How Cooking Robs Food of its ‘Super Powers’
All plant foods are ‘superfoods’
It seems every week there’s a new report telling us of the latest ‘superfood’. Maybe it’s the goji berry, spirulina (seagreens)or raw cacao. There are some foods, such as the goji berry, that, according to our current level of scientific knowledge, are ‘nutritionally dense’ compared with other foods, that is, we can meet many of our nutritional needs on a very small amount of these foods, but many of these exotic ‘superfoods’, although tasty, nutritious, and fun to try, are expensive, and cannot always be obtained locally, let alone grown locally.
My belief is that many, more mundane, plant foods that can be eaten by humans are superfoods! Take any fruit or vegetable, sponsor a university research department to analyse it and carry out studies on its effect on health over years (as has happened to watercress, broccoli and blueberries in recent years), and – hey – new superfood! That’s because the plant foods that have been designed for human consumption are full of precious substances designed to nourish us and protect us from disease. And we can obtain these superfoods in our own localities, even amongst the ‘weeds’ in our gardens! Do you really think they have identified all the amazing things in our foods yet? But, meanwhile, through cooking we’re happily destroying not only the substances scientists have identified, but probably crucial substances it could take them thousands of years to discover…
Cooking damages and destroys the precious raw materials our bodies need
Cooking damages and destroys the amino-acids that our bodies need to build protein. It destroys enzymes present in our foods that help us digest them. It damages and destroys antioxidants that help protect us from cancer. It damages, destroys (or makes less assimilable) vitamins and minerals. The vitamins in our foods need other substances in the foods to work effectively. Our bodies need those precious things in foods to work efficiently. If they don’t get them, or if they get them in the wrong proportions, they start to work less efficiently. Then, either dramatically, and early in life (as in a heart attack) or gradually, and later, after a lifetime of tedious ‘minor ailments’, our bodies splutter to a halt.
Of course every so often we hear of someone who has lived to 100 on a diet of full English breakfasts, whisky and fags. I reckon these people are kept alive as an IQ test for the rest of us – do we copy the one exception to the rule, or the millions that aren’t? In damaging and destroying precious things our bodies need, cooking contributes to minor and major illness, and premature death. It even robs us of substances needed to make serotonin, sometimes called the ‘happiness’ chemical; it depresses us! We are biochemical creatures. The food that goes into our mouths affects us physically and psychologically in every way.
Cooking = heating to a temperature higher than 117 degrees F
Scientific studies have shown that, generally, this is the temperature at which certain substances in our foods start to become damaged or destroyed.
(In fact, raw fooders generally try to keep food to a temperature close to body temperature, ie between 95 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit.)
This is what cooking does to some of the precious substances in our food:
Destroys enzymes that help digestion, placing an increased burden on our
body’s digestive enzymes, depleting energy.Damages amino-acids. Our bodies need amino-acids to make protein. Heat
denatures them, meaning that the molecular structure is altered, rendering
them unusable, or less usable, by our bodies. The irony is that people who think they need to eat meat ‘for protein’ damage the amino-acids through cooking!
Destroys or damages vitamins. Most people know that boiling destroys many vitamins. In fact, it destroys 97% of B vitamins in general, and Vitamin C. OK, so you never boil your vegetables…you steam them (or roast them?). Look at this. A study by Arthur M Baker, MA (NHE Self-Health Care systems and author of ‘Awakening Our Self-Healing Body’) tells us that when food is cooked above 117 (Fahrenheit remember..) for 3 minutes or longer, 30-50% of vitamins are destroyed, and most vitamins lose their capacity to function once they have been subjected to heat surpassing 131 F.Some examples:
Vitamin B1 (thiamine)
Vitamin B2
Vitamin B6
Calculations from baked cookies revealed 90% of B1 lost. B1 is decreased by roasting, braising and frying.
Destroyed if cooked with baking soda/powder
Destroyed by roasting
Destroys or damages minerals. Although minerals in general are less susceptible to damage than vitamins, significant losses of magnesium and selenium can occur through cooking. Also, heat causes cleavage of complexes that render minerals less absorbable by the body.Destroys antioxidants
Antioxidants are substances that fight the ‘free radicals’ that can cause cancer. Many antioxidants lose their anti-cancer qualities when heated. For example, 90% of the antioxidants in broccoli are destroyed by microwaving.
Fire destroys
Cooking creates toxins
When the molecular arrangements of foods are altered by heat, ‘free radicals’ form (they’re molecules ‘gone awry’). When the molecules of vitamins and minerals are deranged by heat, carbon is liberated. They turn into inorganic ash-like form - toxic to the body.
Arthur M Baker explains how fats are rendered carcinogenic through heating food above 117 F for longer than 3 minutes: heating changes the fats and these changed fats are then incorporated into cell walls, interfering with the respiration of the cell (which can lead to cancer and heart disease).
Arthur M Baker also explains how when amino acids are heated ‘coagulated protein molecules tend to putrefy as bacteria in the body feed upon this dead organic matter. Bacterial enzymatic by-products are carcinogenic.’
When fats (hard and oils) are heated to high temperatures fatty acids are converted to transfatty acids. Even unsaturated fats then begin to behave like saturated fats, raising cholesterol levels. Very high temperatures (as in deep frying) applied to oils generate hydrocarbons that can cause cancer. And, if the oil is reheated, the fat may develop cancer-producing agents acrolein and benzopyrene.
Fresh fears have been raised over the safety of cooked foods
(Daily Telegraph 3.12.07)
For many years now scientists have known about acrylamides – substances created by cooking that can cause cancer. It’s only recently that further studies have resulted in this news reaching the mainstream media, making headline news in national newspapers in 2007. The Daily Telegraph reported that acrylamides, caused by frying, roasting or grilling, could double the risk of ovarian and womb cancer in women. A spokesman is quoted as saying that it was not possible to avoid the chemical entirely ‘since acrylamide forms naturally in a wide variety of cooked foods, it is not possible to have a healthy balanced diet that avoids it’.
Oh isn’t it?
Cooked food dehydrates us
Are you fed up with being told you have to drink eight glasses of water a day? Does anybody do that? Well, if you’re on a cooked-food diet, you need to be doing that! That’s because when food is cooked 80% of its water content can be lost. Dehydration has been linked to many major diseases (Dr Batmanghelidj ‘Your Body’s Many Cries for Water’). Now, if you have an apple in the house, go eat it, and be aware of how much water you are gulping down at the same time…
There is so much debate about the relative merits of spring, mineral and ionised water. The very best water for our bodies is found within raw foods (their roots filter out impurities as they grow).
When we receive an imbalance of (denatured) protein, fat and carbohydrate, because the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants have been damaged or destroyed through cooking, when we receive nutrients in proportions different from those the foods were designed to give, there are consequences for our bodies!
When the precious substances in our food (our bodies ‘raw materials’) which have been put there to nourish and protect us, are damaged and destroyed, we suffer illness and disease.
If someone or something wished to cause the premature demise of as many people as possible, and to cause as much suffering as possible along the way, what better way than to hide something so deadly in something that can so delude the senses, be not only socially acceptable but virtually mandatory in many societies, and something that human beings teach others to do, from babyhood!
If you want life,
as opposed to ‘existence’,
eat your food as nature intended –
beautifully, deliciously, purely,
RAW
