The Raw "Paleo Diet" or "Primal Diet" Explored...

The Primal Diet® or raw "Evolutionary" Diet, is usually based on the discoveries and writings of Aajonus Vonderplanitz, but a omnivorous, raw animal diet was also promoted by the Frenchman Guy Claude-Burger as "Instinktive Eating." On this page I am not talking about Dr. Loren Cordain's Paleo Diet, as this is a cooked food diet that includes cooked animal protein. I am discussing raw animal diets here only, and the terms paleo diet and primal diet are sometimes used interchangeably to describe raw animal diets that are based on the presumption that our anscestors would have eaten a lot of raw meat.

Aajonus Vonderplanitz is the major guru of the raw animal diet today. Aajonus' first book We Want to Live tells the story of how upon learning he had cancer he intuitively begin consuming raw animal flesh, and that this cured him of his cancer. It does make sense that consuming parasites and bacteria can help with cancer because the microbes can literally eat the cancer cells and tumors or any diseased tissue. Results with remission from cancer from both his diet and from eating parasites seem to be statistically valid even if not of course traditionally supported from a medical standpoint, and for good reason, as parasites cause serious damage and problems in our bodies. The paleo diet or primal diet as taught by Aajonus also includes raw dairy, excludes all grains and cooked or processed foods, and supports the use of daily green vegetable juices and salads and low sugar fruits.

Radical and Extreme?

Assuming that are paleo anscetors ate a lot of uncooked meat though is only that, an assumption not based on fact or evidence.

Would our Paleo Ancestors Really Have Eaten A lot of Meat?

Here's why this is true:

Modern hunter-gatherer tribes hunt a lot less then they might like you to believe, giving us a good clue as to how ancient man would have lived or what the true "paleo diet" would have really been like. Respected writer and professor Jared Diamond, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, tells the story of how he was invited to go hunting with a New Guinea tribe who still uses Stone Age technology, and how all they came back with that day was two baby birds, a few frogs, and a lot of mushrooms. He writes that the men of the tribe would brag about the large animals they killed, but then when asked for more information, would admit that large animals were killed only a few times in a hunter's career. Additionally, this modern tribe's stone tools were a lot more advanced than the tools found at prehistoric sites of ancient man, so Professor Diamond thinks that prehistoric hunters would have had even less success than present day hunter-gatherers. He concludes early humans ate carrion, small prey like baby birds, and a lot of plant foods. He says that the exception to this would have been on previously unoccupied islands or continents where there were animals that didn't run away from hunters, places like Madagascar and America.

The fossils of the earliest hominids (humans) show decreased mass of the jaw and teeth that are evidence of a high quality, plant-based diet (Milton, 1993). In 1985, a distinguished physician and anthropologist wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that "from about 24 to 5 million years ago fruits appear to have been the main dietary constituent for hominids." Man's closest biological relatives in the ape(primate) family are also primarily fruitarian. Besides man, the Hominide family includes gorillas, chimps, and orangutans, all 90-100% vegetarian. Gorillas are 100% vegetarian and chimps and orangutans generally eat 90% fruit, 5% leaves, 4% bark and stems, and 1% insects/flesh. Some chimps have been observed to never hunt at all. Those that do hunt do so in a seemingly ritualistic manner, and it is too infrequent to be for any significant nutritional reasons (Busse/Hamilton, 1978) (Goodal, 1999) (Barkas, 1975). Many experts have also theorized that the hunting behavior seems to sometimes be learned from human hunting tribes.

Consequences

The concept for this is quite simple and the same as that taught in the vegan raw diet: that a diseased, toxified, malnourished, inner terrain or tissue is the cause of disease, not microbes. I wholeheartedly support this perspective and know that instead of fearing microbes, we should be taking care of our inner terrains, so that we naturally resist microbes.

