It is quite erroneous to suggest  that a zero-carb/limited protein diet, whether raw or cooked,  has a low palatibility. It all depends on the individual. Sure, there are some zero-carbers  who  will just eat  100%  grainfed muscle-meats and nothing else, and grainfed meats are notoriously poor in taste, so that sort of ZC diet will have a low palatability. But then there are those zero-carbers who either eat their meats raw or only very lightly seared on the outside  partly for taste reasons, and then there are other zero-carbers who will incorporate a variety of raw wild game, raw wildcaught seafood or organ-meats, all of which have a high palatability.
I recall reading one article which stated that supermarkets routinely add casein(derived from milk) and gluten as preservatives  to their preprocessed  foods and processed sauces, precisely because they know that grains and dairy are addictive due to their opioid content. Plus, since cooking creates addictive opioids  as well, the very  nature of precooked foods makes them even more addictive.

And, I do wish to make clear that I do NOT actually  think that cooking  "dramatically increases the palatability of most foods". On the contrary, most rawpalaeodieters report that they increasingly find  over years, that, if they ever revert to cooked foods, they find that the taste of cooked foods appears more and more bland, tasteless, dry  and "burnt". This  implies that the enthusiasm for cooked foods among cooked-food-dieters  re taste has partly to do with addictive opioids present in cooked foods, and years of habit eating such cooked foods, nothing more. I do concede, however, that cooking does remove the antinutrients a lot from some  non-palaeo food like grains, so likely increases the palatability of those very non-palaeo foods.Geoffrey Purcell.





> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2014 09:19:01 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Intro; now: one size fits all
> To: [log in to unmask]


> 
> This is a very interesting theory, in relation to paleo. For example, Jim, your zero carb, limited protein (ZCLP) diet is a very low-palatability diet. It is monotonous and, while a certain amount of fat makes foods more palatable, there is a point beyond which it is cloying and reduces palatability. By the same token, people have lost weight and improved many health markers by eating nothing but potatoes. The trick is to eat just the potatoes, without butter or other toppings to make them interesting. Obviously the potatoes are a carbohydrate bomb, but there's evidence that the diet works. Potatoes without toppings are monotonous and bland . 
> 
> On this list and on low-carb sites we often say that carbs are "addictive." Maybe we attribute that to the opioid peptides in gluten. But it's also true that in my lifetime the presentation of carbs has changed a lot. Restaurants seldom serve their cheap starches in a simple format anymore. They tart them up with carefully crafted sauces and toppings designed by "food scientists" to be hyperpalatable. When I was a kid, if we ate spaghetti at home, we had some crappy bland sauce from a jar or can with it; it was nothing special. Today the supermarket sauces available are in a whole different league. There are vodka sauces, arrabiata, diavolo, etc., and many of them are really good. The essence of the food reward theory is that we are often overstimulated by the foods we eat , and that's what's causing trouble. 
> 
> Part of the secret of paleo may be that, done right, it is a return to simplicity. Eat whole foods. Don't tart them up. If this is so--and I think there's still a lot we don't know--it may be that the things we argue about most on this list, such as which foods could have been eaten in which human habitats and when cooking started, may be less important than whether we are overstimulating ourselves with whatever we end up eating. Geoffrey Purcell will point out that cooking itself dramatically increases the palatability of most foods, and he will be correct. 
> 
> Well, I'm rambling. 
> 
> Todd