I east a mostly raw food diet...when I am in nature, where a spend about half my time (living in a camper in the woods) particularly I prefer to not cook. It helps my body to stay regulated in such heat and maintains hydration better.
I do so in the city for health and detoxification purposes, I'm a health dude lol.
The science is essentially increasing enzyme counts and maximizing nutrition..but cooking anything increases the acrylamide content (heavy compound, carcinogen) as well as incites a leukocytosis response in the body (waste of our energy reserve) if cooked past ~160°F ....but heat degrades many compounds, both nutritional and psychoactive..! And given that it feels lighter and cleaner to eat raw and gets my consciousness into a much more lucid and meditative state, and naturally I like to feel my best going into trips, generally I will fruit fast or something before an intense exp.
I'm struggling here to understand how you can possibly increase enzyme counts in produce that has been picked from its plant. Sure, produce is still alive when and for a while after it is picked, but the cells begin to experience negative effects from being cut off from the circulatory system of the mother plant, and begin to experience various forms of stress. The metabolism of the cells within whatever raw produce you're about to eat have begun to die off and those cells that still live have reduced their metabolism, so I don't see how you can get higher amounts of enzymes from picked produce. If you're talking about having more enzymes relative to cooked food, perhaps, but as a rule almost all enzymes are destroyed by the strongly acidic conditions in the stomach, being denatured as surely as if they had been cooked. There is a reason that ceviche uses acid to 'cook' food, and like juice, with a pH of 2-3, is about the same as the average pH of the stomach (which swings from 1-2 to 4-5 depending on whether you've eaten recently, etc).
According to the precepts of raw food as a lifestyle, what benefits would be realized from having more enzymes? There are obvious benefits to having more vitamins and minerals, so that's no question.
You do realize that almost all of the carcinogens associated with cooking food are actually the result of cooking meat specifically, right? The same sorts of Maillard reactions and caramelizations that make compounds in the crust on a seared or grilled piece of meat taste good are the very reactions that produce the carcinogens, since those carcinogens happen to taste great! I say this as a vegetarian myself, I don't think meat is particularly flavorful, but everybody else seems to think it is, and the crust is supposed to be the best part.
While I won't be quite so vehemently critical as Survived Abortion, I think that a raw food lifestyle is silly nonsense. The thing is that a raw diet will be almost nothing like the diet of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer due to the industrialization of the agricultural complex and the millennia of breeding to which we have subjected our vegitable and animal domesticates. So even an organically grown vegitable from an heirloom variety from your very own garden will be nothing like the ancestor of that vegitable that a Neanderthal may have eaten, because the cultivar you are eating today has millennia of interbreeding, crossbreeding, backcrossing, and unnatural (that is to say directed by man as opposed to subjected to the constraints of natural selection without human interference) selection in its past, whereas the ancestor vegitable the Neanderthal ate did not.
Likewise even products gathered from a forest or field will not be comparable to their ancestors that would have been found in those same habitats. This is because what may look like wild land – perhaps a forest in the case of mushrooms – is no such thing! That may sound counterintuitive, so let me explain. When Western explorers came upon North America, it appeared to be a totally wild place untouched by the bands of indigenous hunter-gatherers that lived in the understory. But this was simply a mistaken observation made through Western eyes that were ignorant of the complex programs of modification that Native Americans practiced on the forests. In reality, the forests had been shaped by millenia of selection by mankind, so that they were in a sense more of a garden than a forest. The natives used fire to clear out the underbrush, they killed off any members of the few species of plants for which they didn't have a medicinal or culinary use. They encouraged the growth of plants that they could use, and tended them as they grew. They utilized forestry practices so as to keep the healthy, vigorous trees as shade-cover and as a canopy to modulate temperature swings, while selecting diseased trees to be cut down for firewood or for making tools, preventing the garden-forest trees from killing beneficial shrubs and other smaller plants by casting them into deep shade while simultaneously dampening the spread of disease amongst those trees.