Nevertheless, I do not believe that the best way to do this is by eating raw animal flesh and dairy products. Also,just because we should be more worried about diseased, toxic tissue, then we are about microbes, does not mean that we should go out and consume parasites, e.coli, and strep in order to prove this or get over our fear of microbes! I know that the primal diet or paleo diet can have some immediate and profound health causing effects, but I also know that this is clearly not man's ultimate long-term diet by any means. You take a major risk, as parasites often migrate to other areas of the body and into other organs, even the brain, causing all sorts of other health problems. Why would you want to take this risk, even in an extreme example like a cancer death diagnosis, especially when the vegan raw diet offers even more success to you long term?

If you know people, as many people do, that have had miraculous recoveries from cancer by adopting the paleo diet, what you will notice is that most of these people do not stick with the diet long term, and that they all, almost always, go back to eating cooked food. This in and of itself is a consequence! They were probably eating cooked food the whole time actually, even if in smaller amounts. If you actually know someone who has remained true to the paleo diet, which is hard to find, then just wait awhile and you will start to see negative effects build up in their lives. It may take awhile, but it will happen.

These consequences may not be directly obvious to all, because of any initial outward positive effects, but usually the person will stop being true to the diet at this point anyway. All of this also depends on the personality of the person, because some people will take more action with their new found "power" then others and create more negative karma. Either way, the internal negative karma effects from eating animals is real and can not be avoided, and the timing of how negative karma plays out in our lives is unpredictable.

Other things that many people notice in people who adopt a raw animal product diet is that these people become very primal physically and sexually, often becoming quite "beautiful," attractive, sensual, and I have noticed an excess of promiscuity among "primal" practioners, as have others. Yet this is all part of returning to an animalistic nature. Additionally there is the ego jolt people get on the diet from consuming other animals and getting power from it. This of course is a false sense of power however, and I shudder to think of all the bad karma these people are creating from a misused sense of power.

It may be nice to be beautiful and sexually attractive again, as well as to have your health back, but on our death bed, when we have very likely lost our sexual charisma and perfect skin, regardless of how physically beautiful we were on the outside or of how many people were attracted to us, it will be our internal qualities that we have developed in our lifetime that will give us spiritual rewards, not our external physical qualities, regardless of our belief system. When we die, no matter how beautiful our body is, it will be the actions we took while in that body that will live on, not the body itself.

Karma and Consciousness

David Wolfe has written that it is actually worse karma to eat raw flesh than it is to eat it cooked. Einstein, clearly not a stupid person, has said: "Our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty." Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, also clearly not a stupid person, said: "Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

You are fooling yourself if you think their is a humane way to kill an animal for your own desires. Einstein also said: "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." Please see my full page of vegetarian/vegan quotes from many other famous, brilliant minds. Also look at my vegan vegetarian page for a brief look at the other reasons to be vegan.

Even if you have, in your perspective, saved your own life from taking the life of other animals, there is no way to know that you would have been fine even if you had never adopted the paleo diet in the first place. Finally, and I know this is a very intense question, but ask yourself, whatever your beliefs:

In the end, and I truly mean IN THE END, as in on your deathbed, when there is no one left to answer to but God, will it have been better that you died of cancer or that you stole the life of other creatures to live?

This is a hard question and thought to pursue, but for me, I know that I would rather let the cancer take me than to take the life of another animal, because deep down I know that action will take me backward spritually. All of the world's religions talk about having compassion for all God's creatures and having non-selfish actions towards others. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Many people seem to think that somehow this doesn't include the creatures we share the planet with.

Another important, perhaps larger point, is that sometimes our biggest challenge is to have faith and find strength in something larger than ourselves. To me, suddenly adopting a paleo diet out of fear of death is one, an action of fear and distrust in something higher than ourselvers, as well as a sudden, quick-fix action to try and take away all the negative actions we have already taken in our lives. For example, if you develop cancer, chances are there are a lot of things you did not do in your life that you could have done to ensure yourself of better health, like eat better, exercise, have a more positive, less negative mental outlook and more.

