Anyone else spend any time thinking about this? Normally, I'm the first guy in line to make fun of anything remotely new-agey, hippy, whatever... But this kind of makes sense to me.
The main benefits of cooking food, as I understand it, are to render possibly unsafe food safer and to make tough foods easier to digest, thus giving you more bang for your buck. That's awesome.... If you're living in a time and place where getting every last bit of calorie content out of every last bit of food you eat is vital. If you lose a few vitamins, so be it.
Well, we live in a time where the safe food is pretty easy to get in quantity (for some of us) and where we actually have to think about not eating too much (say what you want retro-grouches but that's a pretty awesome problem to have). Doesn't it make sense to maybe give up the extra stuff needed for growth you get when you cook food for the extra over all health benefits you get when you don't? At least some of the time? I'm not going to give up cooked grains or cooked meat (or raw meat) ever, but I think working towards a goal of having at least half of the food I eat on any given day be raw, or at least not processed, can't possibly be a bad thing.
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3 comments:
Cooking food also renders more of the micro & marconutrients bio-available. Meaning: you might not get everything you need with uncooked food (more bang, as you say).
One hypothesis as to why we humans were able to evolve so fast, so well, is that we started cooking our food and getting more out of it. So, eating raw then to loose weight maybe more akin to a gastric band or one of those fancy fat-absorbing blockers people take that give them runny poo. These two groups of dieters also run a risk of serious vitamin deficiency.
There have been reports of increased food poisoning risk with raw food as the temperature at which foods are permitted (around 120 or so) are prime temperatures for breeding bacteria.
The second part of your thought - limiting processed food - is likely to have the greater impact. A cooked carrot, a raw carrot, either one is better than a snickers bar. At least from a nutritional standpoint.
'k not to harp: but another claim by the raw foodies is you get more nutrients from your food by eating them raw - that cooking destroys vital enzymes. well, enzymes are made of protein, guess what happens in your stomach & intestines: proteins are chopped up into little pieces called peptides and amino acids and are then absorbed to be used as fuel or to rebuild proteins. So you're not gonna get a boost of, say, DNA repair enzymes to prevent cancer by not cooking your food. However you may be hindering your normal DNA repair processes by making cofactors and vitamins less bio-available.
Take grapes, for example. Hundreds of compounds in the skins serve as antioxidants and possible cofactors important for longevity. Would you rather eat a handful of grapes and get some of the good stuff or drink a glass of wine and get much, much more. OK, fermentation is not technically cooking but it's close!
Guess i don't feel very neutral on this topic.
Now that my grapes are ripe, I am firmly in favor of eating grapes AND drinking wine. As always, thanks for the science Ms. A. You = rock.
Also bio-available is a funny word.
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