I'm sure you have all heard of the raw food movement. There are plenty of references ro raw foodism all around us. And who can forget the momentous moment in S&TC when Samantha first laid eyes on a certain sexy raw-food restaurant waiter? It's a thing. If there's a place where accuracy matters, it's health. So I'm going to discuss raw food a little if you don't mind. I'm no expert by any means, by the way, so forgive me if this all sounds a bit amateurish; I'm just tryin to sum up what I know of the subject. If you want specifics, there is ample information on the topic to be found virtually everywhere.
I read a magazine article a few months ago wherein the author proclaimed that a raw food diet is in no uncertain terms healthier than, more nutritious than, and will allow you to live longer than a diet that includes cooked food of any kind. He gave a temperature above which you shouldn't cook food (I don't recall his temperature, but many raw foodists say 104). He was very certain that you shouldn't be cooking any of your food because the nutritional value will always go down. (He also talked about killing 'beneficial food enzymes,' which, by the way, most scientists don't even believe are a real aspect of our nutrition.)
The raw food mantra of "cooking-reduces-nutrition" at first sounds logical and may be easy to accept as black-and-white truth. But unfortunately, it's just not. We all know that if you take a piece of spinach and boil the crap out of it, many of the compounds in the spinach are now in the water instead of in the leaf. That's why the water is green now. And many of those compounds are things that are valuable to us nutritionally. But the science of how compounds in foods react to cooking and interact with our bodies is much more complex than just "cooking reduces nutrients."
If you measure certain nutrients in certain foods before and after cooking you might conclude that the nutrients in the food are reduced by cooking. But the way, and even if, our bodies absorb and use those nutrients is dependent on a variety of factors. For instance, some of the nutrients in some raw foods are blocked by other compounds. There is even a name for such blocking compounds: antinutrients. In some foods, cooking can impair or negate the effects of the antinutrients, thereby making the beneficial nutrients more available to us. This means that even if the nutrients measure lower when the food is cooked, the amount that our bodies will get from the item may be increased, even exponentially so. Antinutrients are just one example of how the chemistry of cooking can sometimes work in our favor.
Another example of a benefit from cooking food is lycopene. A raw tomato essentially has no lycopene; it is only there in cooked tomatoes. You will get more lycopene from ketchup than you will from a raw tomato. Or, how about carrots. Many of the antioxidants in carrots are made much more available to our bodies when the carrots are cooked. Beans are another good example. Beans are a superfood with many beneficial compounds that are totally locked to us when the bean is in it's raw state. And, some minerals are barely affected by cooking or not at all. These are just a few examples that I happen to be aware of. I'm no nutritionist.
This all makes me think of the episode of Good Eats in which he showed how the Mayans processed corn to make masa flour which was the foundation of their diet. By processing the corn kernels in a certain way (as I recall it included slaked lime), they totally changed the kernels' chemical makeup (without realizing it of course). Without processing it that way, the corn's important nutrients would have been totally unavailable; the treatment made the compounds locked inside the corn nutitionally availabe to the human body -- and basically allowed the Mayans to thrive as a massively successful society. But I digress into anthropology. Anyway, it just goes to show that chemically altering foods - which is what cooking is - can sometimes have very positive effects.
Now, I'm obviously not saying that all foods are dietarily better when cooked. There are, of course, plenty of instances in which a particular nutrient may be more available in something raw than in the cooked version. It's just that, it drives me up a wall when I see a raw foodist make the proclamation that cooked food is always less nutritious and less healthy than raw. It's very, very untrue.
The chemical changes that cooking can impart are many. There are multiple aspects to consider. Some dietary benefits might be increased with cooking, and other benefits can be reduced. Like most things, it's foolish to try to narrow down the complex chemistry of our dietary intake to a single, simple rule. The truth is, variety is the spice of health. To have a balanced and healthy diet, we are supposed to eat a wide variety of foods. For instance, we'll get the widest nutrient range if we eat many types of fruits instead of just one. In kind, our diet should also include foods with a range of preparations. If we eat that way, we will be offering the widest possible selection of nutrients to our bodies. Go ahead and eat your raw carrots, but eat your cooked carrots, too, and you'll get the best of both worlds.
The last thing I want to mention is this: The raw food movement is in part a reaction to our culture's increasing dependence on food that is overprocessed, overpreserved, over-everything. I think getting back to fresh, natural food that is real and simple is a very good idea. It's great to focus our efforts on eating fewer processed foods, fewer preservatives and trans fats, more homemade meals, more fresh fruits and veggies. But those who say that cooking is the enemy are unfortunately misguided.
Thanks for reading. Happy eating!
No comments:
Post a Comment