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Vegetables that NEED to be cooked??

As you all know I’m new to the raw diet and searching high and low, reading everything I can so I begin on the right foot.

I googled “food combining” can came across this site: http://www.bodyecology.com/06/11/16/cook_vegeta…

Here’s an excerpt: “You know you should eat your vegetables – but are they better cooked or raw? Raw vegetables of all kinds are great sources of vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, and fiber. However, the finest vegetables available are of no value to you if you cannot properly digest them – a key issue with some raw vegetables.

Eating raw cruciferous vegetables actually suppresses your thyroid’s hormone production, creating fatigue, coldness in your body and a slowing of your metabolism. Cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, mustard greens, radishes, rutabagas and turnips.

Cabbage and its cousins in the cruciferous vegetable family are nutrient-rich, but unless you cook or ferment them, they could slow down your metabolism.

So, how can you get the benefits of these great cruciferous vegetables without all the negative effects?

When eating cruciferous vegetables, it’s important to cook them to avoid the thyroid-suppressing properties. But what if you are committed to a raw food diet (or you simply want to enjoy them raw)?

Body Ecology’s system of health and healing has a solution for raw foodists who want to eat cabbage, kale and collards

Comments

  • ZoeZoe Raw Newbie

    That may be true, I don’t know, but personally I don’t believe it for one second.

    Consider this:

    Cooking changes food. When we heat food above the human body temperature of 38 degrees, it changes. This heated food effects our health much differently than natural, unchanged foods.

    Prior to 1930, It was believed that whenever we ate, there was an immune system response as if we were poisoned. An immediate rise in white blood cells, by about 300%. White blood cells are our body’s soldiers, they are produced to fight off threats, like poison, trauma or disease. This reaction to eating was called Digestive Leukocytosis and thought to be normal.

    In 1930, Dr Paul Kouchakoff conducted research to compare the effects of cooked food versus raw food. He discovered that Digestive Leukocytosis occurred only when cooked or processed food was eaten. He found that there is no immune system response when we eat our food in it’s natural, unheated, unprocessed state.

    Because of Digestive Leukocytosis, eating cooked food keeps our immune system in a constant state of emergency. Even what we call allergies are just our over burdened immune system literally freaking out when a new irritant is encountered.

    Another immune system response to cooked food is mucus. When cooked food is eaten, our bodies try to protect us from this invasion by creating mucus. This mucus makes a wall between the food and our bodies. The mucus builds up in our guts, causing Mucoid Plaque. This is a rubbery hose which lines the intestines and severely reduces the amount of nutrition we can take in from our food. (Here is a Google Image search showing Mucoid Plaque.)

    After years of cooked food, our immune system literally gets worn out. We become run down, and illness becomes a normal part of life. We think that we are just ageing. We believe we have no choice other than to be sick.

    When we eat Purely Raw foods, our immune system rests and recovers. People who switch to eating only raw foods always experience the same thing. Lifelong problems, conditions and diseases go away, usually within weeks or months.

    People eating Purely Raw have experienced complete reversals of cancers, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, autism, depression, skin disease, etc. The list goes on and on. Our immune system can heal anything, if it’s not continually engaged in a war against cooked food. Our bodies treat cooked food as poison, this of course means, that cooked food is poison.

    When food is heated, the enzymes are also destroyed. Enzymes are the life force in food, the magic elixir of Life. They merge with our bodies and tell us how and where to use the food we eat. It’s the enzymes which tell the vitamin C in the orange to go and become part of our skin. Some believe that enzymes are destroyed by stomach acids, but research shows that enzymes are mainly absorbed in the mouth, before our food gets into the stomach.

    Our body cannot communicate with the food unless the enzymes are there. Raw food contains its own digestive enzymes and literally digests itself inside you. Raw food breaks itself down and goes where it is needed, and all is well.

    Without it’s enzymes, cooked food sits in you like a brick. Your body has to use its own digestive enzymes to deal with the cooked food. Many now believe that humans only have enough digestive enzymes to last them into their 40

  • WinonaWinona Raw Newbie

    Thanks Zoe! Great explanation, as always. Raw food is so powerful.. I’m continually amazed at all the wonderful benefits of eating raw. No wonder I have so much energy!

  • angie207angie207 Raw Master

    If I eat cruciferous veggies along with some kind of fat (as per David Wolfe’s advice in Eating For Beauty), I have absolutely none of the problems I had when eating them plain :) I hear a lot of times that people say we HAVE to cook certain things to get certain nutrients out, but like Zoe, I don’t believe for a minute that we need to cook our food. For example, lycopene from tomatoes. I kept hearing/reading that you can’t get the lycopene from a tomato unless you cook it. I didn’t do it. Then a few months ago I heard on the radio that a one-inch slice of watermelon has as much lycopene as 4 tomatoes! Since watermelon is not something people cook, it shows me that we don’t have to cook our food to be healthy – what a crock! Just eat watermelon for lycopene, and don’t worry about tomatoes :)

  • angie207angie207 Raw Master

    I healed my thyroid by eating high raw, and I regularly eat one to three heads of cauliflower a week, besides the cabbage, kale, & broccoli that I eat less often – all raw!

  • Ya angie I am with you on that. I eat raw cauliflower and radishes all the time and I don’t plan on giving up. I want freedom in my raw diet, not paronoia about every veggie that I eat.

  • Thanks so much for clarifying. This is exactly what I needed!

  • pianissimapianissima Raw Newbie

    cruciferous veggies work really well as “rice” so the food processor is “chewing it” for you, and making it more easily digestible.

    your body and its sensitivities will change as you get more and more raw, so as long as it doesn’t bother you now, i’d say it’s cool to eat.

    also, it’s a little misleading to take “scientific” nutritional advice at face value, because i wonder how “harmful” RAW kale, broccoli etc would be to a person that was healthy and RAW to begin with. get my meaning? i want to see some research done on HEALTHY bodies!

  • angie207angie207 Raw Master

    Interesting point, pianissima! I wonder that a lot, too – scientists perform tests on the average population, & I wonder how skewed the findings are because of how people have been living?

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