A century of modern research and ages of ancestral wisdom.
Recognized clinical, chemical, and anthropological research that promotes the idea that raw foods are health-promoting while cooked foods cause degeneration and states of disease.
- Alexander Ugolev's experiment on the digestion of raw vs cooked frogs
- Pottenger's Cat Study of the effect of Raw vs Cooked carnivore diets on 900 cats
- Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Weston A. Price's accounts of indigenous tribes' health and diet rich in raw animal foods
- Aajonus' compilation of stages of destruction of nutrients by heat
All of those figures used their discoveries and observations to help cure diseases using raw foods.
Digestion of raw vs cooked foods in carnivores
Alexander's Ugolev 1984 experiment
In 1984, Alexander Ugolev, a physiologist whose works are world-wide recognized, conducted an experiment:
He placed two dead frogs: one cooked and one raw, each into a carnivore’s digestive fluids.
The raw frog was completely dissolved, while the cooked frog was only superficially dissolved on its surface.
Why? Doesn't cooking facilitate digestion by separating the food and breaking it down?
The body's digestive fluids dissolve chunks of food matter.
The cells from the food have stores of enzymes, which are also digestive agents.
When the digestive fluids dissolve the cells from food, they free the enzymes contained within them, which in turn start dissolving more cells.
This mechanism of self-digestion is called autolysis.
However, cooking destroys enzymes, so this cannot happen with cooked foods, which is why they remain largely undigested.
Additional details:
Our gastric juices are essentially composed of enzymes and hydrochloric acid (HCl).
Enzymes are protein structures which can act as solvents.
Cells contain enzymes, some of which are responsible for regulating its environment. However, most of them are stored into specialized organelles surrounded by their own membrane, lysosomes, so that they do not damage the cell.
Lysosomes have an acidic interior. They digest waste in the cell and play a role in phagocytosis. First, the cell membrane surrounds the substance, trapping it in a small spherical section in the cytoplasm called the phagosome. Lysosomes then fuse to it to digest various substances, non-functioning organelles, food particles, foreign bodies, etc.
When the gastric enzymes and the hydrogen ions from the hydrochloric acid enter in contact with the cells, they pierce through the membranes, destroy the cells’ lysosomes, releasing the enzymes within, triggering autolysis.
Reference: [Induced autolysis as an important mechanism of the initial stages of ordinary digestion] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6519288/
Impact on cooked and raw carnivore diets on cats over generations
Pottenger's 1932-1942 Cat Study
In 1932, and for 10 years, Francis Pottenger Jr., physician, performed a now famous experiment on more than 900 cats, spanning over several generations.
Several groups of cats were constituted; some were fed raw meat and milk, others cooked meat and milk, or a combination.
He meticulously recorded observations of each cat every day.
The cats fed entirely with raw meat and milk consistently displayed excellent health.
Their physical development was perfect: large skulls and thoraxes, broad faces with prominent malar and orbital arches, broad and well-formed dental arches, adequate nasal cavities, and large and long bodies.
The cats fed with cooked meat or milk developed many issues which worsened over generations.
Their physical development was impacted, their build was smaller and bones smaller in diameter. In some cases the bones would grow out of proportion, with the hind legs being much longer than the forelegs.
The offsprings had different skeletal patterns than their parents; there were variations of facial structure similar to those of human beings.
Sterility became so common that raw-food fed cats had to be used for breeding.
X-ray pictures showed that skulls of third generation cooked-fed animals had neutral profiles for both sexes, while the skulls of raw-fed males exhibited more dimorphic traits.
Their behaviour was more aggressive towards other cats and their feeders.
Of those animals subject to degeneration from the cooked foods group, some were placed on the raw diet.
Their health improved.
Over 4 generations, the offsprings gradually restored their natural healthy phenotype.
Pottenger proved that raw foods gave the animals excellent health while cooked foods halted and twisted their growth, impacted their behaviour negatively, lowered their reproductive capacity, and degenerated them in various other ways.
Although we are not cats, and are more adapted to cooked foods, Pottenger got excellent and well-documented results from applying elements of the raw diet remission protocol to his patients with tuberculosis and other chronic diseases.
Adventurers who visited and studied indigenous tribes
Viljhamjur Stefansson (in 1900s)
and Weston A. Price (in 1920s-1930s)
Viljhamjur Stefansson was an Arctic explorer, Harvard anthropologist, who, in the 1900s, lived with the Eskimos in Alaska and adopted their diet of raw and cooked fish, without salt.
In one of his travels, a sailor who had scurvy cured it by eating raw meat for several days. Stefansson noted that cooking the meat reduces its antiscorbutic properties.
