Real Raw Food Topic

[MelBrooksfan]

During my first semester of college, I had a professor who was.. well.. a hippy. Both in dress and attitude. He was a huge proponent of raw food dieting. The reason he gave was a vague and had to do with raw food having more enzymes that are cooked out of the food and lower its nutritional value. He also pushed the notion that food manufacturers are deliberately placing dangerous and lethal additives in processed food.

Wikipedia has not been much of a source for disproving this bunk (just repeating each side's argument and, last I checked, lacked a link to any real, hard science on the subject). So, is this bunk as I think it is? Why? Etc.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

I have no scientific knowledge about a raw food diet. It hasn't been discussed in any of the nutrition classes I've taken. However, I loved the raw food whackjobs that were on P&T's BS. They did a great job of making themselves look stupid.

ETA: The ADA says that some canned vegetables are more nutritious than their fresh counterparts:

Canned tomatoes, corn and carrot products provide higher amounts of some phytochemicals than their fresh counterparts as a result of the canning process.

 

[ChristineR]

Quackwatch on enzymes.

The short answer is that enzymes in the stomach have nothing to do with enzymes in your body.

Although cooking can destroy nutrients, it can also make nutrients available. If you think about it, this is why we cook in the first place. A lot of foods are just not edible without processing, so they have no available nutrients.

Additives are more complicated, as some of them are less than completely wholesome. The FDA will tell you they are safe in small amounts, but the FDA has been known to be influenced by the food industry.

There's ample evidence that you should eat a balanced diet with lots of fresh and unprocessed foods and that such a diet will meat all your nutritional needs.

 

[Capsid]

During my first semester of college, I had a professor who was.. well.. a hippy. Both in dress and attitude. He was a huge proponent of raw food dieting. The reason he gave was a vague and had to do with raw food having more enzymes that are cooked out of the food and lower its nutritional value. He also pushed the notion that food manufacturers are deliberately placing dangerous and lethal additives in processed food.

Any macromolecule (including enzymes) go through a fairly strrong denaturing process by exposure to our stomach acid, in other words it's cooked chemically.

 

[ChristineR]

That's funny, except that canned vegetables contain less of some vitamins and that sort of outweighs the benefits of phytochemicals, such benefits being pretty unclear and often exaggerated.

 

[Mojo]

During my first semester of college, I had a professor who was.. well.. a hippy. Both in dress and attitude. He was a huge proponent of raw food dieting. The reason he gave was a vague and had to do with raw food having more enzymes that are cooked out of the food and lower its nutritional value.

Enzymes are proteins. While it is true that they will be denatured (made ineffective because their structure is changed) by cooking, even if food is eaten raw they will be denatured by the acidity of the stomach contents and digested (i.e. chopped up) by enzymes in the stomach, and further digested before being absorbed.

They have no nutritional value other than as a source of amino acids.

 

[Lisa Simpson]

Actually, newer research shows that canned is often better than fresh:

Canned fruits and vegetables often are considered nutritionally inferior to their fresh and frozen counterparts. While this may be true regarding sugar and salt content, it's not true when it comes to other nutrients. In fact, in a recent study completed at the University of Illinois, many of the canned fruits and vegetables evaluated contained as much or more of certain nutrients than their fresh and frozen counterparts.

For example, most brands of canned apricots, spinach and pumpkin provided more vitamin A per serving than their fresh- cooked counterparts. Also, canned asparagus, potatoes and spinach tended to outrank or equal fresh-cooked varieties for vitamin C. On the other hand, fresh-cooked tomatoes tended to be higher in vitamin C and fresh-cooked carrots higher in vitamin A per serving than canned or frozen types.

One reason canned (and frozen) fruits and vegetables sometimes rank nutritionally superior to fresh produce is they're usually processed immediately after harvest, when nutrient content is at its peak. This is especially true when it comes to the vitamin C found in green vegetables. The longer a green vegetable sits on a truck or in the supermarket, the lower its vitamin C content. Because they are more acidic, fresh (as well as frozen and canned) fruits are less susceptible to loss of vitamin C during storage.

http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/columnnn/nn970122.html

 

[ponderingturtle]

The fundamental premise that you get more nutrition out of uncooked food than cooked food is crap. This is because while sure it might have more vitamins and essential amino acids before cooking, if you can't extract more of them in an uncooked state the whole premise is garbage.

