The idea that cooking your food is bad for you has never sit well with me. I take issue with the term "living foods" to describe raw foods. In an anthropology class, a fellow student even asked if humans suddenly had to eat more food when they discovered fire and started cooking it, due to it's supposedly inferior nutritional value.
I like potatoes, onions and meat, but not raw. Is it really better not to eat ANY cooked foods? And if so, where do we draw the line between "cooked" and "not cooked"? What about just warming things up a little bit? What about denaturing proteins with lemon juice? What about drying your food in the sunshine?
Moreover, I keep running into citations of research that has apparently shown that cooking tomatoes may actually make them "better" for you, because it makes a carotenoid pigment and essential nutrient called lycopene more available for your body to use. The research also showed that cooking tomatoes lowered their vitamin C content, but since it seems like EVERYTHING I eat contains 200% of my daily recommended vitamin C intake, this might actually be a sacrifice worth making.
To me, this illustrates the actual nature of food preparation: it's chemistry. And incredibly complicated chemistry at that, because it must take into account the chemical and biological properties of both the food and the devourer. In other words, stating that raw food is better for you than cooked food is heavily oversimplified at best; it depends on the food as well as on the person. You can't really say that it makes it more or less healthy, all you can really say is that when you cook food, it changes.
To pursue a truly raw food diet, you must give up most restaurants and spend large amounts of time shopping for fresh produce and rendering it edible. So not only are the health benefits disputable, but it's just plain inconvenient!
Give your body more credit and enjoy your life! Beware of the raw food dogma; there are so many things humans can get away with eating! I have had some amazing raw food dishes, but I like to eat food that tastes good, makes me feel good and is relatively easy to obtain and prepare. Sometimes, that includes raw food.
This is one post I completely agree with. There are MANY foods out there that are inedible or have little nutritional value when they are uncooked. Perfect examples-potatoes, onions, garlic, etc. Cooking is required to convert mainly inedible inulin into digestible carbohydrates. While inulin is becoming more commonly used as a fibre supplement and is being viewed as a part of healthy eating, that doesn't make it a food that people can live on. Just like you can't live on wheat husks.
ReplyDeleteWhile most people eat too much processed food and could benefit from more raw foods in their diets, getting fanatical and going too far the other way is...well...fanatical... :P
Agreed. Sometimes, I must take precedence over my intestinal flora.
ReplyDeleteOne of my roommates was on a raw-food-diet-cleanse for about 3 weeks. She had salmonella about 3 or 4 times from juicing canteloupe rinds to 'get all the vitamins out'.
ReplyDeleteI hope those extra vitamins helped her recover.
ReplyDelete"since... EVERYTHING I eat contains 200% of my daily recommended vitamin C intake, this might actually be a sacrifice worth making."
ReplyDeleteHa ha ha. Well said. Plus I hear the raw food diet gives you terrible gas.
Wow! Fire WAS an important discovery!
ReplyDeleteThanks Alex.