However, there is no way to suddenly burn off negative actions from our past. It was our choice to eat fast food, as an example, or not exercise and let our ego help us have poor self-esteem, etc., and therefore the consequences are ours to suffer. This is the Law of Life. Eating a bunch of raw meat might save us from immediate consequence, but at some point you will have to deal with your karma, and it will not get better simply by putting it off. It would be more advantageous to you in the end to have faith in something higher and try another way to recover from cancer, even if that means your body does not make it. To find a connection to something higher in your recovery is the incredble awe inspiring story you hear from so many people who have truly felt God give them a second chance at life and heal their body while they were adopting positive changes to assist in this recovery. Eating dead animals is essentially trying to surpass God and GET SOMETHING FOR NOTHING without really having to make any changes. It is also trying to give yourself your own life without God's help, and without any effort on your part. You can try to convince yourself otherwise, but the life you have taken in order to have this power and lease on life will come back to haunt you. It is a lack of faith in love and a higher power, and a lack of humble gratitude for the life that has been given to you, to take such actions.

Going raw the vegan way is really challenging and takes some serious soul-seaching and soul-effort, and that is why people sometimes decide to just eat raw animal flesh instead, because in this day and age, they don't even have to kill the animal themselves. It's easy! Transitioning to a vegan way of life, and to living foods, is a journey and not instantaneous, where eating raw milk and raw beef can be done right away without the need for any personal changes within.

Yet your spritual advancement is more important than immediate physical gratification in life. The body is going to die anyway, and what spiritual connection and karma will you have when it does?

Alternatives

If you look at some of the pictures of Aajonus Vonderplanitz, creator of the "paleo diet," he does look healthy, but he also looks, quite literally, like a healthy wild animal, and I mean seriously non-human like. Looking at his photo makes me feel like I am looking into the eyes of a lion. Lions, truly pure carnivores, live only 15 years in the wild, which is obviously a very short life span. We cannot say though that this is because a lion eats meat, because there are plenty of herbivore animals that have similar short life spans in the wild. However,we do know that a major factor of longevity happens to be the amount of oxygen a creature utilizes in its lifetime. The more oxygen it must burn and use, the shorter its lifespan due to free radicals. For example, turtles live a very long time because of how slowly they move, and animals that must run and catch their food all the time, or just run a lot period, live much shorter lives. This is why I never understood excessive exercisers, because it isn't good for your health or longevity. Anyway, Aajonus Vonderplanitz doesn't have to chase the animals he eats, so his longevity will not be comparable to a carnivore in the wild. What we do know though is that Aajonus does not have the the liver and kidney of a carnivore like a lion. A lion's kidney is twice the size of a bull's, and not much smaller than the elephants. (Elephants by the way, have a very long life span, they move very slowly, and are vegetarian/vegan.) The lion can handle large amounts of protein and nitrogenous waste products contained in its natural flesh diet.

Aajonus Vonderplanitz and his followers though drink a lot of green vegetable juice almost daily, which may help them deal with all this waste. A lion in the wild doesn't get this opportunity! Aajonus and his followers also are not forced to eat only meat or as much meat as a carnivore either. Personally, I think it's really awesome that we humans don't have to kill other creatures for our survival, how cool is that!?! We have it so damn easy, unless you have a job in a slaughterhouse that is, now that's definitely a really terrible, hard job, with the highest suicide rate, as well as one of the highest turnover rates, of any job out there. Hidden cameras in slaughterhouses often reveal the "nutty" behavior of these workers after having had to kill so many animals. These cameras often show them beating and abusing the animals, with violent, strange verbal abuse, for no good reason. While the Primal Diet may seem to have massive benefits at first to those who practice it, and for obvious reasons, like the fact that practitioners are abstaining from the processed foods of civilization,especially grains, it is other than an optimal longevity diet or even a diet that the human body is built for. If you know someone who has received benefits from eating raw meat, just give them a while, and see what happens after months and years pass. Chances are, that person will go back to eating cooked food anyway, and will not stay on the diet,and they were probably eating cooked food all along.

As David Wolfe writes, unless "biting into a raw fish with its slime, scales, and watching eye" sounds appetizing, or "eating bugs out of a garden," or unless you have the "propensity to go outside" of your "home at 3:00 am and chase a rabbit down, kill it, and chew it up with their teeth," then animal foods cannot be eaten naturally. If you're going to eat raw meat, at least try killing the animal yourself, also take a visit to a slaughterhouse before you claim that you're really happy eating other animals and feel it to be "natural."

