from flickr
Is raw food healthier than cooked food?
It depends on the food. Particular foods shouldn’t be eaten raw.
Most beans, for example, contain mildly toxic lectins that should be leached out by soaking and then boiled out by cooking the beans to tenderness. Ounce for ounce or gram for gram, most orange and yellow vegetables contain higher concentrations of fat-soluble vitamins A and K when cooked than when raw.
Foods that are rich in digestive (lytic) enzymes, however, should be eaten raw.
The food we eat bears only a small proportion of nutrients that are able to assimilate. The rest is food for our intestinal bacteria or eliminated as waste. Digestive enzymes, either produced by the body or consumed in food, are essential to this process. This is not to say you should never eat cooked sprouts, fruit, or fermented foods, but that if you do, your body will have to get its enzymes from another source.
As we get older, our bodies tend to make fewer digestive enzymes. We become more dependent on the enzymes in our food. What happens if we don’t get the digestive enzymes we require? To a certain extent, helpful bacteria in the intestine can pick up the slack. Incompletely digested protein and carbohydrate molecules, however, can trigger a domino effect in which the fragments of incompletely digested sugars arrange into unusual polysaccharides.
It’s absolutely not true that undigested food remains in your digestive tract for years, but the mass of mucoproteins can accumulate to levels that are dangerous to health. If you cannot or do not ever eat raw foods, you should consider taking digestive enzymes with your meals to keep this from happening.
