Changing eating habits

In response to various nudges including looking into achieving optimum calcium/magnesium absorption (for my 2 yr old's teeth), wanting to reduce/stop my refined sugar cravings/intake, and thinking about how fast human eating has changed over relatively recent history compared to how slow the process of evolution/digestive adaptation is, I've been reading about the Raw Food Diet (primariy eating fruit) and I've decided to try it in the mornings and see how it goes, so watch this space!

It would be too expensive and impractical with my family to take it on 24/7 but, as fruit does you much more good on an empty stomach, it makes sense to have it for breakfast and morning snacks (cooked food/protein takes longer to digest than fruit so if it's in your system before the fruit then the fruit has to sit in the stomach longer than it should and ends up fermenting which has repercussions).

Minerals-wise I've recently increased our dairy intake significantly for the sake of my 2 yr old's teeth but I've now learnt that the calcium in dairy is there because of the calcium in the plants the cows eat, and that's the better source - it's more bioavailable and comes with magnesium (arguably more important for bones and teeth than calcium) as well as vitamin D (needed for absorption of calcium and from food as well as sunlight).

I'm obviously just using the Raw Food Diet as inspiration, but this probably helps explain some of my thought on it:

"I suspect that as a species, there probably is a fairly uniform diet that will produce optimal health for most people. That certainly seems to be the case for other animal species. You don’t see other animals debating what they should eat. Human beings, however, have strayed quite a bit from a natural diet. Other species don’t cook their food, or add salt [and] sugar... These changes affect our physiology and taste buds. Human beings aren’t evolving to thrive on harmful substances just because we consume a lot of them; at best we merely adapt to tolerate them more easily. Our bodies do the best they can before finally succumbing to heart disease, cancer, etc.

It seems unlikely to me that some human beings were evolved to thrive on certain foods while some weren’t. I don’t doubt that we vary in our ability to ingest a wide variety of edible matter. But I’m more interested in what fundamental diet we can all thrive on, not merely survive on. Just because we can tolerate a food doesn’t mean we should. We can drink large quantities of alcohol. We can eat cooked food. We can eat goat’s testicles if we want. But just because we can eat something doesn’t mean we should.

...From what I’ve seen, the evidence strongly indicates that human beings were meant to thrive on a diet of raw fruit, some vegetables (especially greens), and possibly some nuts and seeds, and that’s all."