Are raw animal foods healthier
than cooked animal foods?
YES.
This evidence post exists to ensure that the evidence for raw animal foods is scientifically aligned with the overwhelming empirical experience of positive health results from people who eat this way.
What is health? ▾
Health is the objective state in which all tissues in the human body perform their biochemical functions as they should for natural growth, maintenance, and repair. This healthy biochemical state results in the absence of disease and the presence of positive characteristics of health, such as a general sense of well-being in one's own body.
What causes health? ▾
Health for humans is mainly caused by eating other healthy animals' tissues as the chemicals in them fuel the repair, maintenance and growth of our own animal tissues.
What causes unhealthiness? ▾
Unhealthiness in humans is fundamentally caused by consuming unhealthy animals that contain toxins within them, non-animal tissues such as plants (which have low bioavailability and low micronutrient density), and otherwise damaged animal tissue, such as that altered by heating or freezing.
What causes disease? ▾
Disease occurs when the body cannot maintain some bodily system or tissue in proper working order because it lacks the necessary micronutrients or chemicals for the biochemical reactions that repair and sustain that system or tissue. Over time, this shortage causes the tissue or system to malfunction and gradually degenerate.
Symptoms serve as direct signals to the person that a particular tissue or system is currently not functioning properly or is under stress. Prolonged stress without enough nutrients or chemicals for repair causes ongoing tissue or system breakdown. This degeneration can develop into a diagnosable disease, which then continues to worsen and take more severe forms. Toxins interacting with human tissue are also dumped into the stress category as they stress human tissues.
What causes aging? ▾
Aging is caused by adaptation to suboptimal amounts of chemicals that shift the body's priority from DNA repair and maintenance to tissue maintenance, repair and overall survival.
This is a spectrum: the more unhealthy you eat, the faster you age. The more unhealthy you eat, the more the body focuses on short-term survival. The healthier you eat, the more the human body focuses on long-term survival, because short-term survival is already achieved.
If you eat what causes maximum health for humans (RawPrimal) and avoid environmental toxins stressing the body, then biological aging will be much slower. Nobody can know the lifespan of an individual human being as injuries can happen. Injuries and disease reduce lifespan as the body has to focus on massive repairing while deprioritizing DNA repair and maintenance. But we know biological aging will be slower on RawPrimal as the human body can focus on repairing and maintaining DNA in each cell.
What influences growth? ▾
When nutrient/chemical resources are limited, the human body must allocate them dynamically among competing demands, growth, short-term tissue repair, and long-term DNA maintenance, trading off investment in one area to sustain others.
Rapid growth (e.g., during puberty or recovery from injury/disease) requires diverting substantial resources toward anabolic processes. This can reduce allocation to somatic maintenance and repair, leading to accumulated damage and accelerated biological aging over time.
However, when an individual is in a state of true nutritional abundance and health providing ample bioavailable chemicals/nutrients, the body can support these processes more concurrently without severe trade-offs. During rapid growth phases, sufficient resources allow continued investment in DNA repair and maintenance, minimizing damage accumulation and preventing accelerated aging.
What are deficiencies? ▾
A deficiency is a lack of something the body needs for normal tissue repair, maintenance, and growth.
Fundamental deficiencies involve lack of micronutrients, fats, and proteins. Nutrients obtained from diet are fundamental because they provide the direct molecular building blocks and biochemical cofactors the body uses to form cells, enzymes, and hormones.
Secondary deficiencies involve natural human behavioral inputs that support biological regulation, such as sunlight, physical movement (movement, not exertion), sleep, and fresh air. These secondary factors are important because they support the proper functioning of the body's physiological systems.
What is toxic? ▾
A substance is toxic if it causes harm to cells or biological systems. Synthetic or natural chemicals can be toxic as they can disrupt tissue function and biological systems because the body cannot properly process or eliminate them. Toxicity can also arise from natural substances that are out of balance, meaning a substance becomes harmful when it is present in excessive amounts or accumulates in the wrong location in the body so it starts harming the tissues.
