bananas, cornflakes, white bread, and the typical European or American diet (a mixture of starchy foods, dairy products, and meat). A few foods have lower digestibility: starch in home-cooked kidney beans and flaked barley has a digestibility of only around 84 percent. Comparable measurements of the digestibility of raw starch are much lower. Digestibility is 71 percent for wheat starch, 51 percent for potatoes, and a measly 48 percent for raw starch in plantains and cooking bananas."

"We need to know what cooking does. Cooked food does many familiar things. It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes, and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut, or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from our food. "

Of course, one might argue that raw-foods contain more "energy" and nutrients, but the fact is that Wrangham is correct in pointing out that it is easier to get calories from cooked foods than it was, at least for early humans, to get them from wild raw plants.

However, the author is obviously biased in favor of cooking, but I’m sure you have guessed it by now.

"Raw-foodists are dedicated to eating 100 percent of their diets raw, or as close to 100 percent as they can manage. There are only three studies of their body weight, and all find that people who eat raw tend to be thin. The most extensive is the Giessen Raw Food study, conducted by nutritionist Corinna Koebnick and her colleagues in Germany, which used questionnaires to study 513 raw-foodists who ate from 70 percent to 100 percent of their diet raw. They chose to eat raw to be healthy, to prevent illness, to have a long life, or to live naturally. Raw food included not only uncooked vegetables and occasional meat, but also cold-pressed oil and honey, and some items that were lightly heated such as dried fruits, dried meat, and dried fish. Body mass index (BMI), which measures weight in relation to the square of the height, was used as a measure of fatness. As the proportion of food eaten raw rose, BMI fell. The average weight loss when shifting from a cooked to a raw diet was 26.5 pounds (12 kilograms) for women and 21.8 pounds (9.9 kilograms) for men. Among those eating a purely raw diet (31 percent), the body weights of almost a third indicated chronic energy deficiency. The scientists’ conclusion was unambiguous: “a strict raw food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply.” The amount of meat in the Giessen Raw Food diets was not recorded but many raw-foodists eat rather little meat. Could a low meat intake have contributed to their poor energy supply? It is possible. However, among people who eat cooked diets, there is no difference in body weight between vegetarians and meat eaters: when our food is cooked we get as many calories from a vegetarian diet as from a typical cooked diet."

My comments on this last quote from the book is that it is certainly true that a typical raw food diet is deficient in energy. As I have mentioned every time, vegetables simply do not contain enough calories to sustain life, and raw fats such as avocados are difficult to eat in large quantities to maintain energy levels (especially considering that they are more difficult to digest than cooked starches). The traditional raw-food diet is a weight loss program. It’s not something that can be sustained over the long-term.

Some ridiculous comments are being made because the authors of the study have obviously little knowledge on how one could balance a raw-food diet and make it work. However, the raw-food diet they describe is very typical of what many raw-foodists eat, and the absolute opposite of what I recommend.

Wrangham goes on:

"The energy consequences of forgoing cooked food lead to a consistent reaction, illustrated by journalist Jodi Mardesich when she became a raw-foodist. “I’m hungry. These days, I’m almost always hungry,” she wrote. A typical day began at 7 A.M. when she cut and juiced two ounces of wheat grass. At 8:30 A.M. she had a bowl of “energy soup,” which she describes as a “room-temperature concoction made of sunflower greens, which are the tiny first shoots of a sunflower plant, and rejuvelac, a fermented wheat drink that tastes a lot like bad lemonade.” She added a couple of spoonfuls of blended papaya for interest. Lunch was a salad of sunflower greens, sprouted fenugreek seeds, sprouted broccoli seeds, fermented cabbage, and a loaf made of sprouted sunflower seeds, dehydrated seaweed, and some vegetables."

"Dinner was more sprouts, avocado chunks, pineapple, red onion, olive oil, raw vinegar, and sea salt. An hour later she was hungry again. In photographs she looks distinctly thin, but she was happy. She described herself as feeling energized, mentally sharper, and more serene. Nevertheless, after six months, during which she lost 18 pounds (8.2 kilograms), she could not resist slipping out for a pizza. Mardesich was not alone in finding a wholly raw diet a challenge. The Giessen Raw Food study found that 82 percent of long-term raw-foodists included some cooked food in their diets."

