 The debate between raw and cooked foods comes up time and time again in a variety of diets, from carnivore to paleo to vegan. There tends to be some sort of push for the consumption of raw foods under the belief that they have more available vitamins, minerals, beneficial bacteria, and enzymes that are not present in cooked foods. But one thing's for certain, and that is that there has never been a group of peoples that has subsisted off of a raw food diet. Every indigenous group, every tribes group has consumed both cooked and raw plant and animal foods from incredibly high quality sources. So not only have we not seen a raw diet in the past, we haven't even seen a diet on modern food because these people were eating heirloom grains, wild plants or pasture raised wild caught meats. The food quality was much higher. So what we can assume is that these people obtained a very high amount of nutrition from both animal and plant foods. And if we look at the teachings of Weston A Price, the book The Fat of the Land about an Arctic explorer who had many meals with Inuit Eskimos, the one thing that is present in all indigenous diets is the fat soluble vitamin content from animal foods. So that is deemed, in my mind, to be the most important factor to look at in the diet. That is why today, we are going to look at the vitamin availability in raw versus cooked meat and kind of analyze what happens when we actually heat meat and why we might want to consider consuming raw meat over cooked meat in some cases. Now it is important to note that these indigenous groups did have preferences for each part of the animal and it could be as specific as liking the upper leg marrow cooked and the lower leg marrow raw. They might like the liver of one animal boiled and the liver of another animal cooked over fire, maybe one they even liked it raw. So there are very specific cooking preferences by these indigenous people for a variety of reasons. Now the nutrient loss from cooking meat is greatly dependent on the time, the temperature, as well as the method. The higher the surface area that's exposed to the meat, such as ground beef being sauteed in a pan, is drastically higher than pan searing a steak very quickly to a lighter temperature. The longer you cook the meat, the more of the surface area you expose, the higher the internal temperature of the meat gets for a longer period of time, the more nutrients you would lose. There's a huge difference between braising a pot roast in a dutch oven for an hour versus searing a steak blue 20-30 seconds on either side. The first one, you will lose a significant amount of nutrition. The second one, there's no real concern about nutrient loss. Now if we actually look at a table of what happens to a pot roast that is cooked for an hour, we lose about 60% of vitamin B6, 50% of vitamin B1, 44% of folate, 33% of vitamin B5, 25% of vitamin K, 20% of vitamin E, 10% of choline, and 9% of vitamin B12. Now it's important to note that they didn't test for some other fat soluble vitamins A and D, as well as water soluble vitamin C because they assumed that meat did not contain these vitamins, yet meat does contain these vitamins. But from this data, we can ascertain that a piece of meat cooked well done is going to lose anywhere from 30 to 55% of the B vitamins and approximately 20% of the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. And vitamin C, one of the more sensitive water soluble vitamins, will be completely lost if you cook the meat extensively. So that's the main concern here. It's very important to keep in mind that this is a well done temperature. Most people that are cooking their steaks to medium rare medium, the nutrient loss is not going to be as significant as this. It's going to be maybe if I had to guess 5 to 10% of the fat soluble vitamins and maybe 15 to 20% of the B vitamins, you will lose a significant portion of vitamin C. So the main two things to take away are the need for a higher caloric intake through cooking food, as well as the initial nutrient content of the food being the most important thing. Because someone eating 15 pounds of well done muscle meat per week with a pound of liver is going to get more nutrition than someone eating 20 pounds of raw muscle meat. It's a very interesting analogy to make. And I guess some other aspects to take away here about why we might have cooked certain parts of the animal are how difficult it is to harvest the meat even with tools. There are just some parts of the animal that are so difficult to break down without boiling them or cooking them over a fire, you know, making the bones easier to break. There are various reasons in regards to actual food accessibility that we would have used fire or heat to extract more nutrition from the animal. So to me, it's very clear that a raw and cooked meat diet is the best of both worlds from both a caloric intake standpoint and a nutrient density standpoint, because you can cook the foods like muscle meat and fat and ribs, chuck, brisket, pieces that might have been very difficult to eat in a raw state. You can cook those down and eat them easier and extract more calories from them. And then when you have the more nutrient dense parts of the animal, like the liver, the salmon row, the brain tissue, the bone marrow, you can consume those foods in a raw state for their nutrition. To me, that makes the most sense from an indigenous standpoint from our ancestors. But what are the actual benefits of consuming raw meat and an entirely raw diet? For the most of my carnivore dieting history, I've consumed my meat seared on the outside with organs raw. But there was a period of time where I went completely raw primal for a few months and my appetite just became ravenous. In hindsight, I realized my body was not able to produce enough digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid, and bile to digest raw meat as efficiently. So there is definitely a bottleneck in regards to your digestive system's capabilities with high volumes of raw meat. I increased my food volume drastically. I started looking to incorporate things like honey and dairy for some sugars that would digest easier and give me energy. Overall, I've always switched back to a cooked meat diet after trying to go raw for a period of time. But what are the hypothetical benefits of going on a raw meat diet? One of the biggest ones is satiety and satiation. Because raw meat has a much lower palatability than cooked meat. It doesn't taste as good. It satiates your appetite more. And this also ties into obviously foods like liver and fat satiate your appetite more than muscle meat. But there's definitely some tie-ins to reducing food palatability and weight loss that can be benefited from consuming raw. And the only real argument that could be made for the benefit of a