Evidence 1 Raw animal foods are the most nutrient-dense foods on Earth. ▾
The human body works fundamentally biochemically only. The human body is made from chemicals and it uses chemical reactions to repair, maintain and grow itself.
The human body never does anything maladaptive, it always tries to be as adaptive as possible. The human's goal is survival of their own genes at the end. So if you are unhealthy, your body is trying its best but you are just not fueling it with optimal chemicals for the chemical reactions.
For the human body to work optimally, it needs all micronutrients/chemicals in adequate amounts, the most valuable and critical chemicals for repair, growth and maintenance of tissues. The bigger the body, the more chemicals/micronutrients it needs. On RawPrimal you obviously get all macronutrients so you don't need to focus on that, just eat enough fatty raw animal foods.
The human body can't make micronutrients without nutrition. Each biochemical reaction your body makes requires chemicals and specifically micronutrients. Without micronutrients you would die in hours to days as repairing and maintaining your bodily tissue wouldn't be possible.
If you are deficient in some micronutrient, your body can't make some biochemical reactions like it should, it can't repair some tissue, so it needs to adapt. And this adaptation is called disease. The body will still keep the tissue alive (maintaining) even though it's malfunctioning.
When you miss some micronutrients the body doesn't instantly cause disease, it first shows as milder symptoms. But inside your body adaptation is happening as tissues become less like they should be in nourished humans. The body shifts to survival mode, focusing on short-term survival like keeping tissues maintained short-term, but repairing broken tissues is limited. Long-term maintenance goes down so your body starts aging faster as it can't focus on maintaining DNA integrity. Every chemical in the body needs constant maintaining and repairing, even DNA. DNA needs to be repaired constantly as it's the root which informs each of your cells how to "act."
First there is the sun where all of the energy comes to the world, it attaches to life and then escapes back to space. Then there are the atoms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, minerals, cycling endlessly. Plants capture sunlight and turn it into living plant tissue. Herbivores eat the plants. Smaller predators eat the herbivores. Larger predators eat them in turn. At each step, nutrients become more biologically concentrated, organized into muscle, organs, fats, and complex animal tissues. At the top of this hierarchy are humans. A large predator is, in a way, built from millions of plants. The nutrients have been filtered, selected, and refined through multiple living systems. And the end product is the raw animal, the healthiest food available. The atoms in your body were once from ancient plants, animals, even dinosaurs, and before that stars.
Evidence 2 Raw animal foods have the most bioavailable nutrients possible, cooked animal foods have much less bioavailable nutrients. ▾
Cooking alters chemicals/nutrients to a less bioavailable form. The higher the heat, the more it destroys and damages the chemicals/nutrients. Heat changes chemical structure, changing structure means the chemicals/nutrients get damaged objectively for bioavailability as they no longer have the structure of a proper normal chemical. In the body those damaged chemicals need to be repaired before they can be used. Raw animal food is not damaged so it can be processed as food should be, it doesn't need to be repaired first.
The body can't process damaged chemicals/nutrients as optimally as non-damaged chemicals. Damaged chemicals are excreted out of the system as they are unusable or harder to process than non-heated chemicals. Heat is damage. The human body is made from non-heat-damaged chemicals. When you eat cooked food it introduces damaged chemicals that are not usable and the body needs to extract the small amount of chemicals/nutrients that are not damaged from the cooking. Just as a fire-damaged human hand is considered damaged, so is cooked animal meat.
Also, the time that raw animal tissue spends in the environment, like a fridge or room temperature after slaughter, causes damage every second. Physics entropy damages the 3D structure of cells. Optimally, raw animal tissue should be eaten right after slaughter. A fridge at +1°C slows down entropy. Since entropy that causes raw animal foods to become lower quality nutritionally is caused by chemical reactions, the cold slows down those chemical reactions so the food stays fresh longer.
