RAW MEAT

VS
COOKED MEAT
 Introduction
Aajonus Vonderplanitz, American actor, author and nutritionist who died in 2013, was famous
for eating a diet consisting of raw and sometimes rotten animal foods which he called The
Primal Diet. He claimed raw meat and other animal foods eaten raw were healthier than
when cooked and he even credited this diet for curing him of multiple terminal cancers.

For decades, a number of movie stars and bodybuilders have been eating raw eggs as part of
their diets, based on the belief that raw eggs are healthier and easier to digest.

It‟s time to settle the debate by using anthropological and scientific evidence to answer the
question:

Are meat, eggs and other animal proteins

healthier when eaten raw or are they healthier
when cooked?
The information contained in this presentation is from the book Catching
Fire: How Cooking Made us Human by Richard Wrangham.
 The only type of meat you should eat
Before we get started, it‟s important to note that when we‟re talking about meat in this presentation, we
are referring only to pastured meat from animals fed their natural diets.

Corn fed meat Pastured meat

• Destroys topsoil • Builds topsoil
• Pollutes waterways • Provides habitat
• Highly toxic food • Great lives for animals
• Cruel to animals • Extremely nutritious food
• Destroys environment • Improves environment

Find a pastured beef/pork/lamb/poultry farmer near you – Visit Eatwild.com

 WHICH IS HEALTHIER?

RAW MEAT COOKED MEAT

Part I: anthropology
 No hunter gatherer cultures ate raw
food diets
• Plutarch as well as colonial sailors of the 19th century made claims there were
cultures that didn‟t cook their food.
• In 1870, anthropologist Edward Taylor examined these claims to determine if they
were true or not and found no evidence of cultures eating purely raw food diets.
• Taylor concluded that cooking was practiced by every known human society.
Copper inuit ate almost all cooked meat
• In 1906, polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson conducted a series of expeditions in
Canada‟s Northwest Territories and found the Copper Inuit diet was virtually plant-
free, dominated by seal and caribou meat and supplemented with large salmon-like
fish and occasional whale meat.
• Stefansson found that for the Copper Inuit cooking was the nightly norm and that
meat was always well cooked.

“I have never seen Eskimo eat partly cooked meat so bloody as many steaks I have
seen devoured in cities – when they cook, they usually cook well.”
- Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1910
 Copper inuit foods eaten raw
Preference:
Soft animal foods were preferred raw by Copper Inuit.
• Whale blubber was preferred raw, because it was so soft it could be spread
over meat like butter.
• They also ate raw seal and caribou livers and kidneys.

Convenience:
Inuit consumed raw food mostly as a snack while away from the camp
hunting.
• Fresh raw fish
• Raw rotten “high” fish
 FOODS EATEN RAW BY CULTURE
Australian Aboriginees: Copper Inuit (Northwest Territories):
• Raw mangrove worms • Raw whale blubber
• Raw fruit • Raw seal liver & kidney
• Turtle eggs, oysters and witchetty grubs • Raw caribou liver
(Sometimes raw, sometimes cooked)
Maasai (Africa):
• A mixture of raw blood and milk
Yahgan (Tierra del Fuego):
• Raw winkles (Mollusks)
• Raw sea urchins

Utes (Colorado):
• Raw kidney
• Raw liver

“The Inuit probably ate more raw animal products than other societies, but like every
culture the main meal of the day was taken in the evening, and it was cooked.”
- Richard Wrangham,
 CULTUREs that never ate raw meat

Siriono Hunter Gatherers (Bolivia):

In the 1940‟s, anthropologist Allan Holmberg discovered that the Siriono had a
taboo against eating raw meat, which they claimed not to eat under any
circumstances.

• Andaman Islanders
• Mbuti
ate meat
• Kalahari San
only cooked
Part II: science
 eggs
In the past raw eggs were claimed to be the ideal source of calories.

