Raw fooders like to point to other primates as evidence that humans should eat a raw plant food diet.
For example, Steve Pavlina :
“There’s very compelling biological evidence that a high fruit diet is optimal for human beings. I can’t share the volumes of info I’ve read about this, but one of the more convincing points is that the nearest animal species to human beings, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos all naturally favor a high fruit diet, meaning that when fresh fruit is readily available, they’ll get the vast majority of their calories from fruit. How they get the rest of their calories varies (nuts, seeds, insects, or even other animals), but a clear preference for a high fruit diet is something they all have in common.”
Like other raw fooders, Pavlina here confused quantity consumed with preference. The fact that chimps eat more fruit than any other type of food does not indicate that they prefer fruit to all other types of food, any more than the fact that Chinese eat mostly rice means that they prefer rice to all other foods. In fact, chimps prefer to eat termites over fruit, and always start their foraging looking for insects, only moving on to fruits after they have exhausted their insect supplies. The preference for animal matter occurs in other apes; see "Omnivorous Primate Diets and Human Overconsumption of Meat" by William J Hamilton in Food and Evolution edited by Harris and Ross.
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Pavlina's experience confirms previous research showing how much difficulty humans have getting adequate energy from raw vegetal foods. For example, Koebnick et al found BMI below 18.5 in 14.7% of males and 25.0% of females eating raw food diets. Among these raw fooders, the more raw food they ate, and the longer they had been eating “raw,” the lower their body mass. Beyond body mass, Koebnick et al also found general malnutrition among the raw fooders resulting in young women losing their menstrual cycles:
More:
http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2011/02/more-raw-truth-about-raw-vegan-diets.html?utm_campaign=Skeptic&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_source=SNS.analyticsHat-tip to:
http://twitter.com/SkepticViews/status/36290896395767808