Raw diet

Well, okay it could be preserved but I wanted the subject to stand out.

I just wanted to post a thread about what I have been eating lately.

I eat a mostly all raw diet.

I actually started doing this last August, ate strait raw for a month. However I started eating cooked food again and didn't go back to eating mostly raw until this past May.

I don't eat much veggies. I try to limit fruit intake as much as possible. Mostly blue berries.

Milk, I swill the stuff, whether it is fresh, sour or curdled. Constantly. I can easily take on a gallon a day if I press myself. Raw jersey milk at that. I eat at least a stick of butter or a pint of cream a day.

Raw eggs. Really really really love them. Especially duck eggs. I can eat 10 raw eggs a day easily without a second thought.

Beef and lamb. I wish I could eat more of this stuff. A half a pound a day is what I shoot for.

Guts. I don't really care for raw liver or any other slimy mammal organ. I either try to think about something else while I scarf it down or mix it up with milk, eggs, honey and spices.

Clams. God I love clams. Ultimate finger food next to eggs. The bigger they are the more sand they have but the better they taste. Also a big clam costs the same as a small clam.

Fish. Salmon and tuna are some of the tops, best stuff on the planet. American shad swims up the river here, soaked in buttermilk it kept for a long time and tasted great.

I find it hard to imagine that almost everyone in the world virtually ruins all this great food by heating it up on a stove. I can't believe I used to think cooked food tasted good and raw meat or eggs are gross. Now I find cooked food gross, if I eat a fully cooked meal I regret it terribly, it gives me no good feelings to digest such a meal. I do not find many cooked meals to be particularly tasty at all, with the exception of cooked green vegetables which is what I would eat cooked if I ate any cooked food...

Taste alone compels me to eat this way. But gosh, it is far more than taste that keeps me plugging away on this!

EmileSpecies wrote:
Raw eggs. Really really really love them. Especially duck eggs. I can eat 10 raw eggs a day easily without a second thought.

Raw eggs are supposed to be a super food... Great if I know the chicken that laid it... forget supermarket eggs though.

Beef and lamb. I wish I could eat more of this stuff. A half a pound a day is what I shoot for.

Do you age it at all? I know the Inuit do. And of course most butchers do too. Something about it being easier to digest. Oh and same comment as above... not supermarket products.

Guts. I don't really care for raw liver or any other slimy mammal organ. I either try to think about something else while I scarf it down or mix it up with milk, eggs, honey and spices.

Interesting that carnivores go for the guts first. Must be tastiest to them. Also, most nutrients I hear. Probably shortest keeping too. The butcher doesn't age these. Ya, biggest yick from them all.

Fish, I could do. (I guess anything goes if hungry enough) Eggs too. Cultural baggage makes the rest harder I have thought that a years worth of foraging would be good training.... I've never learned to eat food in season... I need to. Raw meat is part of that.

I think I will be cooking food for a while yet... at least till I raise my own meat.

Raw milk?  It the only stuff that is healthy to drink.  Raw eggs?  If I know where they came from and I especially love raw Muscovy duck eggs.  Raw meat?  Sometimes but not any raw meat.  I never eat any undercooked poultry but will eat raw beef.  I won't eat raw lamb or pork but will eat raw goat and venison.  Weird huh? 

You eat all that stuff raw? Wow, I'm impressed! How do you make sure your meat doesn't have any bacteria or anything?

I don't make a habit of it.  I just eat it raw once in a while.  But chicken and duck eggs.  Yummmmmm.

I am interested in figuring out ways to preserve meat actually so I shouldn't have worded the title that way.

If you slaughter a bull you can't be expected to eat the whole thing fresh and freezing isn't ideal. I certainly don't want to cook it though. My friend made sun dried goat meat and goat lung from my goat.  I am not sure how cooked sun dried is.

I buy meat from people who I personally know. I eat chicken eggs from people I know and I eat my own duck and goose eggs. I have only eaten raw duck or goose on two respective occasions. Most of my diet is milk and butter and cream.

If I could get myself more organized I would eat more vegetables in the form of fermented pickles and wheat grass juice.

I try really hard to eat only raw. Sometimes people offer me cooked food and I might eat a little bit. At a potluck table I usually just eat some salad or fruit salad hopefully.

As for meat, as far as I know, food doesn't really go bad unless it's kept too cold or deprived of oxygen. Natives would leave fish out on rocks for up to as long as 2 weeks or until it was infested with maggots and then they would eat it. Meat fermented in ways such as this are said to allow for great boosts of energy.

How do I make sure that my meat doesn't have any bacteria?

I agree that raw muscovy eggs are the best eggs. Geese are a close second, but they are so gosh darn huge that I find them harder to enjoy. Raw muscovy eggs can have yolks the color of the core of the earth. I bet they have more vitamin D than any other domestic egg.

