This blog is about the intersection between evolutionary biology and food. But also about practical applications, sustainable agriculture, and general tasty things. I originally started eating this way to heal from chronic health problems and...it worked!
Melissa McEwen
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idiotic
02/22/2010 - 13:40
From Colin T. Campbell, author of The China Study
Then I often ask where, as a society, did we stray from that lifestyle of whole vegetables, tubers, grains, fruits and legumes because I am confident that evidence shows that we evolved using such foods, which comprised at least 95-98% of our diet. Before the 1850s, very few people ate animal based foods. The royalty did and their paintings and pictures and gout show it.
It's amazing...he's a doctor....doesn't he have access to Sciencedirect or any other scientific databases? There is ample and irrefutable evidence that humans have been eating meat and lots of it for a very very long time. Certainly he has access to Google Scholar. Hint: plug in "meat" + "human evolution" or "meat" + "isotope studies." If anything, Colin is a sad example of how increased specialization in science furthers ignorance. There is really no good excuse for a doctor to not draw on the vast wealth of anthropological research, especially if he is going to make claims like that.
The pharaohs, who suffered numerous health problems including gout and heart disease, were also big consumers of grain and alcohol.
Comment?: 7
02/05/2010 - 21:50
From the comments:
Lets see how many diseases you could get from raw meat
Tapeworms Toxoplasmosis Salmonella Brucellosis Bottulism Trichinellosis
Just to name a few. Do you want to eat raw everything? Go ahead but read this first
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_meat#Raw_meat_diseases
Let's look at all the diseases you can get from vegetables:
Liver fluke, salmonella, pathogenic e coli, botulism, campylobacteriosis, listeria, staphylococcus aureus, brucellosis...the list goes on and on.
Actually, vegetables cause most food poisoning outbreaks. Cooked meat and fish also do plenty of damage. Definitely raw meat can be dangerous, but food poisoning is simply a danger of food. Most of the raw meat outbreaks occur when people make mistakes in the kitchen. Very few people want to eat chicken raw, but it's quite common for people to cut raw chicken and then use the same knife on vegetables for their salad. That's way different from intentionally eating raw meat.
Plenty of cultures from the Japanese to the Inuit consume raw meat without all keeling over and dying. For me, the benefits of eating raw meat outweighed the small risks. I only eat whole prime cuts from herbivorous animals, I don't just buy ground beef from the supermarket. Most contamination occurs during processing.
Most of the raw foods I eat aren't exactly shocking. Millions of people eat sushi and raw oysters every day. Be careful, but life is too short for scare mongering. Thanks for the warning :) I do know about food poisoning. I had food poisoning, serious chronic salmonella that sent me to the E.R. I was a vegetarian then.
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