How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

Some people try to live off raw food today, and the result is that they always lose weight, and suffer from infertility and chronic energy deficiency, however much they fill their bellies with nuts and fruits. A German study of more than 500 raw-food faddists, who ate most of their food raw, concluded that ‘a strict raw food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply.’ And this was among people who were eating domesticated and easily digested fruits and vegetables rather than wild food, let alone trekking through forests energetically looking for food, as their chimpanzee equivalents would do while thriving on such diets. Most raw foodists have to include some cooked food in their diets. The human gut is just not adapted to extract enough energy from raw vegetables, raw meat, raw nuts or raw fruit.