What’s the buzz about raw foods?
By Susun Weed
Which is better: cooked food or
raw? Taking nothing for granted or gospel, I set out to find out
for myself the answer to this important question.
First, I asked what is meant by
"raw food" and what is meant by "cooked food?"
One cannot simply say that raw is uncooked, for there are raw
food "cookbooks." Nor is cooking simply the application
of heat through boiling, baking or frying, as I soon discovered.
Ripening itself is one form of natural cooking; others are described
later.
Second, I wondered, what did my
ancestors eat? And was it raw or cooked?
Third, I questioned, how do enzymes
in foods affect digestion and health?
And fourth, I attempted to sum
it up: Is there an advantage to cooking?
The answers weren't as simple as
one might suspect, however. The answers to these questions combine
in interesting ways and open up other questions in their answering.
What have people traditionally
eaten?
To begin with the second question: Our most primitive ancestors,
those who lived several million years ago, most likely ate raw
food. The majority of what they ate was animal protein: muscle
meats, organ meats, eggs and insects.
Present day examples of peoples
who primarily eat raw animal protein include the Inuit of the
far North and the Masai of Africa, known for their health and
freedom from disease.
Research done by Dr. Pottenger
in the mid-20th century revealed that raw meat and milk contained
enzymes necessary for digestion. He showed that heat deactivated
their enzymes www.westonaprice.org.
His conclusion was that raw meat, fish, milk and eggs provide
more nutrients and are more easily digested.
This is not true of plant foods,
however. Vegetables and fruits do contain enzymes, if picked fully
ripe, but their enzymes have no function in their own digestion
(although papaya, pineapple and kiwi fruit contain enzymes that
digest meat. An interesting aside: These tropical fruits help
digest and destroy, in the digestive systems of people and animals,
the parasites that are found in those regions and only incidentally
digest other kinds of meat.) Many plant enzymes interfere with
digestion, so our bodies destroy them.
Cooked food was the preference
of most of our ancestors. Archaeologists have found evidence of
fire in sites occupied by hominids as far back as a million years
ago but cannot say exactly when we began to use fire to cook food.
Certainly by about 10,000 years
ago, when cultivation of grains and beans — hard foods which
absolutely require cooking — became widespread, our ancestors
were regularly and routinely cooking their food. Most current
aboriginal people also cook their food; in New Zealand, for instance,
I found the Maori jealously guarding natural hot pools used to
cook their food.
Meat: cooked vs. raw
Is there an advantage to cooking? It depends on how we cook —
or more basically, how we define cooking – and whether we
are eating animals or plants. Animal cells are surrounded by a
membrane. This thin membrane is easily dissolved by digestive
juices, releasing the nutrients stored in the cell. Fast, high-heat
cooking will toughen these membranes, thus slowing digestion and
impairing nutrient uptake.
For an illustration of this, think
of how tough an overcooked piece of meat can become; chewing,
an important part of digestion, is much more difficult. Slow,
low-heat cooking dissolves the membrane, making digestion and
nutrient uptake much easier. If the idea of raw meat turns your
stomach, eat soups and stews instead.
Should you cook plant foods?
Plant cells are surrounded by a wall. This wall is designed to
resist breakage and to protect the stored nutrition in plant cells.
Digestive juices act on the cell walls of plants little, if at
all; take a look in the toilet the day after next time you eat
corn on the cob to see how true this is. Cooking, which can be
expanded to include her sisters freezing, drying, sprouting, fermenting
and preserving in oil, breaks the cell wall and is necessary to
liberate nutrients from plant cells.
Cooked vegetables and fruits, grains
and beans provide more nutrients and are more easily digested
than raw ones.
A Haiku-like verse that could sum
this up is:
Chewing what is raw,
how can one smile?
Muscles of the jaw too tense.
The cooked advantage
A macrobiotic diet, the only vegetarian diet shown to put cancer
in remission, consists of cooked food exclusively. Around the
world, well-cooked meat broths — think chicken soup —
are the food of choice for convalescents.
Cooked plants are far more nourishing
than raw plants, whether we look at vegetables, fruits, nuts,
grains or pulses (beans). Cooking not only breaks the cell wall,
liberating minerals to our bodies, but it actually enhances and
activates many vitamins. This is true especially of the carotenes,
used to make vitamin A, and other antioxidants in plants. Research
found that the longer the corn is cooked and the hotter the temperature,
the greater the amount of antioxidants in the corn.
This also applies to vitamin C.
A baked potato contains far more vitamin C than a raw potato.
And sauerkraut (cabbage cooked by fermentation) contains up to
10 times as much vitamin C as raw cabbage.
When cooking means lost
vitamins
Some vitamins do leach into cooking water. Cooking with little
or no water (for instance, steaming or braising) reduces vitamin
loss in vegetables such as broccoli from 97% to 11%. Note, however,
that the vitamins aren't lost or destroyed, but merely transferred
to the cooking water. Using that water for soup stock or drinking
it ensures that you ingest all the nutrients in a highly absorbable
form.
Transferring nutrients into water,
such as by making nourishing herbal infusions and healing soups,
and then ingesting them is far more effective, in my experience,
than drinking wheat grass juice, green drinks or any kind of nutritional
supplement. It is, in fact, one of the best ways to optimally
nourish oneself that I have found in three decades of paying attention
to health.
Even if some vitamins are lost in cooking, people absorb more
of what is there from cooked foods. Several recent studies measured
vitamin levels in the blood after eating raw and cooked vegetables.
"Subjects who ate cooked veggies absorbed four to five times
more nutrients than those who ate raw ones," reported researchers
at the Institute of Food Research in 2003.
Raw or cooked?
There is no simple answer to the question "raw or cooked?"
But for simplicity’s sake, I say, eat your food cooked.
This is especially the case if you choose to eat a diet high in
whole grains, beans, nuts, vegetables and fruit. That's the way
I eat, so I cook most of my food. But I keep a herd of dairy goats
so I can have raw milk, raw milk cheese and raw milk yogurt. I
do enjoy raw meat and raw fish on occasion but more often slow
cook my goat into barbeque, a special kind of healing "soup"
I learned to make in Texas.
© Susun Weed
Susun Weed has been living the simple
life for more than 30 years as an herbalist, goat keeper, author,
homesteader and feminist. See Susun's complete Wise
Women Herbal Series books. Visit www.susunweed.com
and www.ashtreepublishing.com.
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