Raw vs. Cooked: Do You Believe Dr. Fuhrman's Take? What's Your Stance?
This is from Joel Fuhrman M.D., a board–certified family physician who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods:
Raw vs. Cooked?
Certainly, there are benefits to consuming plenty of raw fruits and vegetables. These foods supply us with high nutrient levels and are generally low in calories too. Eating lots of raw foods is a key feature of an anti-cancer diet style and a long life. But are there advantages to eating a diet of all raw foods and excluding all cooked foods? The answer is a resounding “No”. In fact, eating an exclusively raw-food diet is a disadvantage. Excluding all steamed vegetables and vegetable soups from your diet narrows your nutrient diversity and has a tendency to reduce the percentage of calories from vegetables in favor of nuts and fruits which are lower in nutrients per calorie.
Raw vegetables are dramatically low in calories and we probably only absorb about 50 calories a pound from raw vegetables. Our caloric needs cannot be met on a raw food diet without consuming large amounts of fruits, avocado, nuts and seeds. This may be an adequate diet for some people, but in my 15 years of medical practice catering to the community of natural food enthusiasts, raw foodists and natural hygienists, I have seen many people who weakened their health on such raw food, vegan diets. Frequent fungal skin and nail infections, poor dentition, hair loss and muscular wasting are common on such fruit-based diets.
Unfortunately, sloppy science prevails in the raw-food movement. Raw food advocates mistakenly conclude that since many cooked foods are not healthy for us, then all cooked foods are bad. This is not true.
The idea that stirs the most enthusiasm for this diet is the contention that cooking both destroys about fifty percent of the nutrients in food, and destroys all or most of the life promoting enzymes. It is true that when food is baked at high temperatures—and especially when it is fried or barbecued—toxic compounds are formed and most important nutrients are lost. Many vitamins are water-soluble, and a significant percent can be lost with cooking, especially overcooking. Similarly, many plant enzymes function as phytochemical nutrients in our body and are useful to maximize health. They, too, can be destroyed by overcooking. However, we cannot paint with this brush of negativity over every form of cooking.
Only small amounts of nutrients are lost with conservative cooking like making a soup, but many more nutrients are made more absorbable. These nutrients would have been lost if those vegetables had been consumed raw. When we heat, soften and moisturize the vegetables and beans we dramatically increase the potential digestibility and absorption of many beneficial and nutritious compounds. We also increase the plant proteins in the diet, especially important for those eating a plant-based diet with limited or no animal products.
In many cases, cooking actually destroys some of the harmful anti-nutrients that bind minerals in the gut and interfere with the utilization of nutrients. Destruction of these anti-nutrients increases absorption. Steaming vegetables and making vegetable soups breaks down cellulose and alters the plants’ cell structures so that fewer of your own enzymes are needed to digest the food, not more. On the other hand, the roasting of nuts and the baking of cereals does reduce availability and absorbability of protein.
When food is steamed or made into a soup, the temperature is fixed at 100 degrees Celsius or 212 Fahrenheit—the temperature of boiling water. This moisture-based cooking prevents food from browning and forming toxic compounds. Acrylamides, the most generally recognized of the heat-created toxins, are not formed with boiling or steaming. They are formed only with dry cooking. Most essential nutrients in vegetables are made more absorbable after being cooked in a soup and water-soluble nutrients are not lost because we eat the liquid portion of the soup too.
Recent studies confirm that the body absorbs much more of the beneficial anti-cancer compounds (carotenoids and phytochemicals—especially lutein and lycopene) from cooked vegetables compared with raw. Scientists speculate that the increase in absorption of antioxidants after cooking may be attributed to the destruction of the cell matrix (connective bands) to which the valuable compounds are bound.