Some of the tribes practiced outright agriculture in this forest-garden, some did not. But even those tribes that did not intentionally practice agriculture still practiced an inadvertent form by killing off weak individuals of useful species of plants, which meant unintentionally selecting only the healthiest beneficial plants and allowing them to breed, in time improving the cultivar. And this is to say nothing of the cultivation of the fauna of these forest-gardens, not only the flora. So when the Europeans came, some of those forest-gardens were cut down, and some were left to begin the slow process of reverting to truly natural forest. But that process takes time, and there has not been nearly enough time since then to have allowed such a change, plus intermittent logging and mistaken forestry practices such as preventing the forests from periodically burning in a healthy way, ensuring massive forest fires out of control some time later, the shit we are now reaping.
So even 'wild' products are not really wild, for they were selected over millennia for favorable qualities by the natives, and the environment the 'wild' product grow in was likewise modified. Furthermore, while it is certainly true that all of these 'wild' products have been altered, humans have changed as well.
There is undisputed evidence for mastery of fire by hominins (with an N) at least half a million years ago. Furthermore, there is also widespread evidence that hominins had mastered fire as far back as 750,000 years ago, it's simply that this evidence is less numerous than the evidence produced half a million years ago. And the evidence shows that while mastery of fire was universal probably by 6 or 7 hundred thousand years ago, the initial experiments stretch back as far as 1.7 million years.
This means that humans mastered fire long before we were indubitably 'human'. I personally have the opinion that Homo species other than sapiens were actually much smarter than we may give them credit for, with rudimentary language as far back as Homo erectus. This was the species which mastered fire, it so happens. Anyway my point is that we (hominins) have been eating cooked food for longer than our species has existed, and considering the large changes between a Homo erectus and one of us Homo sapiens, it would be foolish to assume that the rest of our bodies exhibit such a marked shift and our brains and mental capabilities experienced such a massive shift yet our stomachs would have somehow stayed the same relative to our pre-cooking ancestor species. Evolution works on long time scales, but even so a million years is a hell of a long time, long enough to contain the rise and fall of several distinct hominins, such as Homo erectus, heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis, floresiensis, the Denisovans, and ourselves.
Considering that all these species cooked, and that a million years plus of cooking separates us from the last direct ancestor that lacked fire, why would a raw diet be appropriate for a member of Homo sapiens? It just doesn't make sense; culturally and evolutionarily we are a cooking species. Even our teeth show signs of evolution towards a cooked diet, shrinking our canines as we needed less tooth to eat cooked meat, and our incisors and molars because we needed less shearing force and less crushing force to eat cooked plant matter.
I do personally think a raw diet is silly, but I am not so hostile to it as SA, so would you care to explain what led you to the conclusion that a raw diet was best for you? I say this as a vegetarian myself, so I get the personal choices that can lead to what some may consider an unconventional diet, and get that not everybody has the same 'ideal diet', explaining why I ask why a raw diet is best for *you*. That said, I think vegetarianism is not nearly so radical a departure from our ordinary diet evolutionarily speaking as veganism, to say nothing of raw food veganism. What motivates you, if you are willing to explain?
I'm not arguing health here, I'm no expert, but this works for me and many other raw foodists, thus lies the ground for my questioning, for I am one of the lesserly common detox health people who value psychedelics
Any understanding of the potential extractability of harmala, harmaline, and dmt at 70– 100°F...(potentially with aid of fruit acidity, vinegar etc)? This is a more pertinent question friend lol I'm not hear to ramble afoot my diet, but discuss psychedelics of course!
On topic, I think that cooking a huasca brew is probably not going to conflict with your diet (in my opinion). You're drinking it for its psychoactive properties, and while DMT is resistant to heat to some extent any time you boil a compound or otherwise expose it to high temperatures some will degrade. And since you're not drinking it for nutritional purposes, 'enzyme count' or vitamin/mineral value isn't such a major factor. Finally, boiling it will likely denature some enzymes or destroy some compounds that would actually make you sick or nauseous, instead of providing any value to the body, so to prevent physical symptoms from being stronger I would suggest simply boiling it.