My comments: The raw diet described above is typical of many people trying to eat raw. Unfortunately, this diet doesn’t work. It obviously is very low in calories (energy) while being high in fat. Unfortunately, that’s the way a lot of raw-foodists try to eat, and it just isn’t sustainable. That’s why I recommend to get sufficient calories from fruit, while keeping your overall diet low in fat.

"Anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas describes bushman women in Africa’s Kalahari Desert returning to camp at the end of their ordinary long day thoroughly exhausted, because for much of the day they have been squatting and digging and walking, and hefting large loads of food, wood, and children. Even in populations that cook, these natural activity levels are high enough to interfere with reproductive function. If we imagine the lives of our German raw-foodists made more difficult by a daily regime of foraging for food in the wild, their rate of energy expenditure would surely be substantially increased. As a result, many more than 50 percent of the women would be incapable of pregnancy. Then add that the subjects of the Giessen Raw Food study obtained their diets from supermarkets. Their foods were the typical products of modern farming—fruits, seeds, and vegetables all selected to be as delicious as possible. “Delicious” means high energy, because what people like are foods with low levels of indigestible fiber and high levels of soluble carbohydrates, such as sugars. Agricultural improvements have rendered fruits in a supermarket, such as apples, bananas, and strawberries, far higher in quality than their wild ancestors. In our laboratory at Harvard, nutritional biochemist NancyLou Conklin-Brittain finds that carrots contain as much sugar as the average wild fruit eaten by a chimpanzee in Kibale National Park in Uganda. But even carrots are better quality than a typical wild tropical fruit, because they have less fiber and fewer toxic compounds. If the German raw-foodists had been eating wild foods, their energy balance and reproductive performance would have been much lower than found by Koebnick’s team."

My comments: These points are interesting. Even under the best circumstances, where we get hybridized raw foods with lots of calories, most people have trouble getting enough raw food to eat so they’re not hungy all the time. Can you imagine what early humans would have done, with no access to bananas or hybridized high-calorie fruits, supermarket avocados, bottles of oils and packs of nuts? Especially when you consider the fact that early humans were much more active than we are, it makes the "struggle for raw calories" even more obvious.

Wrangham also points out some studies where various groups of people tried to live off wild raw-foods, and in every single case they did not manage to get enough calories to thrive.

"Raw-Foodist thrive only in rich modern environments where they depend on eating exceptionally high-quality foods. Animals do not have the same constraints: they flourish on wild raw foods. The suspicion prompted by the shortcomings of the Evo Diet is correct, and the implication is clear: there is something odd about us. We are not like other animals."
 

Are We Just Like Chimpanzees?

The logic of nature is often easy to follow.

Once we realize that we are animals living among other animals, it’s easy to look at nature and try to see where we fit in the grand scheme of things. For example, we might look and try to find other animals similar to us.

Science tells us that humans are apes, related to some degree to chimpanzee by a common, earlier ancestor. We share more DNA with chimpanzees than with any animals on the planet. Looking at these creatures, we can see so many apparent similarities. In fact, I remember reading how many people in England were shocked when they first saw Chimpanzees in a zoo for the first time. Many people were disturbed by the sight of these animals, precisely because they look so similar to us, which was viewed as repulsive for people of that time, who believe that humans were unlike any other animal on the planet.

So raw-foodists look at what apes eat, and although you will find evidences of some meat-eating among them, even scientists admit that they essentially live on fruits and vegetables. Obviously, since we’re apes, our diet should be something along those lines. (not eating dairy, grains, refined foods)

We also know that there are profound differences between chimpanzees and us. How profound?

"Evolutionary benefits of adapting to cooked food are evident from comparing human digestive systems with those of chimpanzees and other apes. The main differences all involve humans having relatively small features. We have small mouths, weak jaws, small teeth, small stomachs, small colons, and small guts overall. In the past, the unusual size of these body parts has mostly been attributed to the evolutionary effects of our eating meat, but the design of the human digestive system is better explained as an adaptation to eating cooked food than it is to eating raw meat."

