I would like to address the comment made on your last blog, "Food Fight 3 - The Weigh In," where the reader made the following statement:
Most of us accept cooked food as the normal means of supplying the body with nutrients. We do not realize the living cells of our bodies don't take nourishment from dead ingredients found in cooked foods. After eating a complete meal our stomachs are full but we still haven't given the body any nourishment and we are slowly starving the body's cells.
I would like to know what evidence they found to substantiate that remark. Man has been eating cooked food since the beginning of time and I don't think “cooked food” serves to breakdown the body. Yes raw foods are good but that doesn’t mean that cooked foods are not.
Most warm blooded animals have a diet of all raw food yet they still get sick or die from disease. Some foods have to be cooked like rhubarb, kidney beans, fish. Heat brings energy to foods such as these. See Idealism vs. Realism in Raw Foods.
A brief thought was added to this conversation last week. This is the lengthier reply.
I understood the reader to mean “cooking” in the sense of improper cooking. At any rate, it's clear heat can help make some foods edible. Some nutrients can't stand the heat. Others can survive longer. No matter what, too much heat is something to avoid when cooking anything. The more alive plant food is when we eat it, the more alive we will be. This tells me if I am seeking health via nutrition, home gardening will have a great impact. This is not necessarily scientific, it's a spiritual awareness with the natural order.
I am becoming more mindful of not cooking food to death. Improper cooking does lower the nutritional value of food. This improper cooking is not only caused by the amount of heat but the duration. Other things that affect the nutrient content of food whether they are being cooked or not is water, air, temperature and every step from growing to processing to transportation and storage. So even if food in supermarkets is barely alive and contains low nutrition, why kill it the rest of the way by being unaware of the potential consequences of improper cooking?
Yes there are some foods that must be cooked. Beyond those, it takes a lot of faith in man's ability to believe cooking food that can be eaten uncooked brings about equal or greater nutritional value. In general, I do not have that kind of faith in man's ability to trump the Creator on something so critical and basic to life such as nutrients in food. I've read of a small number of exceptions but more often than not, uncooked is better.
A frequent misconception is a meal must involve cooking when actually a meal is simply about preparing food for consumption. A home-prepared meal is what I'm talking about. This perspective partially alleviates the pressure and mystic surrounding meals that involves magnificent recipes, magically combining ingredients, heating devices and a magician's hat. It's a lot simpler to bring together foods for a meal when the items don't have to be cooked together.
Preparing food is instinctual, innate and spiritual. Children will prove this untaught, thus Creator-given, ability by combining things (without cooking) parents have not considered. Parents tend to overteach these instincts out of children the same way they tend to overcook the nutrients out of food.
I see raw food versus cooked food as part of the individual refining process we must work through as we retrain our eating habits. Healthy lifestyle improvements will often require looking further and further into things, not just on the internet but looking within ourselves and to spiritual guidance.
Food preparation decisions should be made on an item by item basis. I will continue to eat raw foods and cooked foods. To cook or not to cook is more like an exhibition fight where the winner has been predetermined. The main question for me is what must I eat or not eat? After that I consider what to cook, how to cook it and what cooked/uncooked balance works best for the health I'm trying to achieve. For some, Natural v Cooked is at the top of the fight card, so read the answer someone else gave.
Better Nutrition. Less worries. Health to all. Life to all.
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