I ensure that my meat has bacteria and perhaps other things in it, by not doing anything to it.

Also for eggs. I never put my eggs in the fridge. I try to eat them before they spoil, but if they spoil I eat them anyways!
Okay, I didn't eat the rotten eggs that my goose sat on for one month!

EmileSpecies wrote:
I am interested in figuring out ways to preserve meat actually so I shouldn't have worded the title that way.

If you slaughter a bull you can't be expected to eat the whole thing fresh and freezing isn't ideal. I certainly don't want to cook it though. My friend made sun dried goat meat and goat lung from my goat.  I am not sure how cooked sun dried is.

I buy meat from people who I personally know. I eat chicken eggs from people I know and I eat my own duck and goose eggs. I have only eaten raw duck or goose on two respective occasions. Most of my diet is milk and butter and cream.

If I could get myself more organized I would eat more vegetables in the form of fermented pickles and wheat grass juice.

I try really hard to eat only raw. Sometimes people offer me cooked food and I might eat a little bit. At a potluck table I usually just eat some salad or fruit salad hopefully.

As for meat, as far as I know, food doesn't really go bad unless it's kept too cold or deprived of oxygen. Natives would leave fish out on rocks for up to as long as 2 weeks or until it was infested with maggots and then they would eat it. Meat fermented in ways such as this are said to allow for great boosts of energy.

How do I make sure that my meat doesn't have any bacteria?

I agree that raw muscovy eggs are the best eggs. Geese are a close second, but they are so gosh darn huge that I find them harder to enjoy. Raw muscovy eggs can have yolks the color of the core of the earth. I bet they have more vitamin D than any other domestic egg.

I ensure that my meat has bacteria and perhaps other things in it, by not doing anything to it.

Also for eggs. I never put my eggs in the fridge. I try to eat them before they spoil, but if they spoil I eat them anyways!
Okay, I didn't eat the rotten eggs that my goose sat on for one month!

Dried meat ie. "jerky" isn't cooked.  It is just dried.  Many types of sausages are air fried and not cooked.  I make an air died "sausage" out of a pork loin.  I trim most of the fat from it and put it in a cloth bag (organic cotton) and hang it up with a fan blowing on it until it has thoroughly fried out.  Thinly sliced it is delicious.  Prosciutto is air dried uncooked pork.  North American First People dried as much meat as possible as quickly as possible and then when they needed to prepare a meal it was cooked in bison fat.  They ate it raw when they were traveling but if they had set up their village they cooked it in fat.  I will eat any air dried meat even lamb and pork but the only one I will eat fresh is beef.  That may be a learned cultural response and it may not.  I never eat raw fish but if I did it would not be any species that is a bottom dweller.  All of them are infested with worms.  Catfish, flounder, haddock, sole are all infested with worms and eating shellfish raw is flirting with Hepatitis A.  When I was younger I used to eat lots and lots of raw clams though.  The oceans are much more toxic now than way back in those days.
Preserving meat...... I air dry it or pressure can it. 

Paleo Gardener wrote:
You eat all that stuff raw? Wow, I'm impressed! How do you make sure your meat doesn't have any bacteria or anything?

It does have bacteria. Even we have 100 times the number of bacteria in our bodies as we have human cells. In our gut alone are 5 or 6 pounds of about 500 different kinds of bacteria and fungus. We are designed to live in a bacterial soup. The problem comes when that soup gets unbalanced. To over simplify things (so I can understand myself), every kind of bacteria has a mate, another kind of bacteria that relies on the same things to survive. They compete with each other and balance each other out so each is kept from over growth. Now... if an unbalance is thrown at things... say anti-biotics, often only one of a set is killed, the other survives. Then that one overgrows.... and makes you sick. Meat that is cooked is sterilised. Leave it at room temp and the first bacteria that comes along grows like crazy... and the meat becomes poison. Wild meat has a healthy selection of microbes. Feed lot, grain fed, drugged beef does not. Field raised meat is healthy and balanced.

Very over simplified... but I hope it gets some of the idea across. This is a part of nature that science has not yet learned much about. Out of that 500 kinds of microbes in our gut, we (humans) have studied about 20 - 50.... we know quite a lot about 5 or 6.... yeah, about 1%. Of those, we still don't know what all their functions... pros and cons, for our body are. We do know that the thought of cleaning all the bacteria out of our body to be healthy is wrong. We would die.

I am only a layman in this field, biology was the only science I didn't study in school. I'm trained in Broadcast electronics as happens. However, I have a son who has gut related behaviour problems... a diet change can radically change things in less than 48 hours. So I have studied as much as I can over the past 5 years. I have learned things that doctors will not confirm vocally or on paper, but only the nod of their head. They will not talk about diet as a solution or point me in that direction, but will encourage me to keep on doing so when I figure it out for myself. Pharma-corp has a lot of power and in this country/province all medical professionals are paid by the government, you get fired and you quit medicine there is no one else to work for.... so much for "science"...