"Mick Jagger’s biggest yawn is nothing compared to a chimpanzee’s. Given that the mouth is the entry to the gut, humans have an astonishingly tiny opening for such a large species. All great apes have a prominent snout and a wide grin: chimpanzees can open their mouths twice as far as humans, as they regularly do when eating. If a playful chimpanzee ever kisses you, you will never forget this point. To find a primate with as relatively small an aperture as that of humans, you have to go to a diminutive species, such as a squirrel monkey, weighing less than 1.4 kilograms (3 pounds). In addition to having a small gape, our mouths have a relatively small volume—about the same size as chimpanzee mouths, even though we weigh some 50 percent more than they do. Zoologists often try to capture the essence of our species with such phrases as the naked, bipedal, or big-brained ape. They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape."

(…) The difference in mouth size is even more obvious when we take the lips into account. The amount of food a chimpanzee can hold in its mouth far exceeds what humans can do because, in addition to their wide gape and big mouths, chimpanzees have enormous and very muscular lips. When eating juicy foods like fruits or meat, chimpanzees use their lips to hold a large wad of food in the outer part of their mouths and squeeze it hard against their teeth, which they may do repeatedly for many minutes before swallowing. The strong lips are probably an adaptation for eating fruits, because fruit bats have similarly large and muscular lips that they use in the same way to squeeze fruit wads against their teeth. Humans have relatively tiny lips, appropriate for a small amount of food in the mouth at one time.

(…) Human chewing teeth, or molars, also are small—the smallest of any primate species in relation to body size. Continuing farther into the body, our stomachs again are comparatively small. In humans the surface area of the stomach is less than one-third the size expected for a typical mammal of our body weight, and smaller than in 97 percent of other primates. The high caloric density of cooked food suggests that our stomachs can afford to be small. Great apes eat perhaps twice as much by weight per day as we do because their foods are packed with indigestible fiber (around 30 percent by weight, compared to 5 percent to 10 percent or less in human diets). Thanks to the high caloric density of cooked food, we have modest needs that are adequately served by our small stomachs.

(…) The human small intestine is only a little smaller than expected from the size of our bodies, reflecting that this organ is the main site of digestion and absorption, and humans have the same basal metabolic rate as other primates in relation to body weight. But the large intestine, or colon, is less than 60 percent of the mass that would be expected for a primate of our body weight. The colon is where our intestinal flora ferment plant fiber, producing fatty acids that are absorbed into the body and used for energy. That the colon is relatively small in humans means we cannot retain as much fiber as the great apes can and therefore cannot utilize plant fiber as effectively for food. But that matters little. The high caloric density of cooked food means that normally we do not need the large fermenting potential that apes rely on.

(…) The weight of our guts is estimated at about 60 percent of what is expected for a primate of our size: the human digestive system as a whole is much smaller than would be predicted on the basis of size relations in primates."

MY COMMENTS: Another change that is not mentioned is that humans produce several times the amount of starch-splitting enzymes (useful for digesting complex carbohydrates) than chimpanzees. It’s obvious that although we share a lot of similarities with these animals, we are VERY different. We would also expect our diet to be somewhat different.

Could Humans Live on a Chimpanzee Diet?

The idea is appealing: chimpanzees live on fruit, therefore we can also live on fruit.

However, we should ask ourselves: what kind of fruits do chimpanzees live on?

"Evolutionary adaptation to cooking might likewise explain why humans seem less prepared to tolerate toxins than do other apes. In my experience of sampling many wild foods eaten by primates, items eaten by chimpanzees in the wild taste better than foods eaten by monkeys. Even so, some of the fruits, seeds, and leaves that chimpanzees select taste so foul that I can barely swallow them. The tastes are strong and rich, excellent indicators of the presence of non-nutritional compounds, many of which are likely to be toxic to humans—but presumably much less so to chimpanzees. Consider the plum-size fruit of Warburgia ugandensis, a tree famous for its medicinal bark. Warburgia fruits contain a spicy compound reminiscent of a mustard oil. The hot taste renders even a single fruit impossibly unpleasant for humans to ingest. But chimpanzees can eat a pile of these fruits and then look eagerly for more. Many other fruits in the chimpanzee diet are almost equally unpleasant to the human palate. Astringency, the drying sensation produced by tannins and a few other compounds, is common in fruits eaten by chimpanzees."