Acidity should help to ensure that all of the alkaloids are in the form of a salt. In this context a salt is a molecule of alkaloid, such as DMT, which is slightly basic as an intrinsic property of the amine, ionically bonding to an acid. Salts dissociate in water, and the acid then contributes to the overall pH of the solution, rather than having the acid and the basic molecule of alkaloid still bonded together ionically swimming in solution. But just as we say that salts are soluble in water where freebases are not, what we are really talking about is that the pH of a solution affects the amount of a basic alkaloid that is protonated relative to how much is not protonated.
When an acid and base meet (according to the Brønsted–Lowry theory of acids and bases), in the simplest terms the acid will protonate the base, forming the conjugate base of the acid and the conjugate acid of the base, speaking for that specific pair of molecules. Whether or not a basic molecule like DMT is protonated will affect its solubility. We refer to a chemical's pKa as the pH at which half the compound will be protonated and half unprotonated. So this will determine the pH necessary for an acid base extraction, or for ensuring that as much of the alkaloid is soluble (or not) in a polar solvent like water. When DMT is protonated it is soluble in water, when it is not it is soluble in nonpolar solvents like naphtha.
It turns out that when the pH of a solution matches the pKa of a compound, half is protonated and half is not as I mentioned. Now, knowing that pH is a logarithmic scale, and running the math, a good rule is that almost all (let's call it 99%) of a compound will be protonated at pH = pKa - 2, and unprotonated at pH = pKa + 2, where pKa is the pKa of that chemical. The pKa of DMT is 8.68.
So in practical terms, this means that if we want the DMT to be unprotonated and soluble in nonpolar solvents, as when using naphtha to extract it from Mimosa hostilis rootbark powder, we want the pH to be pKa + 2, which is 8.68 + 2, which is 10.68, so round up to 11. This for extracting DMT from MHRB powder using naphtha, we put in enough sodium hydroxide (lye) that the pH rises to 11. Now >99% of the DMT will be the unprotonated freebase and soluble in nonpolar solvent, so that we do not leave any behind.
I think you can see where this is going. For it to be almost entirely (>99%) protonated and thus soluble in water for drinking the liquid steeped in the jammer of a tea, we want the pH to be pKa - 2, which is 8.68 - 2, which is 6.68, which we round down to 6. Thus to get pretty much all of the DMT into a tea the ideal pH is 6. Water has a pH of 7, so a little bit of vinegar or like juice should drop the pH sufficiently to ensure that as near to all of the DMT is water-soluble and thus ends up in the tea.
It's worth noting however that water is pH 7 as I mentioned when pure. So even if you didn't add any acid you'd be close to the pH of 6.68 to get a lot of alkaloid. But why not ensure you get that much more? Especially if you're not boiling it, which would break down the plant matter some to expose the DMT within to the water? I say acidify with lime juice or vinegar to be sure since its not going to be cooked.
They drank aya before they had pots to boil the tea in..years ago they would pound the vine in water and drink this..after learning how to fire pots that could boil water they developed modern techniques for making aya. So its not like his idea is a new idea of making aya just a less used one...op there is a reason that the modern tech is preferred now...lol
Well actually pottery was developed no later than 20,000 BC. The oldest pot sherds date from this time period, long before the development of agriculture, and well before the Clovis culture spread into the Americas. There is some evidence which is spotty and heavily contested that indicates the presence of humans in the Americas before the Clovis culture, but this is not conclusive, and in either case it still took millennia until people spread fully into South America. So they most assuredly had pots, and obviously they had fire. And most tellingly they lacked transparent glass-like materials which would be necessary for solar-heating huasca brews.
Thus I would conclude that pre-Columbian cultures in South America that used DMT orally would have boiled the brews in pots instead of trying to heat it with energy from the sun.