Enough of that, sorry for the rant. The point being... live food is good.... we just have a few hundred years of being told "germs are bad" to get around.

Len,
Nice "rant," your points were very well stated.  I do question your differentiation between the "healthy" field raised meat and the wild game being less healthy.  Did I misinterpret your statement?  Generally speaking, wild game is the most organic meat available and is easily as healthy as field raised meat.  Venison for instance is most often way overcooked because it is "wild" but the reality is that compared to grocery store meat it is much safer.  Of course there are exceptions to any rule in all cases.  I particularly enjoyed your discussion of the bacterial soup that populates our body. I studied human nutrition and some related areas of science but made my living as a musician and a chef most of the time but have been a gardener all of my life. LOL 

I hope that you discover the right combination of foods to help your son.  I completely believe that nutritional healing is the foundation for providing the body the tools it needs to heal itself.  My father gave me a piece of advice when I was in high school.  He sat down at the dinner table and said, "My patients will get well in spite of what I do because it is the body that does the healing, not the healer.  I have kept that piece of wisdom with me ever since.
Peace.

I know live food is best, I was just concerned about unbalanced bacterial populations on store-bought meat. Part of being a Paleo Gardener is eating raw eggs... yum. The medical establishment's ignorance (interesting how a word we use to mean not knowing also seems to mean ignoring, perhaps implying intention) of diet is pathetic. I go in for a physical and they don't even ask about my diet. What the medical field does is not true science, for science is unbiased, while medical "science" looks only at symptoms and not at the whole system. Len, what diet are you trying with your son? I'd love to hear more about your research.

Paleo Gardener wrote:
I know live food is best, I was just concerned about unbalanced bacterial populations on store-bought meat. Part of being a Paleo Gardener is eating raw eggs... yum. The medical establishment's ignorance (interesting how a word we use to mean not knowing also seems to mean ignoring, perhaps implying intention) of diet is pathetic. I go in for a physical and they don't even ask about my diet. What the medical field does is not true science, for science is unbiased, while medical "science" looks only at symptoms and not at the whole system. Len, what diet are you trying with your son? I'd love to hear more about your research.

M.D. = Medical Deity

Dave Bennett wrote:
Nice "rant," your points were very well stated.  I do question your differentiation between the "healthy" field raised meat and the wild game being less healthy.  Did I misinterpret your statement?  Generally speaking, wild game is the most organic meat available and is easily as healthy as field raised meat.

I think I said it badly... Feedlot=bad. Field raised or wild =good. I would suggest that wild is best and field grown is next best... mainly because field raised still often means raised on a mono culture of chemically sustained pasture. A more permaculture view would have field raised animals much the same as wild animals.

Paleo Gardener wrote:
Len, what diet are you trying with your son? I'd love to hear more about your research.

It is SCD... with mods. No dairy... any dairy we can get has drugs in it. Mark is hyper-sensitive to anti-biotics. He gets a rash from regular eggs, but can eat as many organic eggs as he likes. We try to get probiotics in him.... there is his mom to get around. she likes to cook everything.... raw veggies means only heated till still crunchy... We were doing raw juice but seem to have run out of steam. We still do sometimes. Main thing is no starch or heavy sugars. I dream of a bit more land and our own animals, but for now it is an urban lot. I have made fermented cabbage and water kefer for him and make bread from nut butter. He gets a lot of meat( and fat... he is always looking for the fattiest piece) and veggies. In some ways I would welcome a social collapse as it would force us to eat more local/seasonal. My Yf is "Phlip" and comes with some cultural differences. (and some tropical tastes) I would like to do more, but it is hard not to get discouraged sometimes. Getting him outside lots is good. There is an abundance of wonderful places to go around here.

The SCD with methylene blue, and try fasting him only on coconut shavings with raw egg, some salt and spices, until the gallbladder reacts, then continue for about a day or two longer.

While the gallbladder reacts, it dumps stored-up bile like crazy (you can hear it, squirting into the intestine), and the pH10.5 bile injected right below the stomach, into the small intestine, does a good job of discouraging the fungus/yeast/parasite pH imbalance it sounds like the young man has. However the problem is systemic not limited to the gut.

In addition to what you are doing already, and what is mentioned above, Panacur (fenbendazole), at a double-dosage per kilo, once a day. This, over a week, should help. I've noticed marked improvements in myself however I've had trouble getting Panacur here, so I've run out. A feed store should have it.