Another fallacy promoted in the raw food movement and on the web is that the fragile heat-sensitive enzymes contained in the plants we eat catalyze chemical reactions that occur in humans and aid in digestion of the food. This is not true. Plant foods do not supply enzymes that aid in their digestion when consumed by animals. Our body supplies exactly the precise amount of enzymes needed for digestion; we are not ill equipped to digest normal food. The plant enzymes are broken down into simpler molecules by our own powerful digestive juices and even those that are absorbed as peptide size pieces (or with some biologic function) do not function to catalyze human functions. So it is not true that eating raw food demands less enzyme production by your body. A healthy body produces the precise amount of enzymes needed to digest the ingested food appropriately and the enzymes our body uses for other processes are unique to our human needs and are not present in plants. We make what we need from the proper materials.
In conclusion, eating lots of raw foods is a feature of a healthy diet. I always encourage people to eat more raw food. One of my common statements is—the salad is the main dish. Raw food is necessary for digestive efficiency, proper peristalsis and normal bowel function. Certain foods, especially fruit, avocado and nuts undergo significant change with cooking and are best eaten raw. Baking, frying, barbecuing and other high heat cooking methods that brown and damage food form acrylamides, which are carcinogenic. Browning and other high heat cooking methods should be avoided. Cooking techniques like steaming vegetables, stewing foods in a pressure cooker and soup making, do not have these drawbacks. They do not brown foods or form acrylamides.
Eating raw food is necessary for good health and is an important feature of a healthy diet. But that does not mean that one’s entire diet has to be raw to be in excellent health. It also does not mean eating an all raw diet is the healthiest way to eat. It is healthier to expand your nutrient density, your absorption of plant protein and your nutrient diversity with the inclusion of some conservatively cooked food in your diet.
Link LB ; Potter JD. Raw versus cooked vegetables and cancer risk.
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2004; 13(9):1422-35.
Ismail A ; Lee WY. Influence of cooking practice on antioxidant properties and phenolic content of selected vegetables. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2004; 13(Suppl):S162.
Tags: cooked, eating, health, high, percentage, raw, soups, steamed, wellness
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by AwesomeUniverse!!! on -
David wolfe was talking about being grounded and how it can make bones stronger, cure arthritis, and keep teeth from having plaque. The calcium forming nano bacteria can't form when you are grounded.. as in barefoot a lot.
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Permalink Reply by VEGAN SEALS on -
we are energy (molecules) so what he says makes sense but I don't think that is the only thing that is causing problems and that is the cure. Lot may be weight issues, inflammatory foods and so on... oh and of course lack of exercise.
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Permalink Reply by Debbie Took on
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Mellifera, I've read various quotes from Wrangham (who describes raw foodists as 'faddists'), none of which I found convincing, or motivated me to read the book.
For example, according to a report in The Economist Feb 2009, Wrangham says that 'without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body's energy) can't keep running.'
(Somehow, we seem to be managing...)
Has he been misquoted? Even if this is taken out of context, it seems a rather strange statement to make.
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PS I've just done some googling, and this is probably the source I got it from:
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_i...
The sentence isn't actually surrounded by quotes, but the report gives the impression Wrangham said it. If the Economist article is misleading, someone please let me know.
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Permalink Reply by John Coleman on -
As you correctly observe, Wrangham is obviously wrong. For someone in the accademic community to be so ill informed on the relivant facts is unacceptable.
However, in his defence he only seems to rely on a few papers on raw food diets that have very unfavourable observations in them. Academic science has not so far (it seems) observed any healthy raw foodists.
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Permalink Reply by John Coleman on
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I think this is a historical fact. The widspread presence of raw food in contemporary societies is the result of agriculture. Primitive human societies didn't have access to so much abundance so they had to cook to survive.
There is no experimental data here though, so he is just using supposition.
Humans develop small bodies, not big brains.
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Permalink Reply by Mellifera on -
I think his book made some convincing arguments that humans could not survive in the wild as raw vegans. We don't have the same physiology as chimpanzees which can turn fiber into short chain fatty acids. Domestic fruit, yes....we can certainly survive on just that, but I'm not sure any human could have survived on wild fruit, nuts, and leaves. People who argue that there are palatable raw fruits are missing the point because they tend to be mistaking a plant that has been domesticated and gone feral for a wild plant or the plant is highly seasonal. and tiny. I highly doubt that any of our ancestors were vegan. But that's not a good argument for life today, because as I said, things are very different.
