« Home | Oreo cookie minus trans fat? » | Merlot Sales Growth Sags - Blame 'Sideways' » | Storing Bread - Squeeze Air or Not? » | Trendy Food of 2006 - Grits? » | No Waffling Here » | Black Truffles - Heaven From Earth » | Vertical or prone? What's best position for (wine)... » | Vintner's Lakeside Grill - Yountville CA » | Should You or Shouldn't You When it Comes to Fish? » | Baking Artisan Breads at Home » 



Monday, March 06, 2006 

Is Raw Food the way to go?

Greg Atkinson takes a look at the claims of raw foods zealots that these items will allow you to "experience perfect health" and "a whole new concept of beauty," even "change our lives." Other claims include making you feel more "alive" and "sexy".

Atkinson says he has always been skeptical of these types of claims, and uses a speech by Dr. Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University to really prove his point.
His lecture, "The Natural Cook: The Significance of Paleo Gastronomy," exploded once and for all — at least in my mind — the myth of a raw-food diet and its supposed superiority over a diet of cooked foods. "Every culture in the world relies on cooking, apparently because a raw-foodist lifestyle is simply inadequate for people living at subsistence level," he said. It's all well and good for people who can afford to pulverize, blend, semi-dehydrate and manipulate their food with countertop appliances, but when you're in the bush, a raw-food diet simply will not supply a human brain with the calories it needs to function. Even if it could, we would have to chew and swallow for something like 16 hours a day.
He went to say that fire...and cooking food with it, was one of the things that really set apart early man from his counterparts.