And to show how cooking and treatment can improve the bodies ability to extract nutrients look at field corn.

To quote from Good Eats

DD: Well, because the Spaniards took back the material but not the technology to make it healthful. The way the native American style of making it was with alkali that it would change the cellular structure in the amino acids and make it a more healthful product.
AB: Ah, so the Europeans didn't do that.
DD: No, they just cooked it and made it into mush and made into bread and all kinds of things and then they started getting this nutritional deficiency disease that became known as polegra.
AB: What are the symptoms of that?
DD: Well, first you get this rough skin, and then you get diarrhea, and then that goes on to dementia and then death.

Link

 

[casebro]

The digestive enzymes alone will let me consider tilting the table towards raw.

My brother noticed that particuler brands of peanut butter made him 'windy'. After he pointed it out, I confirmed. With three cases of pancreatitis in the family, I am aware of digestive problems caused by lack of enzymes. Plus my experience as a homebrewer- beer is made by enzymatic action. Anyway, I had bought some roasted peanuts at the store, they gave me enough gas to float the Hindenberg. Hmmm, try Googling. Seems that roasting peanuts makes something in them turn into a trypsin inhibitor. Seeds generally have their own enzymes to make them sprout and grow. Inhibiting the enzymes prevents sprouting, until the proper time. Inhibiting the enzymes also prevent digestion in our gut. So, later in the gut, bacteria do the digesting, and give off gas. Like yeast making bubbles in beer. Raw peanuts don't do this. Infact, they seem to prevent the gas from other causes. There must be lots of excess trypsin in peanuts?

All seeds have enzymes. Until they get heated to about 170F. I don't think the pulp of fruit has as much as the seeds.

Enzymes are most active in the 125-150F range. Which makes me wonder how much foods can be influenced by holding them in this range. "Mashing" barley does that, and turns starches into sugars. Lots of cooked foods are only heated to this internal temperature. Steak, frinstance. Good french fries are either fryed once for a couple minutes, allowed to cool some, and fried again. Or the prepared ones are blanched before freezing. Either way, they spend some time in the "mashing" point. Perhaps there is an optimum point, between raw and cooked to death?

 

[Mojo]

Inhibiting the enzymes also prevent digestion in our gut. So, later in the gut, bacteria do the digesting, and give off gas.

You have enzymes of your own to digest food in your gut, which will digest the enzymes in your food, whether or not it is cooked.

 

[korenyx]

A former co-worker of mine got suckered into the raw food diet; she spent two weeks telling us how great it was until it caused her IBS to flare up and she missed work.

I looked at one of the raw "cookbooks"; the woman who wrote it had skin like an old suitcase.

No thanks; I have great skin and no IBS. I will keep cooking.

Kore

 

[Miss Anthrope]

The thing all these radical "lifestyle" diets seem to be missing is just a simple concept of balance and moderation. Raw, fresh produce IS good. Especially when it is consumed with healthy grains (that require some kind of prep), cooked legumes, some nice oily fish, et cetera et cetera. Heck, even a little beer, wine, and chocolate is shown to be beneficial.

Unfortunately raw foodies and their ilk are downright religious.

 

[ChristineR]

Actually, newer research shows that canned is often better than fresh:



http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/columnnn/nn970122.html

Yeah, I've seen that, but it is a bit disingenuous. So canned apricots have more vitamin A than fresh apricots that have been cooked. Not real surprising, as the canners have better cooking equipment than do I and the fruit is real fresh. But who cooks their apricots before they eat them? And if I did cook them, I wouldn't start by boiling them in sugar syrup.

So if you are going to buy fresh and process them as if you were canning them, sure it makes more sense to let the pros do it.

 

[ysabella]

I like looking up this stuff, so I have done it several times. Enzymes in most raw foods, say a carrot, certainly have nothing to do with digestion of the carrot in the gut.
That's not even the claim, at least not lately; nowadays the claim is that the carrot enzymes make a difference during chewing and swallowing, and that somehow it makes a cumulative difference over time in how much digestive enzyme you have to make, the overarching theory being that we all have some finite resource of digestive enzymes. To me, that's sort of like saying you should never run, just walk slowly, because you only get so many heart beats. How that means we should eat raw foods, I don't know. In many cases they are much harder to digest.

