Someone wrote:  >>Generally, the theory behind raw foods diets is that it must
be the optimal eating plan because it is the original human
diet.

"Original" if you go back at least 500,000 to 900,000 years.  As far as can
be gleaned from archeological research, fire was controlled, and people were
cooking foods with it, all over the inhabited world by 400,000-500,000
years.  That's a long time for natural selection to work on adapting the
human gut to eating cooked foods.  Another example that took much less time:
people have been milking cows only for about 8,000 years, yet wherever a
population has a long history of milking cows, people's gene for producing
lactase (the enzyme that digests lactose) stays turned on for life.  In
populations where there isn't a history of dairying, the lactase gene turns
off in mid-childhood.  And that took only 8,000 years to evolve.  So, I'd
say all humans are genetically adapted to eating cooked foods, even though
prior to 500,000 years ago, all hominids (they aren't called "humans" that
far back) ate only raw foods.

If you were to hazard a guess as to the diet of early hominids, some 3-4
million years ago, the first folks to become bipedal and take those first
steps to becoming human, their diet (known from archeological evidence)
seems to have consisted of:  fruits, leaves, nuts, seeds, tubers, animal
meat, and marrow.

On both these counts -- the antiguity of fire use in humans, and what we
know about early hominid diets -- there really can be no claim for any
naturalness of a diet composed of all raw foods but no animal products.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition
Texas A&M University