However, I would like to get your insight about the ‘living enzyme’ argument used by raw food proponents as another reason why a cooked food diet is bad for us. According to this argument, heating/cooking foods damage and kill the enzymes that help break down the food we consume into nutrients that our body can use. Without these food occurring enzymes our body has to use and therefore deplete its own store of enzymes thereby weakening our immune system.

Can you please shed some light?

And it also mentions ‘Transaminitis has also been reported in a 53 year old male and a 83 year old male following daily ingestion of one half cup serving of Kombucha tea for 2 to 3 weeks. Liver enzymes returned to normal following cessation of tea consumption in both patients (4) More recently, Kombucha tea was implicated in the case of a patient with new onset anti-jo1antibody-positive myositis.(8)’

Google “bush babies”. Primates eating primates!

OTOH, grains == civilization. And you’re prying my mac mini out of my cold, dead hands.

Weston Price studied Swiss peasants high in the Alps and found they ate a sort of sprouted rye bread. I believe this may be similar to the “special” rye which my German relatives used to buy imported at the holidays. It was dense, moist, and crumbled readily, unlike crusty bakery breads. (They also ate a lot of pastured butter and cream, which Price tested and found high in vitamins, which explained the good state of the children’s teeth.) It may be that we just are exposed to much higher amounts of the bad stuff in bread than people in the past, accelerating the destruction of our digestive systems, just as a celiac may become lactose intolerant, not on account of genetics, but because of degeneration of their digestive organs as the disease progresses.

Greeks in the classical era boiled their meat. The elites in their society also enjoyed good life expectancy. Grilling and charring meat may be a mistake…

Industrial frying seems to cause chemical changes in food. I read a little about it and don’t really understand, but it seems to change the nature of the starches. The industrial objective is to create a crunchier chip, but perhaps it becomes less digestible. My stomach will gladly eat fish or fries out of the fryolator, but fried “tortilla” chips* come right back up. Still learning…

*-Cannot actually get good info if these chips are made with masa or corn meal, except for Fritos. Fritos are made with wet masa, and I actually tolerate them well! (Also, some restaurants are now slipping wheat flour into their masa flour–WTF.)

When maize cultivation spread around the globe around 1900, populations who depended upon it who did not nixtamalize suffered pellagra outbreaks, including Northern Italy, South Africa, and the American South. (Ironically, Quaker brand grits, eaten throughout the South today, are nixtamalized. The pellagra victims were eating bread made from corn meal, which is unprocessed aside from milling.)