There are a couple of exceptions - if you eat lots of raw papaya and/or pineapple, both have lots of strong enzymes and some might make it through to the gut. Both are used in commercial meat tenderizers because the enzymes break down proteins nicely.

There are two over-the-counter preparations of enzymes to help people digest - Lactaid, a form of lactase to help digest lactose (milk sugar) and Beano - alpha galactosidase that breaks down oligosaccharides. Both are particularly acid-happy versions of enzymes (so they will make it past the stomach) and both are made from an aspergillus mold that is found on cassava, at least I read that somewhere.

Beyond that you can actually buy actual digestive enzymes to sprinkle on your food so it starts being digested before you eat it. Some very ill people have to do this. I doubt it is delicious.

This site is a great read about raw foodism and several other diet types: Beyond Veg

 

[JJM]

I have seen many good comments here. However, I think the subject is being approached like the fabled blind men describing an elephant, each one describing one part.

For example, cooking vitamins can destroy them; but by how much? Does an "adequately" cooked vegetable still have enough vitamins after accounting for the loss? Are other parts of the vegetable more readily digested in the trade-off? Only quantitative analysis in each case can tell us.

Another important consideration is sanitation. Modern methods of harvesting food lead to lapses at various points in handling and processing (even old methods led to the occasional infection). For example, workers in enormous, factory fields are unable to leave the field to relieve themselves. Also, as I understand it, eggs can be infected early in development; so washing cannot clean them. Adequate cooking is a way of assuring the food is not contaminated.

 

[ponderingturtle]

I have seen many good comments here. However, I think the subject is being approached like the fabled blind men describing an elephant, each one describing one part.

For example, cooking vitamins can destroy them; but by how much? Does an "adequately" cooked vegetable still have enough vitamins after accounting for the loss? Are other parts of the vegetable more readily digested in the trade-off? Only quantitative analysis in each case can tell us.

Another important consideration is sanitation. Modern methods of harvesting food lead to lapses at various points in handling and processing (even old methods led to the occasional infection). For example, workers in enormous, factory fields are unable to leave the field to relieve themselves. Also, as I understand it, eggs can be infected early in development; so washing cannot clean them. Adequate cooking is a way of assuring the food is not contaminated.

The problem is that cooking vs raw is not universaly one way or the other. There might well be some foods that are better for you raw, but the point is that it is certainly not all foods, unlike the raw food people claim.

 

[JJM]

The problem is that cooking vs raw is not universaly one way or the other. There might well be some foods that are better for you raw, but the point is that it is certainly not all foods, unlike the raw food people claim.

That is a concise statement of my post.

 

[tracer]

He also pushed the notion that food manufacturers are deliberately placing dangerous and lethal additives in processed food.

This is a favorite argument from the anti-processed food crowd.

Synthetic food additives tend to be subjected to some pretty rigorous safety testing both before and after they're introduced to the market. It's not uncommon for some of these tests to show an unpleasant result. For example, sodium saccharin was shown to cause an increased incidence of cancer in laboratory rats. Similarly alarming prelimiary results were obtained for BHA, alar, and red dye number 2.

What ends up being missed in these discussions are the dangerous and lethal chemicals found naturally in foods. Grain alcohol, for example, also causes an increased incidence of cancer in laboratory rats. The baking process that ordinary bread undergoes produces small amounts of acrylamide, also a known carcinogen.

It is unfortunate that "artificial" additives are regarded as poisonous-until-proven-otherwise, while "natural" foods are regardes as safe-until-proven-otherwise.

 

[tracer]

This site is a great read about raw foodism and several other diet types: Beyond Veg

I am SO gonna put that link up on my Vegetable-Free Living webpage.

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

It's important to eat both raw and cooked food depending on the food. Some foods when cooked can actually increase materials that cause various diseases including cancer. For example cooking some meats will produce Heterocyclic Amines which can cause cancer which wouldn't be present in uncooked meats otherwise. Link.

Studies also show that in specific vegetables, cooking release specific nutrients including beta Carotene, especially in carrots. Link.

This is why it's important to eat a both raw food diet and a cooked food diet.