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i think it depends on what kind of food… many foods that are eaten cooked are just unhealthy period. for the most part i think that if you wouldn’t be able to eat something raw, then it’s bad for you. also, often the methods of cooking themselves are very unhealthy, particularly using cooked oils. in general, i think that in the raw vs. cooked equation, raw is always OPTIMAL. i just can’t see anything unhealthy about lightly steamed veggies, for example, but i think that the raw version would be a more nutritious choice. raw food is generally more nutritious and digests more efficiently and quickly, thereby causing less stress to the digestive system and less build up in the colon. but i don’t exactly think that steamed veggies cause cancer :)
i think this is a little like the chicken and the egg. i have heard both, and I am just not sure. there are people who get sick from eating cooked food, so I would say for them that cooked food is not good. but eating lots of raw and a small amount of cooked seems to benefit people if the cooked is healthy whole foods. so i think it depends on the person.
I agree with dorian don’t! And really it’s easier, you dont have to cook (smile)
Cooked foods are bad for you. Your body treats cooked food as if it is a toxin. Check out this article on my husband and I’s website for more information: http://purelyraw.com/cooking.htm
Apart from the hard facts that are in that article, my personal experience shows me that cooked food is bad for me. I am 100% raw, during the first couple of years I would ‘cheat’ and have some cooked food occaisionally. Whenever I did quite a few things happened to me. One was that my mouth would get blisteres, my nose would run, my mood would shift and I would feel confused, depressed and irritable, my skin would itch and flake off, my legs would cramp which was soo painful and my face and body would puff up and get all swollen. So observing the difference between eating cooked and raw over the years has really shown me how much damage cooked food does to me.
I haven’t eaten any cooked food at all for a long time now. The way I feel is indescribable really, my mood, my body, everything is in amazing condition. I weighed myself the other day and I weigh the same as I did when I was cooked, but I am 3 dress sizes smaller, isn’t that funny?!
Cooked foods are NOT bad for you. Of course, there are foods that are cooked in an unhealthy way and also most all processed foods are not good but there are many veggies that are actually more nutritious when cooked.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who are very negatively affected by cooked food but they’re rare. People are badly affected by food that has become the norm in this day and age. Eating raw food is fighting the affect and setting a new standard for our culture. It’s about health awareness and learning about your body and how it works.
As for me, I work a whole lot better on raw. My Mom functions horribly on raw. She doesn’t eat processed foods or anything high in fat but her veggies have to be cooked in order for her body to function right. It’s all about your metobolic type and how your body works.
In my opinion cooked foods are not bad for you if they are cooked correctly – frying in fat or butter is not an optimal way to eat your vegetables! I don’t think Raw should be treated like a religious affair, where you are going to die if you eat something cooked. It is a way of eating that you should adjust to suit your body (unless you are doing it for health reasons like helping cancer, etc.), and if that means eating half and half then that’s better than none at all!
Personally I don’t eat everything raw, because I like sometimes to have some beans (which have extraordinary health properties when properly prepared), and some cooked grains (although I try to vary from the norm of using only wheat). However I NEVER eat processed food – I take the time to do everything myself when it comes to cooked stuff (including breads, frozen meals, salad dressings, etc.) and before I ate any raw I saw a difference just in doing that! But since I now eat at least half of my day’s calories with raw food (which is a lot of food because it’s a lot of veggies!), it’s amazing the differences. I used have sick-building syndrome, and now even being in a building all day for 4 days a week at work I have no issues with my athsma (which has also gone) and my skin is full of color! My skin is also not as dry now that I eat raw-greens all the time, and I feel a lot more energetic!
I have also been ‘sneaking’ more raw foods into my mom’s diet while I help her lose weight (which we have a hard time with since she’s got Hypo-thyroidism). Since she’s been eating all raw snacks and at least some of each meal raw, she has lost at least 5 lbs in the last 2 weeks and her Thyroid (I guess from the anti-inflammatory stuff in all the fruit and veg.) hasn’t acted up at all! She actually felt good enough to do chores and even run errands in town! You’d have to understand thyroid disease – it’s crazy.
Anyway I kindof went off there a little, but I hope you DO start eating more raw – I have seen differences I never thought were possible since I have done what little I have.
