 I don't know about you guys, but I can't stand these condescending pseudo-intellectuals that think they know everything because they well informed, they're educated, they've done their research, they read up on the latest and greatest information. Adam Ragusea just seeds that type of energy. I cannot stand it. And recently he did a video trash talking, raw food diets, paleo diets, and keto diets. Basically appealing to authority, talking to experts, and really what the average person wants to hear. And his audience is a bunch of normies, but this video was so painfully incorrect that, I mean, not painfully incorrect, not one thing he said was correct. So let's take a look before I lose my mind. Of all the fad diets that have come and gone through the years, the raw and paleo diets might just be the stupidest. Don't get me started on keto, that we will get back to that. I'd call raw and paleo the stupidest because they are predicated on some very suspect notions of how our bodies work and how they evolve to work that way. We'll start with the raw diet. Certainly you can live a long, healthy life eating all kinds of diets. And any diet that restricts refined carbohydrates and other processed foods will probably do some good for people like me living overfed lives. So whatever works for you works. Just don't let anyone tell you that a raw foods diet is more natural because we humans have been cooking our food since before we were homo sapiens. In fact, cooking might be part of why we are homo sapiens. What I just said is known in the field of anthropology as the cooking hypothesis. And while the lifestyles of our paleolithic ancestors may differ quite a bit from our own, the reasons why cooking was advantageous to them still apply to us. Scholars believe the human ancestor Homo erectus started eating meat about two and a half million years ago. They invented cooking about a million years ago. Cooking became a widespread practice around 250,000 years ago, and that's about when the first anatomically modern humans appeared, the first Homo sapiens. These are all interrelated events, or so goes the hypothesis. I think most of us would be in agreeance that he's oversimplifying this substantially. He's turning it into a raw versus cooked discussion as opposed to mentioning specific foods, the properties of those foods, the nutrients contained in those foods, how they applied to cooking, which would be a brief explanation, not just like, oh well, we started cooking food 250,000 years ago. And noticed how he said we started cooking food as if he was implying that we were only eating cooked food from that point on, which is absolutely not true. Every single indigenous group of people has a variety of cooked and raw foods, both plant and animal in their diets. The hypothesis being that once we started cooking, we were able to extract a lot more energy, and that really helped further push us into sort of being the human entities that we now understand ourselves to be. This is Dr. Jessica Han, an anthropology professor at Oxford College of Emory University. When we shifted from eating a fully raw foods diet into a diet in which meat would have been part of the diet and cooking of foods would have been part of the diet, we're extracting more energy, our guts are shrinking, sort of the shape and size of our teeth is also changing, because we're not, you know, having to grind away at raw things. Indeed, compare yourself to this cow or this buffalo or this goat. Your digestive system is way smaller proportional to your body. This goat needs major internal hardware to break raw greenery down into nutrition its body can actually use. Unlike goatee there, I don't need to spend literally my entire day chewing my cud, and my body hardware doesn't need to be monopolized with the constant work of breaking it down. Cooking allows us to take more nutrient dense foods and to pre-digest them outside our body, to break them down in the pot so that our bodies will have less work to do once we actually eat. As the hypothesis goes, this innovation was so powerful that it allowed our anatomy to evolve. So all those shifts in our biology then leads energy to go up to our brains and to sort of expand our capacity, our brain capacity. Less body mass and time dedicated to digestion means more can be dedicated to other activities, like designing ziggurats or new and terrible ways to kill each other. All hallmarks of the civilizations cooking allowed us to build. Increased energy from cooked foods grind away at raw things, entire day chewing cud. So this guy is obviously special interest funded, pushing the mainstream agenda of what we've been told our whole lives. The most calorically dense food, the highest energy food is animal fat. Nothing is going to give you more pure fat, caloric energy than raw butter, raw cream, bone marrow, foods that don't have to be cooked to offer high caloric intakes, honey. Plus, raw foods aren't hard to eat. Our teeth wouldn't have been grinding away at raw things, raw fruits, raw meat. All those foods are easy to chew and you could even swallow them whole because we have the proper stomach acidity and digestive enzymes to break those down. Cooking doesn't break down nutrients like vitamins and minerals to make them more available. It breaks down macronutrients protein and carbohydrates into forms that are more absorbed, especially turning indigestible starches into sugars and stuff that can be eaten by our gut bacteria. Nothing about what him and this expert is saying is correct. When we jump from physical anthropology to cultural anthropology, there's a whole other argument that says cooking allowed communities to extract more from their shared food supply. Thus freeing up some members of that society to be architects and soldiers and stone masons and priests and blacksmiths instead of everybody just being a farmer. Dr. Ham herself is a cultural anthropologist and while she's actually a little skeptical that cooking played such a direct role in our physical evolution, she's absolutely convinced