[IamConservative]

If you eat in a manner consistent with daily energy requirements, don't limit yourself to a single macronutrient (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats

Fair to say in your opinion that the typical American diet has too many macronutrients and not enough micronutrients? That's what I see wrong with Paula Deen's cooking. 1) most everything is cooked, 2) too much macronutrient, i.e. calorie dense food. Humans are the only species that cooks their food.

[aruanan]

Fair to say in your opinion that the typical American diet has too many macronutrients and not enough micronutrients? That's what I see wrong with Paula Deen's cooking. 1) most everything is cooked, 2) too much macronutrient, i.e. calorie dense food. Humans are the only species that cooks their food.

If you eat a varied diet that includes meat, you will get all the micronutrients (minerals and vitamins) that you need to prevent deficiency diseases (there are other uses for them that are alleged but not as definitively demonstrated as their role in deficiency disease), though women usually need more calcium than they get in their diets and most people in a modern, heavily clothed, spend-most-time-indoors-or-in-car society need more vitamin D than they typically synthesize. Vitamins are not usually destroyed by cooking, though you could lose some in water that plants are cooked in. Minerals are not destroyed by cooking.

As far as calories go, the number one requirement for human life is gross kilocalories of food energy and water. Without micronutrients it can take many months to decades to develop a deficiency disease (and this is usually in the context of a diet relying on a single macronutrient such as pellagra from living off an almost exclusive corn meal diet throughout winter months), without macronutrients you'll start to weaken within a day or so, become seriously impaired within a couple weaks, and die within a few months (unless you were gigantically obese or extremely heavily muscled to begin with). Without water, of course, you'll die in a matter of weeks.

Humans are also one of the longest lived mammals on earth. Most mammals have a heartbeat/longevity/size ratio that is fairly well fixed. You reach the end of your alloted heartbeats, unless you're taken out by a scavenger or accident or disease first, and you die. Human life span vastly exceeds this. It probably has a lot to do with agriculture making a lot of food available and cooking and food prep techniques that 1. makes nutrients in food more easily available, 2. kills parasites and fungus, 3. can help remove substances from raw sources that would otherwise harm or impair health.