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.
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