Freezers (under 0°C) cause damage to the 3D structure of micronutrients/chemicals in raw animal tissue through cold denaturation, ice crystal formation, and mechanical damage.
Evidence 3 Raw animal foods have microbes that help humans. ▾
Microbes live on nutrition like humans do. They help humans by processing dead food in ways we can't as optimally, and they keep some nutrients to reproduce while helping us process foods and keeping the gut clean of dead food mass and toxins. A microbe that lives inside the human gut is much more adaptive than one that lives in the ground in terms of reproduction, so the microbe also benefits from being inside the human gut.
Microbes eat everything that's dead. This can be seen in nature as they decompose dead matter like leaves and everything on surfaces. In the human gut, parasites and bacteria eat only the dead and damaged matter and leave the alive human gut lining alone, because the human gut immune system kills parasites fast if they try to attack the gut walls, which they very rarely do as they know they will be killed because evolution programmed them that way. These microbes reduce the amount of dead food mass from your gut and reduce it to only 1%–5% of the original waste mass size.
Also, eating high-quality raw animal foods from healthy animals can't even cause illness. If someone gets sick temporarily from eating raw animal food, it means the animal was sick itself from toxins, and the toxins just moved to you from the animal. If the animal is healthy it won't cause illness. Some people will still have detox symptoms after starting the diet but it's different from getting actually sick.
Evidence 4 Raw animal food doesn't have harmful chemicals that are created by cooking. ▾
Below are the dangerous toxins created by cooking animal foods. These are not just random mild toxins, these are dangerous toxins that cause cancer and disease.
| Toxin | Classification | Type |
|---|---|---|
| PhIP | Group 2B | Mutagen & Possible Carcinogen |
| MeIQx | Group 2B | Mutagen & Possible Carcinogen |
| DiMeIQx | Group 2B | Mutagen & Possible Carcinogen |
| IQ | Group 2A | Mutagen & Probable Carcinogen |
| MeIQ | Group 2B | Mutagen & Possible Carcinogen |
| AαC / MeAαC | Group 2B | Mutagen & Possible Carcinogen |
| Benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) | Group 1 | Known Human Carcinogen & Mutagen |
| Other PAHs | Group 2A/2B | Probable/Possible Carcinogens, Mutagenic |
| Acrylamide | Group 2A | Probable Carcinogen & Mutagen |
| AGEs (e.g., CML) | Pro-inflammatory | Linked to oxidative stress & DNA damage |
| Acrolein | Group 2A | Probable Carcinogen, Mutagen & Irritant |
| 4-Hydroxynonenal (4-HNE) | Cytotoxic | Mutagenic & Cytotoxic |
| Malondialdehyde (MDA) | Mutagenic | Mutagenic |
| Nitrosamines (NDMA, NDEA) | Group 2A | Probable Carcinogens & Mutagenic |
| Furan | Group 2B | Possible Carcinogen |
| 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural (5-HMF) | Potential Mutagen | Potential Mutagen/Genotoxin |
| Glycidyl esters (release glycidol) | Group 2A | Probable Carcinogen & Mutagen |
| 3-MCPD esters (release 3-MCPD) | Group 2B | Possible Carcinogen |
| Ethyl carbamate | Group 2B | Possible Carcinogen |
🔬 Conclusive Evidence
Why do only 4 types of evidence give proof that this diet is the most healthy?
Because these first 4 points directly explain how the human body works fundamentally by biochemistry and physics. They explain everything that interacts with the human biochemical system through nutrition:
- Live tissue (food)
- Microbes, what they do in the gut
- What damages live tissue (food degradation)
- What toxins are created by cooking (food processing damage)
As we earlier mentioned, the body works fundamentally with chemicals only, the only thing we get chemicals from is food. We are made from food. Only food.
Eat healthy animals and you are going to become a healthy animal.