Cooked or Raw? What’s Best For Healthy Eating
Why should one cook? Believed, it destroys nutrients and wastes energy. Eating raw is a natural way, the way nature intended the food to be eaten. It sounds fancily accurate enough to convince many people, but is it the truth?
Nature’s intentions
According to what we know, it is presumptuous to assume that nature produces food consumed by humans or does anything to benefit us humans. We have been here on this planet for a tiny fraction of time, the character was here much earlier, and it has produced a lot of stuff that will kill us if we consume it. Of course, this whole argument collapses if you don’t believe what the guys sitting in their fancy labs prove.
Loss of Nutrients
Baking or frying food at high temperatures does indeed result in some loss of nutrients; a chunk of water-soluble vitamins are lost when food is cooked, especially when it is overcooked. But then, in numerous cases, cooking also destroys anti-nutrients that inhibit the absorption of nutrients in the gut.
Also, the loss of nutrients is nowhere close to the high percentages proclaimed by the proponents of raw food diets.
In some vegetables, such as Asparagus and carrots and the red fruit tomato, cooking increases the availability of some great antioxidants. Cooked Asparagus can give you more ferulic acid than the raw; cooked carrots can provide more beta-carotene, converted to vitamin A.
Breaking Down of Enzymes
Another common misconception of some raw food proponents is that the breakdown of plant enzymes, which happens when overcooked, increases the number of enzymes required to digest them. Even though the plant enzymes are beneficial for us, they do not speed up digestion when consumed; they are absorbed by our digestive juices, like other nutrients.
Vegetable soups and steamed vegetables are easier to digest; the cell structure of the plant is altered by cooking, cellulose is also broken down, which means that fewer enzymes are required to digest them.
What about Cooking Meats?
Cooking meats is essential to minimize the chances of food poisoning; research has shown that cooked meat and cooked sweet potatoes provide more energy than raw ones. The preference tests conducted on hungry mice showed that they had a strong preference for cooked food. It is highly doubtful that that was because of the seasonings they put on the cooked food. It suggests that the subjects were aware of the energy benefits of eating cooked food.
So is cooking better than eating raw?
It is impossible to answer this question with a straightforward yes or no. Cooking meat, poultry, and seafood is beneficial and should be the preferred method. However, when it comes to fruit & Veg, it essential to eat them in sufficient quantity. Some vegetables and fruits are better off cooked; some are not.
Unless you are open to put in the effort and make a chart for the better way to consume the standard products or pay someone to do it for you, eating a variety of products is what matters. If you have trouble eating raw broccoli, you will still gain many benefits by eating steamed broccoli.