it was huge in our social evolution. Cooking is an inherently social act, so to what degree should we also be thinking about how the socialness of cooking was also part of helping us to become human, helping us to sort of work with an inherent ability to be cooperative and social with one another. You look at cultures around the world and all cultures are cooking their food. There are many food cultures, I would say perhaps contemporary North American food culture being one of them, where you see a combination of cooked and raw eating. In many cultures, raw foods are not a thing. For example, where I do field work in Ghana, you would not be considered to have eaten a meal if you ate raw food. Food there is considered to be cooked. For those times where I was craving a salad, I would kind of secretly go to the market to buy vegetables and then hide out in my room and eat my salad by myself because I knew that it would be mocked. Cooking has little to do with giving humans more free time in comparison to things like animal husbandry and agriculture, especially on a larger scale. That is how long it takes to procure your food. You can spend all day hunting and foraging or just a small amount of time throughout the day going to the market to buy your food. The reason they eat a lot of cooked food in Ghana is because they don't grow fresh fruits or vegetables in that region. It's mostly starches, tubers, and animal-based foods. And if you look across most indigenous groups of people, the reason they eat animal foods and starches is because they are calorically dense. The goal of humans is to survive and reproduce. We need calories to do that. Fruits and vegetables aren't really good sources of calories and salads didn't exist until this century. We can get all of the vitamins, minerals, fatty acids we need from animal foods, grains, and you don't even need a small amount of fruits or vegetables. And making coffee is, by the way, an example of the extractive powers of cooking in water specifically. The advent of things like stone basins and later water-safe pottery really would have allowed humans to get more from their food by boiling it. In our romantic imaginations, ancient humans are roasting meat on a stick over an open flame. But with a tough piece of wild animal, it's amazing how little you can get off the bone this way. But cook the same chunk in water for a few hours and everything literally falls off the bone. Plus, tons of proteins and other nutrients lost in cooking are conveniently dissolved in the broth which you can drink. I mean, yeah, when you boil or poach foods, the nutrients from those foods goes into the cooking liquid, but if you just eat the food lightly cooked or raw, you don't leach out the nutrients. The problem with his theory is that a large percentage of indigenous people did not use cooking methods that required pottery and boiling water. I would say this is one of the weakest arguments there is as there are dozens of different cooking and preparation methods indigenous people use for their foods. But boiling is not a popular one until recently. And we're talking literally dozens and dozens and dozens of different ways they cook their food. Maybe only one or two things might have been boiled just for preference. From a nutrient perspective, from a caloric energy perspective, boiling isn't significant. Slow cooking, whether it's on a fire, any sort of heat source, even fermentation, makes calories more available. Cooking in general, not specifically boiling. And this is the moment when a raw foods advocate would say, hey, but wait a minute, cooking destroys some nutrients. Well, that's true. You lose some nutrients every time you cook food, but the losses are very small, but the benefits of cooking far outweigh any negatives. That's Dr. Tim Crowe, a longtime nutrition researcher and host of the Thinking Nutrition podcast. And the benefits are you actually make some nutrients more available, you make some food more easily digestible, and you actually make it safer as well because you kill off a lot of the bacteria that causes food poisoning, which is a major cause of illness and sickness in the world. I don't mean to be insulting here, but how you look is generally an indicator of your health knowledge. If you know so much about nutrition, shouldn't you look like a Roman statue? You know, this guy is losing half his hair, the other half is gray, and he doesn't exactly look healthy. Neither do any of these experts or Adam himself. Indeed, the latter benefit might be part of why cooking is particularly important in Ghana and other developing countries, where food and water supplies might not always be so sterile. But Lorne knows we have our own food safety issues here in the United States, the land of factory farmed everything. Let's get back, though, to the first benefit Dr. Crowe mentioned, bioavailability. Just because you cram food down your gullet doesn't mean your body is able to actually use it. So when you cook food, there's some nutrients you do maybe absorb less of, but there's others that you absorb more of. So it's a case of swings and roundabouts. And I'll use a good example. There's one of the vitamin A family members called lycopene. It's a vitamin A pigment. It gives foods their red color, particularly tomatoes. They are high on lycopene. When you cook tomatoes, you actually absorb more of this vitamin A antioxidant into your bloodstream. So that's a nice example. That's because when you cook tomatoes, it's generally with fat, and you need fat to absorb plant-based carotenoids. It's these people look at studies and say, oh, well, this study says this without understanding actual mechanisms of what happens in the body, what physically happens when you consume a certain nutrient. Another example is legumes. It's virtually impossible to digest beans and lentils and such without cooking them first. Now, there are some people who say they like the raw foods diet precisely because of reduced bioavailability. They're hoping that it'll help them make some