“An egg should never be cooked. In its natural state it is easily dissolved and readily
taken up by all the organs of digestion, but the cooked egg must be brought back to
liquid form before it can be digested.”
- Molly and Eugene Christian, 1904

This concept persuaded many bodybuilders and actors to eat raw eggs.

Steve Reeves Arnold schwarzenegger Sylvester stallone

Famously ate raw eggs Drank eggs mixed with heavy Swallowed raw eggs in the
everyday for breakfast cream movie Rocky
 Effects of cooking on protein absorption
Raw Egg Study:
• In 1998, Bulgarian scientists conducted a
study to find out how much protein is
absorbed from eating raw eggs verses
cooked eggs.

• Participants ate about 4 raw or cooked

eggs, containing a total of about 25
grams of protein.

Cooked: 91-94% of Protein digested

Raw: 65% of Protein digested
Source: Evenepoel et. al. (1998,1999)
 Digestion of Raw vs cooked
1987 Study:
Researchers tested the degradation of the
protein bovine serum albumin by the
enzyme trypsin with and without heat.

In cooked samples, digestion by the enzyme

trypsin increased 4x compared to that of
uncooked samples.

Digestion by enzyme increased 4x in

cooked protein

Source: Davies et. al. (1987)

 mechanisms
• The Belgian scientists in the previous study concluded the major reason for the
dramatic increase in nutritional absorption caused by cooking was the
denaturation of proteins induced by heat.

• The same phenomenon occurred in the 1987 study.

1. Cooking Denatures Proteins

2. Cooking softens connective tissues
 1. Cooking denatures proteins
• Denaturing protein exposes it to the action of enzymes.

• Heat weakens the molecular bonds of a protein, causing it to open up so enzymes

can break the rest down into smaller fragments.

4 Ways to Denature protein

Heat Acidity
Davies et al. (1987) Gaman and Sherrington (1996)

salt drying
Sannaveerappa et al. (2004) Sannaveerappa et al. (2004)
 Your stomach denatures protein

• During digestion, your stomach

produces hydrochloric acid to
denature protein

• Cooking is a way to „pre-digest‟

food outside of your body to make
the entire process of digestion
easier and more efficient.
 2. Cooking Softens Connective tissues
• The material in meat most responsible for its
toughness is connective tissue.
• Composed of a fibrous protein called collagen
and a stretchy protein called elastin, connective
tissue wraps meat in three layers.

1. Endyomysium: Surrounds each individual

muscle fiber.
2. Perimysium: Bundles of endomysium enclosed
muscle fibers are jointly sheathed within the
perimysium.
3. Epimysium: Those bundles are held together by
the outer wrapping called the epimysium, which
encloses the entire muscle. At the end of the
muscle, the epimysium turns into the tendon.

Fact: The tensile strength of tendons can be

half that of aluminum.
Tendons are bioengineering marvels
Tendons make excellent bowstrings

But collagen has an achilles’ heel…

 Heat turns it to jelly!

Collagen denaturation temperature is 60-70C (140-158F).

 Recap:
• Cooking meat increases the amount of protein (energy) you get from your food.
• It does this by denaturing proteins and softening connective tissues.

But there’s more…

 Cooking decreases energy to digest
• Physiological ecologist Stephen Secor conducted
a study using Burmese Pythons.

• Burmese pythons are the ideal subjects for

testing the effects of cooking on the cost of
digestion.

• After swallowing a meal, snakes lie in a cage and

do almost nothing but digest and breathe.

Study:
• 8 Burmese pythons were fed 5 different kinds of experimental diets containing lean beef
steak.

1. Raw and intact 3. Cooked and intact 5. Whole live rat

2. Raw and ground 4. Cooked and ground

 Cost of digestion was the same

1. Raw and intact 3. Cooked and intact 5. Whole intact rat

2. Raw and ground 4. Cooked and ground

 Cooking reduced the cost of digestion by 12.7%
Grinding reduced the cost of digestion by 12.3%
• Grinding breaks up both muscle fibers and connective tissue so it increases
the surface area of the digestable parts of meat and exposes it to acid and
enzymes.

