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 Debbie Took on
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PS You've given me a great idea...!
I think I will do a blog article on this (or rather it will include this). Then, in future, I can simply link to that for my replies rather than get involved in vegetarian v meat-eating discussions.
Much easier - thank you!
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Permalink Reply by Mellifera on -
You can do your own transit time experiments too :) In my experience, as long as you keep fiber constant, transit time should be be affected. If you eat only meat it might be longer, but who knows if the bacteria would eventually adjust? Plenty of native peoples eat almost exclusively animal products and aren't exactly keeling over from colon cancer. The SAD diet is uniquely bad...not sure what we can learn about transit on a raw diet from studies of SAD. I do know that they added chicken to a chimp diet in a zoo and transit time did not change...that would be a better model to apply to rawers who are adding in animal products.
Also, as far as I know, carnivores do not have short digestive tracts to prevent any putrification and clear the waste quickly...it's because meat doesn't need a long digestive tract to extract full energy from it. Primates have all kinds of fermentation "equipment" to get all the energy from plants.
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Permalink Reply by ben "the beekeeper" stiller on -
and what we're not even looking at the quality of foods... it's not just about a SAD or another diet. it's so much more complicated than that, and i don't think we know enough about food and nutrition...
if you eat only fruits and veggies:
are they picked before their ripe and therefore less nutrient dense?
are they hybrids growth for taste and not nutrition?
are they grown in soil that's healthy, dense, etc.?
if you eat animal products:
are they grass fed?
if so, what are the grasses -- are they wild or something else?
are they shot up with hormones?
are they treated well?
we get milk from a local Amish farmer who has his cattle graze on grasses, and when their being milked he offers them molasses to drink as a treat. how sweet is that?
anyway,... aside from these sorts of questions... there's little we know about how our ancestry, body type, blood type, local environment, overall chi, prana, or life force affects or plays into our food choices.
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Permalink Reply by Rawgreengoddess on -
PLA,if you want to know the transition time of your food,have a meal,and eat some corn with it...or have a meal and eat some beets with it,and you will know exactly when you eliminate this food,just by looking at it,then you will know the transition time of that particular food...i find the best way to work out anything(within reason and excluding anything animal orientated) i experiment on my self...
i always know what meal im eliminating,simply by the color,watermelon is red,cantelope is orange,green smoothie is green,bananas is creamy yellow...its so simple when food intake is simple and with mono or minimal ingredients!
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Permalink Reply by ben "the beekeeper" stiller on
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rEyYzL,
She says (if I remember correctly) that she only eats raw meat & dairy. She says raw fruit is "actually cooked by the sun" and all of her veggies are cooked.
So I guess she doesn't eat salads....
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Basically, I suspect Susun and Brigitte have fundamentally different philosophies.
I would certainly never enter into a 'debate' with Susun :-)
For example, contrast her view of menstruation here
http://www.healthynewage.com/susun1.html
with mine here:
http://debbietookrawforlife.blogspot.com/2009/04/periods-they-may-b...
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Permalink Reply by ben "the beekeeper" stiller on
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yes she does. i think she also says that the cell wall in ripe fruit has been altered by the sun -- making it useful for digestion.
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Permalink Reply by Rawgreengoddess on
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PLA,no worries..sorry :)
i 'experimented' on my husband....he eats meat....and we noted down his elimination times for days of eating meat,and days of fruits and veggies(elimination of meat was much slower,many hours slower than days of just fruits and vegs,and even some grains)...he's an athlete,so his transition times for foods would be quicker than those who are sedentary! perhaps this is how you could get the answers you are searching for?just a thought....:)
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Permalink Reply by Lizz on -
Sounds like the limited thinking of a cooked food scientist to me...
I went raw before ever having anything to heal, so that I would never have to heal, so I would never poison myself to begin with (well maybe a little poison in the party form every now and then lol)
I watched both my parents go through cancer, and although they both survived, I saw what a "healthy" whole food omnivorous diet did to my family, as well as the effects of stress, low exercise, low sunshine, toxic thinking. Not for me. It is my raw vegan lifestyle for me!
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Permalink Reply by ben "the beekeeper" stiller on
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Not exactly. He's an MD who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He's not a cooked food scientist.
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Permalink Reply by Lizz on
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I mean cooked food scientist in the sense that as a cooked food eater his scientific method (as most cooked food eating scientists are) is biased to his own habits, addictions, and a lot of time I feel that these so called specialists, MD or not, are just trying to use there "proofs" to prove what they want to believe. I just don't buy that anything that humans beings consume cooked can be better than raw. It comes down to whether or not you believe that nature has an animate quality that "creates" or whatever anthromorphizing one could place on nature, and in this "creating" nature does is a perfect job, or do humans hold a capacity for improving the random chaos that is nature. I personally am undecided about these issues, but I generally don't think that humans cooking improves anything that we are suppose to have in the first place. If something turns out to me more bioavailable in a cooked form I have to question if that food is fit for our consumption in the first place. Just cause we can doesnt mean we should. And in the end I am not sure if there is such a thing as "should" when it comes to nature. I dont know, I know I am contradicting myself a lot, mostly because I am still not sure how I feel about the nature, natural, debate
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Permalink Reply by ben "the beekeeper" stiller on
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I see what you're saying... and it is complicated and its also easy to see contradictions in any way of thinking about this. :-)
What's interesting to me is that, as a n MD, he's using his patients as a guide to figure out the best diet.
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