Inuits who eat an almost exclusive all meat diet find a source of residual carbs in the glycogen present in the freshly killed raw meat (which soon after turns into lactic acid).
Read the accounts of his travels and further experiments in The Fat of the Land and Not By Bread Alone
Weston A. Price was a Doctor of Dental Surgery who, in the 1930s, documented the health of indigenous communities of homogenous and isolated ethnicity following their ancestral diet, as well as their modern counterpart, all over the world (Lötschental in Switzerland, Eskimos and other native North and South Americans, Pygmies and other tribes in Africa, Aborigenes, Polynesians, Maori, Swiss people in high Alpine valleys, ...), taking 15000 photos, examining teeth, analyzing samples of food, soil, and saliva in laboratory, in a seminal observational study.
He decided to do so when he noticed children of his patients had worse dental health than their parents, and emitted the postulate that dental health reflected overall health, which was largely related to diet, and so he sought people outside of modern societies lifestyle to compare.
He noted they were free of most diseases, had perfect dental development which reflected on facial development.
Most of them ate many animal foods raw, such as dairy, organs, fish.
He searched thoroughly for healthy vegetarian tribes, but only found them to have more diseases.
Weston A. Price researched vitamins and minerals and believed that modern processing (which cooking is a form of) stripped them away from foods, leading to disease.
He successfuly reversed diseases and improved dental health/facial development in patients using dietary regimens, especially High Vitamin Butter Oil, rich in Activator X which he discovered (later re-discovered as Vitamin K2), and cold-extracted at 21℃ (70℉), combined with cod liver oil, also cold-extracted to presere nutrients, such as vitamins A and D which have been found to be in higher levels, and omega-3 fatty acids.
Read his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
https://www.westonaprice.org/in-his-footsteps/
Scientific Consensus on the issue
Based of some of the research collected by Aajonus
Research throughout the world shows that heat-treatment of food alters, damages, or destroys many nutrients.
It is well-known among nutritionists, industrials, farmers, and some of the general public, that in pasteurised juices and milk, vitamin contents are much lower. This is why cold-extraction juicers exist and find a good market.
Most people would agree that food burnt to charcoal or ashes is no longer nutritious and is probably unhealthy.
A major problem is that food scientists view nutrients in only two categories, good and destroyed. However, there are many stages in-between:
Once food is heated above 40.5℃ (105℉), the bacterial activity is destroyed. All functions of any animal rely on bacteria.
By 44.4℃ (112℉), all enzymes that help digestion are incapacitated.
By 50℃ (122℉), most of the major vitamin, including vitamin A, are destroyed.
By 55.5℃ (132℉), all of those natural vitamins vitamins, enzymes and all those sub-category nutrients, are destroyed.
By 60.5℃ (141℉), the old pasteurization temperature - and for only 15 seconds - 50% of the calcium is cauterized, unusable. Cauterization is when heat or a caustic substance burns a substance to the point where it is relatively impervious and unable to exchange molecules to sustain or promote activity.
Raw minerals, just like clay, are malleable. Clay, when fired at even cone 2, becomes a hardened lifeless substance with very little absorption, and at cone 9, it is porcelain, which is unabsorbable.
Phosphorus is cauterized at only 36.6℃ (98℉).
The enzymes in unheated honey get progressively reverted back to sugar from 33.8℃ (93℉) to 39℃ (102℉) , point beyond which the sugar becomes radical.
oils that are not pressed under 35.5℃ (96℉) are compromised.
Cooking causes free-radicals. Cooking destroys the natural bonds of bio-active organic vitamins, enzymes, minerals and other nutrients that help to grow plant and animal tissues. The destruction of those bonds releases the metallic minerals as free-radicals. Free-radicals often cause severe cellular destruction, mutation, and cellular death.
Smoke from cooking contains toxins such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
The evaporated water is no longer present as part of the nutrient matrix to accompany it into the cells. Adding water will not recreate the chemical bonds between the H2O molecules and the other nutrients.
The higher the temperature goes, all kinds of points of destruction are reached - protein, fat, and carbohydrate denaturation that causes heterocyclic amines, lipid peroxides, and acrylamides respectively, and all sorts of compounds.
Some foods are almost only assimilable cooked (such as grains).
Cooking is often used to break down the undigestible hard plant fiber (for example, vegetable soup), or destroy certain anti-nutrients (for example, raw soy is toxic even to most animals, so it is always cooked). However, many nutrients are still lost and toxins generated in the process. Other process exist to remove, inactivate or break down undesirable compounds: juicing, fermentation, enzymatic digestion, ... Sometimes, it is better to forego the food completely (except in situations of famine).
There are 32 known toxins produced from cooking (not much more research is being done on the subject).
All of those build-up in the body.
