This was asked in the caveman forums. “How much raw food should you eat? Do we have any information on how much food the hunter and gatherers ate was raw?”
Personally, I’m only interested in solid, experiential evidence. I would consider the evidence of Weston Price’s research with healthy groups of people. I would consider the evidence of my own experience. This is how I answered this question:
I eat as much raw food as I can. I used to be really sick in 2005. ( See http://www.eczemacure.info to see what I looked like. ) So after being symptom free on 2006 I went and tried out many diets I stumbled upon. My stumbling led me to:
organic vegetarian
organic raw vegan – unsustainable
organic raw fruitarian – unsustainable
organic / wild wai diet (raw fruitarian + extra virgin olive oil + egg yolks + various ocean raw fish) – got boring… I wanted land animals later on
organic / wild raw primal diet (aajonus vonderplanitz – raw fruit, raw vegs, raw dairy, raw ocean fish, raw land animals) – raw dairy didn’t agree with me… only butter agreed with me.
organic / wild raw paleolithic diet (raw fruit, few raw vegs, few raw nuts, raw ocean fish, raw land animals + organs) – so far the best for me
cooked meat paleolithic diet (raw fruits, raw vegs + cooked meats) – I tried for 2 months to compare it to raw meats and I did not feel as good so I went back to raw paleolithic diet.
So I settled on raw paleolithic diet and shifted to HIGH FAT – LOW CARB… awesome, much better than high carb. The initial problem is sourcing of food stuffs.
I still eat some cooked meat at socials, but I try to avoid it, when I do heat meat from my refrigerator, I see to it that I heat it only or at the most RARE. Lately I see the toaster oven is the cleanest method of heating.
I make pretty darn sure I get organic / wild / ocean meats and avoid condiments. My only condiments are raw calamansi / raw lemon / real fermented vinegar – I don’t use salt.
This is me and it works for me because I have a lot of unhealth to reverse. As for my kids I feed them as much raw meat as I can. rare beef, raw beef, raw squid, raw fish, raw eggs, etc… but they still default to eating rice with cooked meat… which I’m working on to eliminate rice. Kids have realized rice tastes bad with raw meats… which is a big incentive to go with raw meat.