I agree. It's ridiculous, childish and pretty pretentious to claim that one of us has found out the optimal ideal diet just because it seems to work and improve our heath after a few months or even years on it.

Things are much much much more complex, unfortunately.

So far raw omnivore fatty meat+ fish+ shellfish+ eggs +  fruit + leafy veggies is working great for me too. Yet I would certainly not claim that this is the only healthy diet for homo sapiens....

Just posting an update, went to the doc (different doc from the last one who diagnosed a UTI)  and explained all my symptoms, he said it could be kidney stones (you were right lex!). I've got a blood test and urine test next week, and getting an ultrasound scan. Still have to get the blood results from the other doc from the last time this happened.
Hopefully i will get to the bottom of this soon...my symptoms have eased alot, i can get by with day to day life though there is still dull pain on my left and back, and my stomach keeps making gurgling sounds, so still not 100% back on my feet . Eating seems to help a bit now as well (whereas before it seemed to worsen it). I've just been eating raw lamb chops and a bit of cooked vegetables (eg mushrooms and butternut squash)

Glad you went for a second opinion.  The statement above leads me to suspect that you might have a kidney infection as well.  Renal stones usually don't cause a dull ache unless you have a very large one (some get to the size of golf balls).  If you lightly hit your lower back with your fist you will feel pain on the side where there is infection.  My recommendation is not to fool around with this.  If you have an infection then take antibiotics.  A kidney infection, if it is not taken care of, could destroy the kidney.

Lex

One thing I find difficult here is that lots of people seem to go raw paleo, before just going paleo, so they seem to attribute the +'s to rawpaleo, when the things they notice they'd get on cooked meat paleo too(ofc, rawpaleo, if done right probably has the potential to be much better than cooked but most people probably wouldn't notice the differences attributed to the meat being raw unless they'd already been for a while on cooked meat). So either they think 'You win some you lose some' and accept the rough with the smooth, losing their problems from grain/legume/dairy/salt intolerances and replacing them with others.. Or they think to go back to their SMD... One reason why it's hard for me to take info from here.

People can't think, and give me balanced answers/responses about things to do with rawpaleo/raw meat, when they only have the SMD to compare it to. They'll come up with all sorts of reasons in their head as to why they have the negative effects, because surely it must be good with the positives they've also experienced... This will cause a sort of defensiveness too.

I am quite confident that rawpaleo, probably almost all meat, with VLC is much better than to have cooked meat. However, if someone doesn't take the step of first going with cooked meat(unless they are 'lucky' enough to get it right straight away) then they will not be able to identify what is due to raw and what is due to more generally 'paleo'. Severe problems being caused from eating the wrong raw animal food, they won't take note of, since to them it's minor compared to what they had with the SMD.

One of the key principles of paleo anyway, is to only eat food which in its' natural state, could be eaten raw. A cashew(nut), for example, although 'fine'(on the face of things) to eat raw in abundance from a plastic packet, would be virtually impossible to obtain edibly, in its' natural state(therefore it should not be assumed that we are suitably adapted to handle all its' constituents). Conversely, meat, in its' most natural state would be perfectly edible raw. However, if there are less-natural methods of raising, 'extracting', carving, storing, delivering etc of the meat, it may not be safe to eat raw; therefore you'd cook it to allow for anything that could've gone wrong. The closer you are to eating an animal which has grown up and lived in an environment which it evolved naturally over a lengthy period of time to exist in, and would've been available to humans as prey, and the closer your methods of killing it and eating it are to how a 'wild-human' would've done it, the less likely anything could go wrong, and the less need there may be for compensatory measures(e.g. cooking).

Is cooking bad? I would say almost certainly, yes. Can some meat be worse to have raw than cooked? Even that I do not know. However, are there things that many raw-meat eaters here do, regards to their consumption of raw meat, which, if they'd first tried cooked, they'd realise weren't right. Probably yes.

Miles,
I went lightly cooked paleo first, then meat only (cooked med rare as that is the way I used to like my meat) as an experiment after reading Steffannson's articles in Harper's linked at the Yahoo RVAF Group, and finally stopped cooking the meat just on the principle that it shouldn't be necessary from an evolutionary point of view.

The honest truth is, I believe that I got 95%+ of the health benefits just by converting from SAD (high in grains and dairy), to lightly cooked Paleo (eating mostly meat but also a salad every day and occasionally a piece of fruit).  I now perfer my meat raw (or extra rare when it must be cooked as when eating out), so that is the way I will probably continue to eat it.  I may add a small salad or a bit of fruit to my diet in the future as I don't think there is any magic in being totally ZC.  I also don't think that there is a problem lightly cooking most foods as long as they are foods we evolved to eat.  Eating inappropriate foods is our bigest problem.  Get rid of those and you're likely to resolve a whole host of health issues.  Eating most foods raw would just be adding a bit of icing to the cake (so to speak ) - probably not critical for most people, but the crowning glory for the purists among us.

The bottom line is that lightly cooked paleo seems to be no better or worse than raw paleo (or ZC for that matter).  At least that has been my experience.

Lex