raw diet would have to be in regards to the microbiome. Because we know we can obtain adequate nutrition from cooked animal foods. There's no question about that. What we really have to debate is if the microbiome of someone consuming cooked animal foods is drastically different than someone consuming only raw animal foods. But if we look at what these indigenous people ate, they ate cooked animal foods, they ate raw animal foods, and they ate fermented animal foods as well as various wild plant foods. So it's safe to say the gut microbiome of these indigenous people was far more diverse even than a modern person on a raw meat diet. That is definitely something that is safe to say. If we look at studies done on dogs because there are quite a few done comparing raw meat diets in these animals to commercial feed, the dogs that were fed a raw meat diet did have healthier gut microbes than the commercial dog food diets. But this isn't a great comparison. This is like comparing a standard American diet to a raw meat diet. It's not like you're comparing a raw meat to a cooked meat diet. The best bet here is to look at what these indigenous groups ate, see how we could replicate it to some degree, and not worry too much about what the benefits are of going strictly raw. Because hypothetically speaking, if you have some cooked meat, some raw meat, and some fermented meat, even when you are eating those cooked meat products in your diet, you're still feeding the raw meat bacteria in your microbiome. You're not really altering the gut bacteria too much. Granted, you have a fairly reasonable balance of high quality animal foods that you're ingesting. There are definitely some interesting tie-ins to how a food is raised, to how it tastes in its raw state, and how that affects the food palatability. The reason a lot of people don't like raw animal foods is because of what we're feeding our animals. I did a video comparing a grain fed steak to a grass fed steak, tasting them both raw and cooked, and there was this off-accurate taste in the grain fed fat. I mean, same thing with organ meats and fat, where it's even more prevalent. I'm sure a lot of you guys have tasted raw grain fed fat, and it's hard, it's gristly, you can't really chew it, whereas grass fed fat is soft, it has a nutty, sweet flavor. How the animal was fed correlates directly how it tastes. But what's interesting is cooking the meat covers this up. If you take that grain fed steak that has that off-accurate taste and put a bunch of salt and pepper on it, you don't taste that the animal wasn't raised properly. So because of our lack of access to super high quality animal foods in the United States, not only are we cooking our meat and seasoning it more than we would normally do so in nature, we're also avoiding parts of the animal that are more negatively affected by this poor feeding regimen. Obviously the liver, the fat, the organ and off-cuts of the animal have a drastic taste difference, whereas the muscle meat isn't affected nearly as negatively. One other video I did where I tasted every single organ of a lamb in its raw state is interesting from the perspective of, you know, you're in nature. You just killed a whole animal. What foods taste the best out of that animal right when you kill it? From a hunter's perspective, from a perspective of a human indigenous diet, that will answer a lot of questions. If you take the ribeye, the New York strip, in a wild animal and compare that to the taste of the liver or the marrow fat or the kidney or any organ really, in its raw state, the organs and the fat will always taste better than the muscle meat. We are really out of touch with nature and how foods are supposed to taste. Liver is supposed to be sweet, slightly minerally and delicious, whereas most people associate liver with it like this bitter, astringent, like terrible thing that no one likes. It's because of how we're raising our animals. I mean, people will talk up and down about how they like carry-gold butter. They'll say, oh, I love my eggs sunny side up. They'll say, oh, I need my steak to be cooked pink or well done. People have innate food preferences in modern society, just like our indigenous ancestors did. But if they actually had access to high quality versions of the food and tried these foods at various stages of their life, things would be drastically different from a cultural perspective. So all of these concepts in mind, regardless of what we're talking about, it always ties back into nutrient density, what our indigenous ancestors ate, and that you're getting adequate fat soluble vitamin intake in the diet. People ask me, Frank, is it okay if I cook my liver? Is it okay if I cook all my meat well done? Is it okay if I get commercial eggs or these eggs? Does the butter have to be raw? As long as the nutrient content is present in the diet, that is the one overlapping factor. If your butter was pasteurized but it has a high vitamin A content, a high fat soluble vitamin content, it's fine. If your fish was frozen but it's wild fatty mackerel, it's still a great source of DHA. If you're buying a ton of grain fed meat and cooking it well done as your main caloric source, but you're having two pounds of liver a week for nutrients, that's great. The goal in the diet is always to achieve nutrient density and whether that's achieved on a raw diet or cooked diet, your body has two requirements. Getting enough calories and getting enough nutrients. If you can check those two boxes, things like raw versus cooked, the gut microbiome, all of these things are going to be an extra, perhaps not even 5% improvement in your diet. And a lot of that is going to have to be experimented with and you're going to have to try it for yourself to see what foods you feel better on. So overall, yes, we do lose some nutrients when we heat meat, especially well done for a long period of time, but the temperature that most people cook meat to is not too significant of an issue. Even if you have the same foods I consume, liver, salmon roe, whatever it may be, you can throw them all on the grill and cook them to whatever temperature you like. If the food was initially good quality, you're going to be achieving nutrient density. So this video isn't necessarily a reality check for people to look into a raw food diet. It's more of a reality check in regards to making sure you're getting enough nutrients in your diet and then possibly experimenting with the different digestion rates of raw foods. That being said, I just find it really interesting that I prefer to, you know, sear my meat on the outside, but leave the inside completely raw. So technically I'm on a raw food diet, but it tastes like cooked food. So maybe I'm tricking my body in some way, but who knows? 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