Khaas Ladki-that is all totally awesome! I’m in it for similar reasons. I had a variety of health issues and they’re now all almost entirely disappeared. It’s been amazing but I don’t want raw food ever to get in the way with how I interact with people. I want them to see the affects without me having to preach it and I don’t want to judge them because they choose cooked. We’re all different and raw food is amazing for me but not everyone can handle it.
I know many extremely healthy, energetic, and happy people who eat a lot of cooked food. That’s what this is all about right? Being happy and healthy?
Right on! :D
I believe Zoe is on to something. But it can be hard for some people to accept. (no offense intended to anyone who might be sensitive about this).
And please note that I’m not talking about ‘ability’ here with this next bit-- But it’s interesting that mankind is the only species on the planet that eats cooked food
And we are the only species that not only drinks milk past infancy, into and through adulthood, but we drink it from an entirely different species!!! Where is the logic in that? And why has it been chosen to be from Cows & Goats? Why not Elephants & Horses? It makes as much (non)sense to me.
After all – just because a person can do something does not necessarily mean that they ought to.
In Mongolia it is horses! I guess we don’t use it here because we use our horses for other things? My sister and I milked our mare once after she had her foal and tasted it… it wasn’t all that great. Xp
I think we eat cooked food because God made us to be able to eat it; at least some of the time. We are also the only species on the planet who can think for ourselves and take care of ourselves (when we do it right). God has blessed us with the care of all other creatures on this planet, therefore we will be different from them in some, if not a lot of ways! Unfortunately we need to learn to do it correctly (we being the majority), and to take care of ourselves as well.
I am with Zoe on this one. I try to stay 100% at every meal because right when you start chewing cooked foods your immune system reactes and starts sending white blood cells to deal with the toxins it percieves. It is my opinion that it makes me tired and taxes my body. I have a lot of healing to do so why would I make that choice? To me it would be counter-productive to my goals. I will also say that I sometimes will eat a raw veggie meal once a week but I try to do that in one meal and not “mix it up” in my other meals because of this reason. If I insist on doing something that I know is not that great for me I want it to be in one shot and then get back to healing, cleansing mode the rest of the week. I know there are a lot of people who look healthy and happy eating cooked food but it is my opinion that they will eventually pay the piper.
I totally agree with Khaas. We were created to be completely different from other animals. Because we can think for ourselves we can make the choices on what we eat and it’s up to us to find things that work for our bodies. Many people take this way to lightly and eat crap but that doesn’t mean that anything cooked is crap.
Yes, we may have adapted to eat cooked food, but not necessarily for the best…
http://www.rawpaleo.com/adventCook.html
”’adaptation to cooked foods’
Another issue to consider with the history of cooking is the length of time needed for the body to adapt to it. Some geneticists think that it takes circa 1 million years for a particular species to fully adapt, on an evolutionary level, to an entirely new diet (eg: from a Fruitarian to a largely meat-based one) and this view is reflected in our own ancestral, pre-human dietary past where extreme dietary-changes were pretty slow, taking many millions of years in some cases.[5]
Given that cooked food involves a much more drastic change to one’s diet than simply switching from one type of raw food to another – such as fruit to meat – it’s obviously going to take a much longer time to adapt to it, by comparison. Chemical alterations caused by cooking are many, and many of them are known to be harmful (view the many cooked food articles on this site http://www.rawpaleo.com/adventCook.html for details). Plus, given that no other animal has ever gone in for cooking its own food, we don’t really know whether any species can ever fully adapt in all ways to such a food.
Indeed, it has been stated that the advent of cooking also led to us having certain unique dental problems, such as malocclusion, due to eating softer cooked foods; whereas other species seem to be unaffected by these particular problems, due to having a more natural, raw diet.[6] Switching to the consumption of foods which were softer than before, possibly caused human jaws to become smaller on average, due to lack of natural selection for tougher jaws; but the number of teeth remained the same, thus explaining why a number of humans often need to have their wisdom teeth removed. Some predict that, eventually, human teeth, due to lack of natural selection and a lack of a harder, uncooked, unprocessed diet, might eventually disappear altogether, from our descendants![7]...”
