The Low, Down and Dirty About Cooked Foods

I will never forget the weekend I sat down for a conversation with a woman who was working on her PhD thesis in nutrition. She talked to me all about the project that she was working on. It had to do with feeding rats infant formula. She was very excited about how this information would revolutionize hospital food for people who were not able to eat solid foods.

I felt rather repulsed by the idea of it all, but smiled, acknowledged her communication, then asked her a question, that surely anyone with a PhD in nutrition would know.

I said, “Can you tell me how heat affects nutrients?”

She hummed and hawed then said, “Well, it activates enzymes.”

Huh!?

Anyone who has ever tried to plant or sprout heated seeds, knows that heat doesn’t activate enzymes it destroys them.

I couldn’t believe that after 6 years of full time study in nutrition there wasn’t an extensive study of heat and its affect on food. I mean, surely if there had been, we’d have a lot more raw foodists on the planet.

As hard as it is to believe, the truth is that we’ve become so accustomed and unconscious about cooking our foods, that few people actually stop to consider the consequences of what heat does to the foods we eat. And so I thought I’d cover a few things that really empowered me to go full force as I started off on the raw food path a few years ago on that very subject.

If you already know these things, then great! Forward them on to someone who doesn’t. If you’ve forgotten, maybe this can be an inspiring refresher.

If you’re coming across this information for the first time, then dive in and enjoy the adventure. We hope this information can inspire you to make healthier choices for yourself.

So why raw food?

Though there are countless reasons, let’s look specifically at what happens when we heat food. More appropriately the question we’re answering would be,

“Why NOT cooked food?”

We need to start with the understanding that nutrients are delivered to the body in three major categories:

Carboydrates (which can be simple (fruits, sugars) or complex (grains, cereals and starchy vegetables like potatoes, etc.)
Protein
Fat

Carbohydrates, when subjected to heat, become water saturated. When this happens, they become more difficult to digest. Inefficient carbohydrate digestion ultimately leads to fermentation in the gut. In case you don’t know, we have 3 nasty by-products of fermentation being produced in the body:

Gas
Alcohol
Acetic acid

Chances are good that you’re familiar with the effects of gas and alcohol. So let’s talk about acetic acid. I haven’t yet figured out why people continue to use vinegar, a diluted form of acetic acid, when the following is what you’ll find in a chemical laboratory, regarding it’s material safety data:

POISON! DANGER! CORROSIVE. LIQUID AND MIST CAUSE SEVERE BURNS TO ALL BODY TISSUE. MAY BE FATAL IF SWALLOWED. HARMFUL IF INHALED. INHALATION MAY CAUSE LUNG AND TOOTH DAMAGE. FLAMMABLE LIQUID AND VAPOR.

Having acetic acid in the body is clearly an invitation for trouble.

When there is acetic acid in the body, it leaches phosphorus and ultimately causes stress to the part of our body designed to help us most during stress: our adrenal glands (the little glands on top of the kidneys that are responsible for our “flight or fight” responses).

Taxing these guys means trouble in the form of body odor, mucus production, increased heart rate, headaches and thoose awful dark circles you get under the eyes.

Most people who eat grains and breads have that infamous bulge in the belly and bloated feeling. These are the tell-tale signs of fermentation hard at work in the gut. Most people experience a drastic difference in these symptoms after only 3 days on all raw foods.

So that’s carboydrates. What happens when we throw protein onto the fire?

Proteins are kind of like lego, composed of smaller parts called amino acids, which are bound together with “peptide bonds” (a kind of chemical glue for these amino acids. When protein is cooked, the bonds between the lego (amino acids) become tight and tough to break down. The body reacts to these unbreakable lego much the same way it would a foreign invader and it increases the production of prostaglandins (hormone like substances responsible for creating inflammation and other pain-responses in the body).

Many pain-relieving drugs like aspirin inhibit the production of prostaglandins in the body to reduce pain, inflammation and swelling.

