Hi, I would love to get Doug's or anyone else's in put on this. I found an article about human vs monkey anatomy and diet comparisons, and I read it very carefully. It is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10378206/. First I want to say I very much prefer 801010rv to a cooked diet. But a couple of things in this article made me question it: 1) our digestive tracts aren't the same as monkeys. Human small intestines are twice as big as most monkeys and our large intenstines are half as long. The author said the monkey's large intestines absorb nutrients from the greens that they eat. My understanding is that the small intestines absorb digested food. There are some scientists who say we've been eating cooked food for 800,000 years which is long enough for us to evolve a digestive system suited for that--longer small intestines for absorption of cooked food? and shorter long intestines since we can cook our vegetables and don't need to digest them raw? and 2) the fruit monkeys eat is very different from cultivated fruits we eat today. Our fruits have much less fiber and more fructose and less glucose. However, if you take into account that sucrose is half glucose and half fructose, the amount of fructose vs glucose (when including sucrose contributions) is not terribly different. For monkey fruits, glucose is 60-50% and for our fruits, glucose is 50-40%, typically. but monkey fruits do have quite a bit more fiber it seems and aren't as sweet in general. So that suggests our fruit is not the same as our ancestors ate. However, neither are our cooked veggies and starches.
I just began to wonder if our cultivated fruits are too low in fiber and too high in sugar to be optimal. and...if we should be eating some cooked veggies, which allows a larger variety and gives you more nutrients even though some are destroyed in cooking--but the articles I've seen say that you get 50% of your vitamins and all your minerals from cooked food (when you eat the broth as well).