I doubt it took a million years but of course we did have to adapt to it. However, because we cooked food we were able to get find many nutritious things that you can’t eat raw(of course your argument is that we shouldn’t eat them if they couldn’t be eaten raw).
Also, in times of disease it probably helped people keep safe since cooking disinfects.
Cooked food is harmful. I recommend reading the science behind cooked food, instead of guessing or assuming that it’s safe. The science behind raw food, backed up with clinical trials run by conventional scientists (not raw foodists) is in this book:
Enzyme Nutrition by Dr. Howell
Read this excerpt from the book online
Cooked food causes enlarged pancreas, enlarged heart, leukocytes responding to the toxins. This book is the best description of enzyme activity that i’ve read to date. It is worth the $8 to own a copy – you’ll read it over and over!
I believe the greatest evil of our time is not COOKED FOOD, but PROCESSED, INDUSTRIALIZED FOOD. Our forefathers not so long ago thrived on quite a lot of cooked food, but it was qualitatively far superior. The rawer we stay the better for most people, and the less cooked the better, but good common sense is the key. It would also help to have a government that had a clue!!
yeah, I took a few tests to see what metobolic type I am and I actually have deficiencies directly related to enzymes so I need alot more than some people. That may be why I immediately felt a complete change when I went raw. I didn’t have a painful detox stage and I think that may be because my needs were fulfilled and the rest is history. I adore raw food because it saved me.
carmentina! I guess we posted at the same time. I totally agree with that! Our processed food is the bane of the age. Raw food may be the best but cooked food isn’t the worst for sure.
Carmentina I totally agree with you!
To counter my own argument, here’s a quote from Matt Monarch’s Blog… READ THE POST HERE “Did you know that within one hour after you pick a head of lettuce out of the ground, more than half the enzymes are gone? Now imagine that same organic lettuce being stored, shipped in a truck, stored again and placed on the store shelves. How many enzymes do you think would be left in that?
The number one benefit for us of eating a 100% Raw Food Diet is: you are eliminating all the processed foods that are DAMAGING to the body. For people eating a ‘Standard American Diet’, you can literally heal and get better just by eating dead rats and eliminating everything else from your diet. You would heal because you have eliminated refined sugar and processed starches from your diet.
Eating enzyme-rich raw foods is not the main reason why people heal and regenerate their bodies. They heal because they are leaving out all the damaging foods.”
Y’all are right on with the assessment that industrialized/processed/GMO “foods” are the root of all dietary evil. How we apply the icing to our particular nutritional cake (mine happens to be raw vegan and LOW glycemic) is a privilege that is only as sound as our access to whole, unprocessed, organic foods. Whatever natural foods diet one adopts, removing the blatantly toxic preservatives, sweeteners, colorings, stimulants etc. gives immediate and profound benefit.
10 years ago if I were to say “cooked food makes me feel like crap” it was probably not Whole, Organic, lightly steamed veggies and brow rice I was taking about, but rather some garbage that I binged on while falling off the raw food wagon. Probably consumed while feeling guilty and telling myself “This food is so bad for me, I’m a failure for not staying raw.” No food can be good for you once you have convinced yourself that it is poison.
Orthorexia is a real problem in the raw food world. When beginning on a new nutritional path, I think it is important to familiarize oneself with the signs of unhealthful dietary obsession. Check out; http://www.orthorexia.com/ and http://www.beyondveg.com/
There is a lot more nutritional common sense around now than there was in the 90’s, but being Raw is still such a beautifully simple idea, it can be easy to forget that we eat to feel awesome, not in to fulfill a quixotic nutritional dream.
All The Best to all of you! Now I’m going to go juice some local parsley and make raw tacos!
Amen Timothy. This is such a great discussion.
Orthorexia is definitely a big deal. I think it’s safe to say that any over obsession in any area of diet is dangerous. I have never had a problem with an eating disorder but there have been so many moments in my life where I was so desperate for something that when I felt down I could have gone to extremes. That was just a taste and it scared the heck out of me. I’m now much more focused on nutrition and health rather than obsessing over weight etc. Fortunately those things all fall into place and now I”m at my ideal weight and feeling great.
Raw Tacos sound amazing right now.