I only got really sick once or twice. Once from meat and once from milk. The meat, I should say, was rotten, not just raw. That was also a long time ago. I should also say that raw food can never poison anyone. People poison themselves and thus give bacteria and/or parasites a fine place to thrive and multiply(bacteria/parasites thrive in sugar filled/toxic environment). Ultimately though, they are life's little janitors and are here for our benefit. The idea of good and bad bacteria is one that I don't, and most raw omnis, I would say, don't support...rather bacteria that do or do not have the ability to reproduce and thrive in your body as it is now.
I can best explain it with the guns vs people argument, in who/what it is that kills people. Well if you want to get super technical bullets kill people, but nobody goes around blaming bullets for murders. The truth is, if the gun and the person weren't there then the other person would never have been shot. It's the same with bacteria. They are the bullets. The last thing the person touches before they get sick. But had the person not provided them a bacteria/parasite garden of eden to live in, there would have been no problem. Now, I can eat old, smelly, brown, even somewhat rotting meat with no problem, along with mouldy fruits as well.
The benefit to doing it is eating food that is:
1. Not laced with by-products from the chemical change that occurs when food is burned(120 degrees and up)
2. Recognized as the food it is, rather than a mutilated form of the food it was, making it near if not 100% assimilated vs the cooked that is often discarded or even, at times(depending on how cooked it is), engulfed by white blood cells as a foreign invader(I remember that from a source I cited a while back on a paper I wrote).