(…) The shifts in food preference between chimpanzees and humans suggest that our species has a reduced physiological tolerance for foods high in toxins or tannins. Since cooking predictably destroys many toxins, we may have evolved a relatively sensitive palate.

My Comments: Since I’ve been coming to Costa Rica, I’ve had the chance to look at what monkeys eat in the wild. The monkeys in Costa Rica are not like great apes, but fruit constitutes most of the diet of some of these monkeys.

What always puzzled me is that whenever I saw the fruits these monkeys ate, and by accident some of it was dropped on the ground, it always looked far from edible to me. Whenever I tried to eat some of these fruits, I found them to be quite repulsive.

I don’t think that my taste buds have been corrupted by the foods I’ve eaten all my life. For a modern human, I have pretty natural taste buds. And I’m quite convinced that a baby human would not enjoy many of the fruits eaten by most monkeys, and would in fact refuse to eat them.

Even Raw-Foodists "Cook" Their Foods

"It makes sense that we like foods that have been softened by cooking, just as we like them chopped up in a blender, ground in a mill, or pounded in a mortar. The unnaturally, atypically soft foods that compose the human diet have given our species an energetic edge, sparing us much of the hard work of digestion. Fire does a job our bodies would otherwise have to do."

This last quote by Wrangham made me look at the way raw-foodist eat their foods. In my opinion, even smart raw-foodists like 80-10-10 do the equivalent of "cooking" without using any heat. Let me explain:

• We get more calories from our raw foods by making smoothies and other blended foods
• We assimilate more from our greens by blending them into soups or even juicing them
• We favor high-calorie fruits such as bananas, dates, mangoes and other tropical fruits, which have been bred to be high in sugar and low in fiber.
• We make rich dressings by blending nuts, seeds and avocados
• Some raw-foodist also ferment certain tough vegetables

Why do you think that blending is so popular in the raw-food world? Why do you think that green smoothies are such a craze? Why do you think vegetable juicing has so many fans? These are all techniques we use to get the most out of our raw foods! In other words, most people inherently understand that eating carrot sticks doesn’t work. They know that raw-foods are lower in calories, and therefore have discovered all kinds of ingenious ways to make them more digestible.

I do believe that this raw food diet CAN works when we use some of these tools. In my opinion, in would be almost impossible to live off wild foods. And I can bet you anything that anyone who eats a significant quantity of wild food in their diet gets the bulk of their calories from either cultivated fruits, cooked rice or grains, potatoes or avocados, or has access to an unnatural variety of dried "wild" foods shipped from all corners of the world.

It’s not that cooking food is one of the defining aspects of civilization. I believe that it’s the "processing" of foods that makes the difference. This includes: blending, cultivating, hybridizing, juicing, etc. Raw-foodists may just be a lot smarter by using methods that don’t create toxins that are harmful to the body when processing their raw foods.

We are civilized by nature. Even the modern raw-food diet is "unnatural".

So my final comments on this topic are as follows:

• There may never have been a "golden age" where humans lived in perfect health eating delicious fruits and vegetables. Most likely, we come from a line of animals that ate tough and astringent fruits similar to those modern apes eat. Over time, we started to cook more and more, and learned how to hybridize plants to get sweeter and better varieties. We evolved to prefer these foods over the wild foods we formely ate. Trying to go back to wild foods simply doesn’t work.
• Cooking was probably a key element in human evolution, however it doesn’t mean we are forced to keep eating it today. Modern nutritional knowledge of calories, combined with cultivation of many varieties of sweet fruits, non-bitter vegetables and modern techniques such as blending allow us to eat a raw diet and get the best of both worlds (civilization and nature).
• We come from such a long line of sick and diseased ancestors and parents living on the low-quality, toxic Standard American Diet that a low-toxin, high-nutrient raw-based diet is definitely the way the go.

I do not believe that the research presented in the book Catching Fire really goes against the low-fat, fruit-based raw diet. However, it does show you how unsustainable most other low-calorie, high-fat raw-diets are, and how many of their claims are not based in solid science.

IMPORTANT FINAL NOTE: I don’t intend to turn this discussion into a creation vs. evolution debate. I respect everyone’s beliefs but will not let the comment section turn into a heated fight between religion and science. That is not the point of this article. The discussion is about civilization vs. nature, so please keep that in mind before posting any comment.