1. Raw and intact 3. Cooked and intact 5. Whole intact rat

2. Raw and ground 4. Cooked and ground

 Cooking and grinding together reduced the
cost of digestion by 23.4%

1. Raw and intact 3. Cooked and intact 5. Whole intact rat

2. Raw and ground 4. Cooked and ground

 The alexis st. martin story
• On June 6, 1822, twenty-eight-year-old Alexis St. Martin was
accidentally shot from a distance of about three feet inside a store
of the American Fur Company at Fort Mackinac, Michigan in the
United States.

• Surgeon William Beaumont arrived on the bloody scene and said

the following when describing what he saw,

“A large portion of his side was blown off, the ribs fractured, and
openings made into the cavities of the chest and abdomen, through
which protruded portions of the lung and stomach, much lacerated
and burnt, exhibiting altogether an appalling and hopeless case. The
diaphragm was lacerated and perforation made directly into the
cavity of the stomach, through which food was escaping at the time Reconstruction of torso by Michael
Schultz, 2017.
your memorialist was called to his relief.”

• Beaumont took St. Martin to his home and he survived to go on and resume a vigorous life, which
included paddling his family in a canoe from Mississippi to Montreal.
• Although the fist-sized wound mostly filled in, it never completely closed.
• For the rest of his life, St. Martin‟s insides were visible from the outside.
• To Beaumont, this meant an extraordinary study opportunity; for
the first time in history it was possible to watch digestion taking
place.
• For the next 8 years, Beaumont experimented by inserting foods
into St. Martin‟s stomach through the opening attached to a string
and observed its effects on digestion.
• He recorded how long it took foods to be digested by the
stomach and emptied into the duodenum and from these
observations he drew conclusions in relation to the effects of
cooking.
• When Beaumont introduced boiled beef and raw beef at noon, the
boiled beef was gone by 2pm and the piece of raw, salted, lean
beef of the same size was only slightly digested on the surface,
while the rest remained firm and in tact.

Beaumont‟s Conclusion:
• The more tender the food, and the more finely divided, the more rapidly and completely it was
digested.

“Fibrine and gelatine [muscle fibers and collagen in meat] are affected in the same way. If tender
and finely divided, they are disposed of readily; if in large and solid masses, digestion is
proportionately retarded… minuteness of division and tenderness of fibre are the two grand
essentials for speedy and easy digestion.”
- Dr. William Beaumont
• Sadly, by the time St. Martin died in
1880 at eighty-five-years-old, he felt
mistreated and was resentful of being
the subject of all this experimentation.
Neither he nor his family wanted
anything to do with Beaumont.

• After St. Martin‟s death, Dr. William

Osler, described as the father of modern
medicine, offered to buy his stomach for
further study but the family refused.

• The family kept the body privately for a

number of days to ensure it rotted then
buried it in an unusually deep grave to
ensure nobody could get to it.

• Let‟s justify St. Martin‟s lifetime of

suffering by learning from the
experiments done on him after his
unfortunate accident and by applying
the knowledge to our lives.
 Avoid burning meat
When you burn or char meat, a number of toxic substances are formed called maillard
compounds, such as acrylamide and heterocyclic amines.

They are formed essentially by the union of sugars and protein in the meat, mainly the
amino acid lysine. In his book, Richard Wrangham stated “Their presence is easily
recognized in the brown colors found in pork crackling or bread crust.”
 WHICH IS HEALTHIER?

RAW MEAT COOKED MEAT

Cooking meat:
1. Reduces the amount of time and energy your body spends digesting meat.
2. Increases the amount of energy you obtain from meat.
COOKED MEAT
Is
healthier
 How to support my work

To purchase or to see the show notes, visit EndAllDisease.com/episode5