He also makes a good argument that cooking has been around longer than most raw foodists are willing to admit. And he talks about some experiments that show that we can't extract energy as well from raw food...but given that today's health problems are those of excess calories, I don't think that's a good argument that raw diets are bad. Overall, I learned a lot, even if I was not convinced by his own theory.
He spends a lot of time discussing some of the raw studies that showed that women became infertile....but doesn't note that many of these women were getting levels of calories rivaling an anorexic. There are obviously plenty of women in the raw community making babies without a problem.
His theory was that cooked tubers were the fuel of the human brain expansion. Um, has he ever tried to dig for tubers? Furthermore, it doesn't explain the human brain's hunger for DHA and iodine. I have read a lot of anthropology papers and books. The most convincing argument for what fueled human evolution is, for me, a coastal environment with shellfish, more fleshy fruits, coconut, fish, seaweed. This diet provides the optimal amount of DHA/iodine/ and other nutrients, would have allowed humans to spend less time eating, would have not led to early tooth decay, and would have provided enough calories. This diet may not be a good one for today given what humans have done to our waters....
Most anthropologists, I would say, do not agree with Wrangham. They tend to subscribe to the shoreline theory mentioned above or the theory that hunting meat on the savanna was our brain fuel.
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I won't comment toooo much, as don't want to get into...bigger issues:-)
When it comes down to it, none of us know for sure the full picture re what happened in the past, and even if we're pretty certain as to some things that did occur, we can, as Wrangham has, only theorise as to why those things might have occurred. And, inevitably, those theories will never be completely objective - they all reflect our biases to some extent, whether meat-eaters, vegetarian or vegan, raw, cooked, whatever.
We only know (or know pretty much) what the situation is in our current habitats in 2009.
Appreciate the info, M.
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Permalink Reply by John Coleman on
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I hope this does not sound pedantic.
Anthropology is making up stories after the event by looking at distant fragments of information to derive an explanation that is largely supposition - it is not science. Science, at least empirical science, consists of using experiments designed to test the validity of a hypothesis.
These various "theories" about the path of human evolution can be tested in a sense, but not empirically by design.
It is clear from developmental biology that humans and other primates have relatively large heads due to a decreased somatization, they do not demonstrate a cranial hypertrophy.
You can check this out yourself, I wrote a referenced article about it http://www.soalive.biz/articles/plain_encephal.htm.
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Permalink Reply by Mellifera on
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I think you are mistaking cultural anthropology with physical anthropology. You cite Deacon, a physical anthropologist (who ironically does believe the meat hypothesis). Physical anthropologists don't always do experiments, but some do, particularly on other primates. They act a little like forensic investigators, looking for clues in old bones for example.
Wild vegan foods are absolutely incapable of sustaining humans as far as I know. If anyone can prove me wrong I applaud them, but I think vegans are fighting a losing war when they argue that their diet is THE natural human diet. Esp since they are so many good arguments for veganism based on modern realities and ethics.
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Permalink Reply by Mellifera on
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Some anthros who do posit a plant-based, though not entirely vegan diet, are Katharine Milton, Robert Sussman, and Donna Hart. You might want to look into their research.
I personally don't believe humans evolved eating tons of meat or even any at all, so I'm very interested in in their theories myself. I love reading this kind of stuff and so far I've been most convinced by the theory that early humans scavenged shellfish, coconuts, seaweed, etc. not big game. Our bodies are pretty badly adapted to eating both lots of meat and lots of fibrous wild fruit. But as I said, I am open to other ideas.
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Permalink Reply by Rawzilla on -
Are there any well-documented, thriving vegan, raw vegan, or 100% raw (human) cultures? Have there ever been?
This should be obvious, but I mean communities where we can see more than one generation.
There are a lot of people on this site who claim to feel great having been raw vegan for a few years, but I can say the same of many people I know who smoke, eat a SAD diet, as well as a whole-foods cooked diet.
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