I was looking at websites about eating raw foods and I saw some things that motivated me to write this article. On one website it said that cooking destroys vitamins, minerals and enzymes. On webMD.com, that gets a million visitors a day, it says “The idea is that heating food destroys its nutrients and natural enzymes.” “You’ll probably lose weight on this diet, since many raw foods are low in calories, fat, and sodium, and high in fiber. One study found that a raw foods diet worked for weight loss.”
The 2 main groups of nutrients are vitamins and minerals. So this (heating food destroys its nutrients) would be like saying that people have prostate glands. There are 2 main groups of people, but the above only applies to one group. So what is a mineral. When you look it up, you get the definition that applies to rocks and minerals. A mineral in a food is a substance in a food that is a metal element on the periodic table that people learn about in high school. There are also non-metal elements.
The elements are the basic building blocks of chemicals. So they cannot be destroyed. Even if you blew them up with an atomic bomb. So cooking cannot destroy minerals. Vitamins and enzymes contain many elements and it is easy to break down those combinations and destroy them. Now nuclear fusion like from a hydrogen bomb or what happens in the sun cannot destroy minerals but they can change one mineral into another mineral by fusion. If you boil vegetables in water and throw away the water instead of steaming them, a great deal of minerals can come out of the food into the water where they then get thrown away.
Eating a raw food diet or a mostly raw food diet is good for health. Theories about this are in debate but people with many health problems have cured them with a raw food diet. Let us look at what we know. Except for humans, baboons and Tasmanian devils, all animals eat raw foods. Actually I am kidding about the baboons and Tasmanian devils. Now one thing that people will bring up is how some nutrients are more bioavailable when cooked. What is the most famous one? Lycopene!
Lycopene is a phytochemical or plant medicine in tomatoes. So you hear people say how a study showed that cooked lycopene was more bioavailable than raw lycopene. So if chickens eat tomatoes, they need to learn how to cook. As far as money, a study like this would benefit the companies that make tomato sauce. I do not know if they made up this study or not. But here is what I do know.
The U.S. government was testing the lycopene in watermelon and found that watermelon had more lycopene than tomatoes. But they wanted to know if the lycopene in raw watermelon was as bioavailable as the lycopene in cooked tomatoes. They expected to find this since they knew about the above study but wanted to see by how much.
This was tested by the Agricultural Research Service– the in-house research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jun02/lyco0602.htm They found to their surprise that raw lycopene was just as available as cooked lycopene. So you have probably learned so far that cooking cannot destroy minerals and cooked lycopene is not more bioavailable than raw lycopene. So that is enough to put similar studies in question.
I have an article about 2 studies that show that consuming salt is healthy for you. But they measured their intake of salt by how much salt is in their urine. The article explains why that does not work and why people who eat less sodium have more sodium in their urine. Some people on a raw food diet do not consume salt (it is a rock so it cannot be raw or cooked). Just that alone can extend life for decades. WebMD.com has an article saying that consuming salt is worse for your health than smoking.
There was a webpage about misconceptions about raw food. One was that cooking destroys the enzymes in foods. Then it said that this was absolutely true. So that misconception was true, making it not a misconception. But it then added that it did not matter since the body can produce digestive enzymes. Now I have not heard of this from other people but this happened to me. The idea of enzymes in raw foods is they help you digest the foods. And without them your body may exhaust its ability to produce that enzyme over time. That’s the theory.
So I was eating in a health food restaurant 5 days a week, every week. I would get the same 5 meals every week since they were my 5 most favorite meals there. This restaurant/health food store in Philadelphia was owned by a good friend of mine, Susan Seideman-Brown. I just did a search for her and it has her picture and the massage school that she graduated from. After a year of eating these cooked meals, I no longer liked them any more. Then I would just eat specials that they had. This has happened to me many times with cooked foods but not with raw foods. I know a woman Debbie Pierce (Rose Goddess) that was depressed until she switched to a raw food diet.
So if you have any health problems that you cannot get rid of then maybe you should try a mostly raw diet. One group found that if people eat 85% of their diet raw during the day and then eat 15% of their food at the end of the day as healthy cooked food, it works just as good as a totally raw diet. Many can benefit just by increasing the intake of raw food and decreasing the intake of cooked food. For more information on the benefits of eating raw food see Health Benefits of Eating Raw Food.