For women with painful menstrual cycles, TAKE NOTE!

For YEARS I suffered with terrible menstrual cramps and PMS. During my university days, because this was really debilitating, I was prescribed prostaglandin inhibitors to help deal with the pain. Although I was a strict vegetarian and vegan for over 7 years, I never experienced any real improvement in my condition until becoming a raw foodist. Being nearly 100% raw, I have NO PMS, NO CRAMPS, and totally normal, regular, healthy cycles. A BIG wow, because for a lot of years I was doubled over in pain for days.

Now I know why. Cooked proteins and prostaglandins!! More recent experiments on myself have proven that while my cycle is in progress, eating cooked proteins creates a nearly INSTANTANEOUS reaction in my body and within minutes I will start to experience mildly uncomfortable cramps! It was only this week, however, that I managed to make the connection to prostaglandins.

Eliminating cooked protein has been a huge factor in helping people overcome chronic conditions of rheumatoid arthritis, and other auto-immune diseases (conditions in which the body apparently attacks itself) involving pain and inflammation. The body, in these circumstances, is not actually “attacking” itself, but actually fighting to protect the body from the invasion of foreign particles (cooked proteins) which are not necessary for the survival and well-being of the body itself.

Another thing about cooking proteins is the fact that it alters specific amino acids which are necessary for the transport of oxygen in the blood. Hemoglobin (which is responsible for transporting oxygen throughout the body in the blood) simply cannot do its job as efficiently in the presence of cooked proteins, because it depends upon the specific location of sulfur found on amino acids, which is altered and damaged through the heating process.

So why is that important?

Well, anyone who has ever walked up a set of stairs, or been involved in sports of any kind knows that getting oxygen moving in the blood makes a huge difference in being able to perform well cardio- vascularly.

We also know that cancer thrives in an environment that is anaerobic or (lacking in oxygen). So, getting oxygen traveling efficiently through the body is vital to maintaining overall health.

Now here’s the nastiest one of them all: FAT! What happens when we cook fat?

If you’ve ever washed dishes after a fatty cooked food meal (and who hasn’t) then you’ve got a great visual of what is going on inside your intestinal tract and blood. Fats get sticky when heated, and just like cheese sticks to the size of the lasagna pan, cooked fats cause your blood cells to stick together and eventually form blockages which are major contributors to strokes and heart attacks.

Having that sticky stuff along the lining of your intestinal tract can make the absorption of nutrients through the intestinal wall much more difficult.

Vitamin E and A, which naturally protect us from free radicals in the body, are destroyed by heating. When we heat fats, we dramatically increase the amount of free radicals in the body and are destroying the Vitamins that protect us from these free radicals in the first place. A double dose of trouble from cooked fats.

The Best Nutritional Supplement EVER

All that having been said, don’t forget that stress itself inhibits digestions and assimilation of nutrients, which leads to many of the above conditions as well. Let this information inspire you to take the next step forward in your health journey–not turn you into an introverted, food-obsessed paranoid who is terrified of steamed broccoli.

I can’t count the number of people, raw food chefs, and leaders in the community who state very clearly that they are embracing a journey, and do not beat themselves up for compromises along the way.

I don’t know where YOU are at in your journey,  but if you’ve fallen off the proverbial wagon, let this article inspire you to step back up to the challenge that fits with your lifestyle and circumstances.

I don’t believe that a degree in nutrition will necessarily bring you any closer to achieving your ideal health. Informing yourself about the basics of physiology, however, so that you feel knowledgeable about what’s going on in the body, is a very empowering thing and helps us answer up with confidence when people ask us why we live on rabbit food. I’ve noticed it also helps as motivation when walking past bakeries, chocolate shops, and New Year’s dinners.

Above all, keep your thoughts positive! Look out around you at that beautiful world we’ve created, take it all in and may your joy and thirst for life be your greatest nutritional supplement EVER.