As far as bacteria: the 'germ theory' is just that - a theory. Germs themselves, as the others have commented, do not cause dis-ease. It's peoples own states of being, their emotional management and diet, coupled with the toxins emitted by some types of organisms, which create a hardship for the body. Some of those toxins are highly stressful for the body to eliminate. Point of fact: cooked food generates a number of byproducts which are difficult for the body to handle, perhaps more stressful than the little bit of harmless bacteria on a natural steak.

For the one who is taking care of the young man with the systemic parasitic/imbalance issue, intestinal cleansing or other kinds of detox may help, in addition to the above.

Tying in the paleodiet man's comments with that of the son who has a yeast/fungus/parasite systemic issue, the concern the stuff that comes off of some organisms and the environment of the host, and how well it is neutralized or removed.

edit: in addition to not eating the cleaner fish as commented (thanks), the pig is a cleaner animal. The cleaner animals should be off-limits unless you want to deal with parasite issues.

mooochoo wrote:
The SCD with methylene blue, and try fasting him only on coconut shavings with raw egg, some salt and spices, until the gallbladder reacts, then continue for about a day or two longer.

...

I'd love to try some of this.... but I would have to get it past his mom. I will save it though, sometimes she is willing to try new things after she has sat on it for a while. It was over a year after I told her about SCD that she was willing to try. GFCF was before that and had made almost instant changes (less than 48 hours). From that I knew he had gut problems (leaky gut?) Anyway, describing everything goes way off topic.

The point is I agree with raw food. The other end is that my Yf comes from a culture where they cook everything.... except maybe beer and wine, though I don't think it is too easy to find uncooked beer in north America... I think it is all dead pasteurised stuff. Maybe some imported wine is better.

The other part of things is that most meat one can get in the store is not safe to eat raw because it is feed lot drugged junk. Of coarse many of the veggies are not good for anyone raw or cooked because of the chemicals they are grown with. I'm not sure if it is best to try to find land to raise my own... or make friends with organic food growers and support them. I'm trying to do both for now.

I work at The Blue & Gray Brewing Co. in Fredericksburg Va. from time to time doing maintenance on their equipment.  None of our beer is pasteurized.  You can pour a bottle of it in a bowl of flour mix it up, knead it, oil the surface and 6 or more hours later you can punch it down, form your loaves and let it rise again and then bake it.  It will rise faster the second time and makes wonderfully flavorful bread.    All of our beers have live yeast in them.  The basic process of making beer is cooking the malted grain to convert the starch to sugar.  After that it is chilled before the yeast is pitched.  I am a Mead Maker but I used to brew beer too.  Mead might take way longer but it is much easier. LOL  You really have to be patient using honey as a sugar source for wine. 

Dave Bennett wrote:
I work at The Blue & Gray Brewing Co. in Fredericksburg Va. from time to time doing maintenance on their equipment.  None of our beer is pasteurized. 

Maybe it is just Canadian beer... or "Big beer". I like home made stuff, I've done that, but the "Big Beers" around here taste like dish water, a touch of rice wine, pasteurise it and carbonate after.... ok to get drunk if thats all you want... but I don't do that, I want a good taste. I like stout ... must be the Irish in me.

You can pour a bottle of it in a bowl of flour mix it up, knead it, oil the surface and 6 or more hours later you can punch it down, form your loaves and let it rise again and then bake it.  It will rise faster the second time and makes wonderfully flavorful bread.    All of our beers have live yeast in them.  The basic process of making beer is cooking the malted grain to convert the starch to sugar.  After that it is chilled before the yeast is pitched.  I am a Mead Maker but I used to brew beer too.  Mead might take way longer but it is much easier. LOL  You really have to be patient using honey as a sugar source for wine. 

I've made mead too. I had never thought of using beer to raise bread... but I have heard bread called solid beer.... also that bread was discovered accidentally while making beer. (I've heard the opposite too)

Wow cool!

Hey, I heard about a mead that is ready in a day, left out in the hot sun in the desert. Don't remember the details, could find out though.

Mead ready in a day?  That isn't possible.  It might be possible to make something with some alcohol in it.  I am not making Mead to have it ready in a day or a week.  It is not about the alcohol, it is about making a fine wine.  I do a variety of different wines using Honey.  Add fruit except Apples and it is called Melomel (what I do most often), add grapes and it is called Pyment, add apples and it is a Cyser just to name a few.  There is something called Short Mead that can be finished in a few says but it is more like a Braggot which is Ale made with Honey.  I have made Braggot before but never made Short mead.  Most of mine take at least a year before they go in the bottle.  The first stage is just the Honey and then it is transferred to a secondary fermenter and fruit is added and then it can take anywhere for 3 months to another year to finish.  It depends upon the fruit mostly.  I make a sparkling Mead that is very much like Brut Champagne too.  The cool part of making Mead is that after the sugar has been converted to alcohol the subtleties of the floral flavors shines through.