reductions of their own. You actually do absorb some of the nutrients less because you don't break down the cell walls. And interesting, it's actually thought that the potential calories in some of these food, you don't absorb them all. So a lot of people, when they go on a raw food diet, they can lose weight. Number one, because it limits their food choices, they stop eating a lot of junk food, and maybe they actually absorb a few less calories, which in the Western world is a good thing. So they seem to be mostly referencing a raw vegan diet, some type of raw food diet, and not even acknowledging the cooked versus raw properties of meat. We're almost done with this video, and they haven't even mentioned the most important aspect of nutrient absorption, which is the body's ability to produce certain enzymes. And that is greatly impacted by how much you cook the food. The more you cook the food, the more enzymes you need to break it down. And to not mention that in a cooked versus raw video, that's like step one. That's the first thing you should be talking about. But come on, please don't follow a diet plan that depends upon you simply passing perfectly good food without actually using it. That's just dumb. Speaking of dumb, the paleo diet. The diet that issues grains and legumes and dairy on the basis that these foods were supposedly not consumed by our Stone Age ancestors. We're not meant to eat them, these people say. But there is archaeological evidence of humans eating grains, for example, deep in the Paleolithic era, long before the First Agricultural Revolution. And of course, many of the vegetables that paleo dieters do eat did not exist at all in the Stone Age. They're modern creations, the product of millennia of selective breeding by humans. Okay, our ancestors consumed grains. Why aren't you mentioning that our current foods applied the current grains we're eating are sprayed with agrochemicals and are basically GMO poison? Oh, that's right. Because you're being paid to push the mainstream agenda in your nonsense video. Which brings us finally to the fad diet du jour, the ketogenic diet, keto. Another low-carb diet like Atkins and Paleo that restricts starch and sugar. The modern ketogenic diet was invented in the early 20th century, not as a treatment for obesity, but as a preventive treatment for seizures. Basically, if you replace nearly all of the carbohydrate calories in your diet with fat calories, you will force your body to produce these things called ketone bodies that your brain will eat in place of the blood sugar glucose that your brain would normally eat. And this, for science reasons, helps to prevent epileptic seizures. And people have now seized on keto as a fad diet to lose weight. The issue is very few people who think they're doing keto are actually eating the extreme fat to carb ratio needed to put your body into ketosis. Here's an example of an actual keto diet designed for a five-year-old kid with epilepsy. These poor kids literally have to have heavy whipping cream with every meal. And unless you are a hardcore athlete, particularly maybe an elite athlete who's really focused on eating that way, you have a very obsessive compulsive personality, few people stick to a true ketogenic diet for more than three to six months. They start introducing carbohydrates back into their diet because let's face it, bread and pasta is pretty awesome. So if keto works for you, by all means do it, but few people actually do keto as it's designed and that's to get into your ketosis, which is about 50 grams of carbohydrates per day. And that's not much carbohydrates. All right, that is the most ridiculous lie I've ever heard. If you've been on a keto forum, these people are obsessed with measuring their blood ketones and are always counting their carbohydrates. This is some type of defeatist pessimistic mentality to get you to not even try any of these diets. God forbid you feel better. And that's really the whole point of this video. Yeah, don't try those diets. Do what you want so you can remain part of the sheeple. Dr. Crow is one of like a hundred nutrition experts I've talked to at this point in my life who all say different shades of the same thing. The problem in your diet probably isn't the bread you're baking at home or the fresh pastas you're making at home. It's the processed food. It's the sugary junk you buy off the shelf, fast food, burgers and fries. So any diet plan that knocks most of that out of your diet is probably going to do you a world of good. And that is the only fad diet you need to know about. So you've talked to hundreds of nutrition experts and your overall understanding of nutrition is that of a brainwashed monkey? Okay, hundreds. I think even dozens would be a gross exaggeration. How can you even try to pull off that lie? I've talked to hundreds of nutrition experts. Yeah, this video is why I hate the appeal to authority. You have this clown who has a large YouTube following throws in a bunch of experts to repeat what you've heard over and over again. His viewer base is a bunch of normies that don't seem to care at all about nutrition or this video. So it's very obvious that Adam Ragusea was paid to make this video and push these specific ideas. It's really sad. Not only are these people not talking about what's going on in the world, how malignant and tyrannical our government is, they're going along with the agenda. They're helping them. They're helping them. It's ridiculous. But thank you guys for joining me today. A lot of you guys asked me to critique this and I mean I could talk for 10 to 15 minutes on every single one of these topics and explain what's correct, what's not correct. Definitely check out a video I did I think over a year ago now, Raw vs. Cooked Foods and Fresh vs. Frozen. I have a bunch of different videos on all of these topics. You guys can go look through my channel. Thanks again for joining me guys. If you want to support me further, all the stuff is down in the description below. Leave Frankie Boy a comment for later.