Raw Food Diet: You Are What You Eat

Last month I blogged about Steve Pavlina’s 30 Days Raw (mostly fruit) experiment. Part of the experiment was to see if he could fully convert to eating raw foods, even after the trial was over.

Well, he recently finished the trial. Here’s what he has to say about it:

Now that the trial has officially ended, it almost feels like a graduation. This has definitely been the most challenging 30-day trial I’ve done to date, but I can’t say I’m sad to see it end. I’m looking forward to eating something — anything — other than fruit tomorrow. I feel like I’ve eaten enough bananas to last a year!

I’m not very surprised that he got bored of eating 20 bananas a day (in addition to whole watermelons, 30 clementines, and other gargantuan piles of raw fruit). But I admit, I wondered if his palate would adapt to this. In his first post about the trial, Steve gave some evidence for a fruit-based diet:

There’s very compelling biological evidence that a high fruit diet is optimal for human beings…one of the more convincing points is that the nearest animal species to human beings, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos all naturally favor a high fruit diet, meaning that when fresh fruit is readily available, they’ll get the vast majority of their calories from fruit…

An article in today’s Science Daily may explain why this diet wasn’t optimal for Steve. In fact, the very dietary differences between humans and apes may explain our different places on the evolutionary ladder.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute fed mice one of three diets: a raw fruit and vegetable diet, a human diet consisting of food from the Institute’s cafeteria (yum), and a pure fast food menu (this one caused the mice to significantly gain weight, no surprise there).

They then compared the livers of the three mice and noticed a significant difference: the livers of mice on the human diets exhibited different proteins compared to mice on the chimp diet. At an evolutionary level, this means that something in the human diet triggered certain genes to be “turned on”.

Does this suggest that eating an all raw diet is good or bad? Well, neither. It doesn’t say whether we’d be better off without the proteins evoked by the cooked diet. But whether this is true is irrelevant. As a species, food has had a significant affect on us physiologically. We can’t simply go back millions of years to the diet of our Neanderthal brethren; our bodies are simply no longer adapted to that diet.

Raw food is great, but all raw? It doesn’t seem to agree with Steve, but it does agree with thousands of other people. Which suggests that maybe evolution has nothing to do with it: diet is (duh) just a matter of personal taste.

Link to article in Science Daily
Link to Steve Pavlina’s 30 Days Raw trial

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