Wine and Cooked Food. FTW.

Two things in articles here and here which point to our diet as the key, the very foundation, of what brought on our intelligence and advancement.  And which should totally smash some of the outdated ideas of diet that are circulating.

If you're a regular reader you know already that I had prostate cancer (and BTW a few weeks back was the four year anniversary of when I first knew I had abnormalities, and just using the diet and nothing else, I'm still clear and expect to be clear well into old age) and that I was kind of pushed into developing a diet for it and am selling the e-book of the diet online.

I'm pretty relaxed about The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook Diet, because that's precisely what the diet is about - NOT forcing unnatural changes in diet - and because the book recognises that we as a species got here largely on the basis of the foods we eat and how we eat them.  Our farmer forefathers may not have had an Internet, but they did have traditional knowledge and what to them was just basic commonsense.

Be that as it may.  Farming and growing food spared us from the need to constantly expend all our energy foraging, and allowed us to perfect tools and techniques for hunting, then domesticating.  Wine introduced alcohol to us, and alcohol inhibited the growth of a range of bacteria and allowed some food preservation to take place.

Wine also has a reputation as a digestive, that is, taken after dinner it helps break down our food.  Remember, the most basic tenet of my diet is to make it easy for my body to use the nutrients in my food. It was one of the things we as a species did to lift ourselves above the survival threshold, and it's what we still need to be doing now.

Another thing - all those "raw" diets.  They insist that we as a species are designed to eat our food raw, but that is pure unadulterated rubbish.  One of the key events of our species was the use of fire.  Do you think that the fire somehow magically got into our brains and made us smarter, while we chewed away on largely indigestible hunks of raw food?  Of course not!  One of the reasons we find fire to have been a key driver of our evolvement is that it enabled us to cook food and thus extract more nourishment from that food.  Over thousands of generations, our bodies have become supremely adapted to cooked food.

And vegans/vegetarians, sorry but meat, and especially cooked meat, was one of the turning points in human development.  Our farmer forebears were so convinced of the benefits of meat that they began to herd and domesticate animals for meat.  And please bear in mind that most "folk wisdom" stems from generation after generation of people without cars and phones and computers and newspapers do distract them, who had little else to do but observe what was going on around them, and draw conclusions from that.  Stuff like "Oh, Bardar eats his meat burnt over coals, and he's bigger and stronger than anyone else.  And to think, he was the skinniest one here, a few years ago..."

I can't believe that despite knowing so little at the time, I was able to accurately hit so many targets with the Zen Cookbook diet.  But then, most of it was folk wisdom, and some of it was folk wisdom confirmed by research and science.  And all of it appears to work, and appears to get proven over and over the deeper I dig into food and nutrition and therapeutic values of foods.

NOTE:
9th June 2005, by the way.  That was when I got my life-crumbling PSA reading that led to tests and biopsies and the Body friendly Zen Cookbook.

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