A Challenge

You are however, instead of consuming extra life force and energy from the sun, consuming a lot of fear and energy that the animal felt upon its demise, and consuming this can easily contribute to making you an egomaniac and an unpleasant person to be around. If you don't believe me then look at people who have been eating raw meat, before they began, compared to a few months later, and you will see the accumulation of this negative energy and karma, no doubt.You can't miss it, just look at how circumstances change in their lives. There is a lot of energy of lack, or of not "being enough" in our society, and this is often the root of taking such extreme actions to try and be "more," "better than," and feel less powerlessness over circumstances. However, the power gained from eating other animals and taking life for this power is a deceptive ego-trap that will ultimately harm you more than it will do good, outweighing any apparent gains.

One will also likely start to smell like an animal from all the bacteria, further making one an unpleasant to be around. This is what I have experienced from years of being around the primal lifestyle. David Wolfe has also personally seen people who have done the so-called raw paleo diet develop major problems, including: "extreme anger, body odor, immobility, infertility, repeated illnesses, and rampant parasite infestations"(Sunfood Diet Success System, p. 132-136). He also writes in these pages that he has personally seen many lives destroyed from the negative energy of raw animal foods. I too have seen lives turn for the worse in a few people, and have seen serious destruction in one life, but truth be told, none of these people stayed on Aajonus' diet, they all stopped it at some point, so the diet either doesn't bring enough benefits for people to stick with it, or starts to cause harm that cause people to stop doing it. Furthermore, nothing is ever absolutely destroyed of course, and it is subjective as to whether we think a life has been destyroyed, especially since destruction can be overcome, so its subjective to some extent to talk about other's lives being destroyed. I can not name names or bring those identities to you here to prove to you what I have witnessed, so you'll just have to take or not take my word for it. Yet clearly, I am not the only one who has claimed to witness these effects, as David Wolfe is a best-selling author that thousands of people all over the world put their faith in for health advice, and thus is another reason to remove your doubt of such effects/claims. Finally, you have to ask yourself why people do not stick with the diet longterm. There must be a reason.

Also, I do actually have a great deal of respect for a lot of the work that primal diet and paleo diet supporters have done on the internet and in the world in terms of re-educating people about microbes and grains, the truth about cholesterol and polyunsaturated fats, and working to rid people's fear of microbes. I do also agree that looking at our foraging paleo ancestors is key to determining man's optimal diet, which would have included days without food, and lots of tree fruits. Paleo websites do have catalogued a tremendous amount of great studies and information that I highly recommend studying, but I seriously do warn you not to let their raw meat eating propaganda give you any kind of false hope, because I can tell you from the standpoint of someone who has been around the paleo diet for a long time in Southern California, that eating raw meat is a very dangerous and deceptive action that can seem great at first, but that can only ultimately only lead to much negativity, especially if continued long-term.

Raw Dairy

Raw Fish

Eat More Vegan Fats

One of the major reasons people crave meat is for the protein drug effect, because our body has to "rev" up to get rid of all the poisonous waste product and excess acidic protein in it, and we feel a caffeine-like stimulation from it, in the same way that the body rushes to get rid of caffeine and revs up the system, giving us that activated feeling. Read my Where Do You Get Your Protein? page for more information on the protein myth.

References:

Carqué, Otto An appeal to common sense: The folly of meat-eating ; a reply to an editorial in the New York and Chicago Evening American and San Francisco Examiner. Kosmos; 3rd edition: 1904.

Barkas, Janet. The Vegetable Passion. (1975). London: Routledge &Kegan Paul.

Busse, C.D. and W.J. Hamilton. Primate Carnivory and Its Significance to Human Diets. (1978).

Goodall, Jane. (1999) Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey. New York: Warner Books.

http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=336738

The Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning, International, Inc., Bio-Communications Research Institute.. Intravenous Ascorbate as a Chemotherapeutic and Biologic Response Modifying Agent. http://www.doctoryourself.com/riordan1.html

Return from the Paleo Diet to The Raw Diet....