What\u2019s Wrong With the Paleo Diet<\/a>. He argues, essentially, that civilizations cook for good reason. For example, the fourth of his five points (this is the reporter\u2019s summary, not Pollan writing):<\/p>\n4. Raw food is for the birds (too much of it, anyway).<\/strong>\u00a0There\u2019s paleo, and then there\u2019s the raw diet. Folks who eat raw tout the health benefits of the approach, saying that they\u2019re accessing the full, complete nutrients available because they\u2019re not heating, and thus destroying, their dinner. But that\u2019s simply wrong. We cook to get our hands on\u00a0more<\/em>\u00a0nutrients, not fewer.<\/p>\nAccording to [Richard] Wrangham, the one thing absolutely all cultures have in common is that they cook their food. He points out that women who move towards 100 percent raw diets often stop ovulating, because even if in theory they\u2019re tossing sufficient food into the blender to fulfill their caloric needs, they simply can\u2019t absorb enough from the uncooked food.<\/p>\n
Our hefty cousins, the apes, spend half their waking hours gnawing on raw sustenance, about six hours per day. In contrast, we spend only one hour. \u201cSo in a sense, cooking opens up this space for other activities,\u201d says Pollan. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to have culture, it\u2019s very hard to have science, it\u2019s very hard to have all the things we count as important parts of civilization if you\u2019re spending half of all your waking hours chewing.\u201d Cooked food: It gave us civilization.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In\u00a0Mother Jones, Michael Pollan explains\u00a0What\u2019s Wrong With the Paleo Diet. He argues, essentially, that civilizations cook for good reason. For example, the fourth of his five points (this is the reporter\u2019s summary, not Pollan writing): 4. Raw food is for the birds (too much of it, anyway).\u00a0There\u2019s paleo, and then there\u2019s the raw diet. Folks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1863,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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