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!
food poisoning
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.

What's also true is that E. coli only showed up so prolifically in the guts of cows since they've been fed corn in the last 50 years or so. A starchy food the grass-eaters didn't evolve to consume, corn produces an acidic mess in their stomachs that E. coli bacteria apparently loves.
I just realized today that you could totally rewrite that sentence and it would still be true.
What's also true is that E. coli only showed up so prolifically in the guts of human since they've been fed so much corn in the last 50 years or so. A starchy food the meat and vegetable eaters didn't evolve to consume, corn produces an acidicmess in their stomachs that E. coli bacteria apparently loves.

It's not just acidic stomachs of cattle that E. Coli love, it's acidic stomachs of humans too. The amount of food poisoning cases attributed to pathogens that aren't big fans of acid, like salmonella, has dropped. Well, except for in the other extreme end up acidity, which is the growing population treated with drugs like Proton Pump Inhibitors that reduce acid too much, thus leaving them susceptible to other nasty types of food poisoning.
All that is clear is that in the US our stomachs are a mess. We should make an effort to get them back to normal by elimating both grains and acid-reducing drugs.

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