Health Matters

– Raw versus Cooked It seems logical that raw food would be more nutritious than cooked food. Being in its natural and unprocessed state, surely it retains more of its original vitamins, minerals, enzymes and other good things? VERNE MAREE looks at this

For most of my life, I’ve felt I should be eating more of my food raw. My health-conscious family was big on fresh fruit, juicing, big salads and raw nuts; and, some years ago, I felt intensely virtuous after spending a week at a health resort whose sole restaurant served only raw food*. Now, however, Michael Pollan’s brilliant book Cooked (2014) has banished any guilt I may have had about not being a raw foodie.

Before I go on (and on), allow me a short rant about restaurants that serve undercooked vegetables, which are neither one thing nor the other. Vegetables need to be just-tender to be properly cooked. Still-crunchy broccoli, cauliflower, carrots or green beans are lovely in a salad; and as they retain their pretty colours, they’re no doubt great for the time-strapped kitchen that can’t be bothered to cook up a fresh batch for each order. Served with my hot roast chicken, rack of lamb or veal chop, they’re simply wrong and they fill me with something akin to rage. (No, it actually is rage.)

The raw truth

Some things taste perfect raw: papaya, strawberries, oysters, cucumber and rocket, for example. Others work well either raw or cooked. Beef, for example, can be finely chopped and then mixed with a raw egg yolk, diced onion and plenty of seasoning to transform it into beef tartare; but let’s face it – steak served straight off a sizzling barbecue is far yummier. And while raw mushrooms add an interesting dimension to a mixed salad, nothing brings out their flavour like a frying pan, a dollop of butter and a smattering of crushed garlic.

Pork, chicken and lamb, on the other hand, were born to be cooked ( though the individual representatives of those species might disagree, given the chance), and raw offal could only be awful. What’s more, potatoes would not have become the world’s favourite vegetable if no one had thought to boil them, mash them, roast them or fry them in duck-fat.

Arguments for a raw food diet

The primary notion is that by cooking food we reduce its nutrients and destroy its enzymes, enzymes that we need for optimal digestion and a healthy immune system. Proponents of a raw food diet promise that it will give you more energy, improve your digestion and the appearance of your skin, help you lose weight, lower your risk of cardiovascular disease and more.

The clear virtue of a raw or mainly raw diet is that it tends to consist of largely unprocessed whole foods – fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and sometimes sprouted grains; non-vegetarians might also eat raw meat, fish, eggs and unpasteurised dairy.

If you’re used to eating a lot of restaurant or fastfood meals, it will probably also get you back into the kitchen: juicing, preparing salads and experimenting with dehydration and other raw-food techniques. And it will definitely wean you off sugar, caffeine and other toxins.

It’s not that simple, though

Humans are the only animals that cook their food, Pollan reminds us in Cooked; and cooking, explains Harvard anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham in Catching Fire, is what holds the evolutionary key to our humanness.

According to the cooking hypothesis, cooking their food “provided our forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet” that allowed their brains to grow bigger and their guts to shrink. That’s because cooking renders meat, cereals and most vegetables far times more digestible, eliminating many hours of relatively unproductive mastication (that’s chewing, remember) to free us up for other pursuits, “like creating a culture”.

Once cooking allowed us to expand our cognitive capacity at the expense of our digestive capacity, it is argued, there was no going back: our big brains and tiny guts depend on a diet of cooked food.

Proteins, too Best of both worlds More of the good stuff

If you’ve ever sautéed a huge pile of mushrooms, spinach or shredded cabbage, you’ll know how quickly it shrinks, and how much easier it is to eat quite a lot of it. And, according to a recent article on scientificamerican. com, cooked mushrooms, spinach and cabbage supply more antioxidants such as carotenoids and ferulic acid, as do cooked carrots, asparagus, peppers, zucchini, broccoli and many other vegetables. Tomatoes, too, deliver more lycopene (another powerful antioxidant) cooked as opposed to raw. Cooking does reduce the vitamin C content of vegetables, and the longer you cook them, the less of it they retain. It’s a sort of balancing act, because you can eat a lot more broccoli in the form of a delicious, creamed soup than you’ll ever manage to chew through raw. How you cook stuff is important, though: boiling and steaming are best; deepfrying is associated with the production of carcinogenic free radicals. Subjecting complex protein to heat “denatures” it, breaking it down into shorter, more digestible chains. Cooking eggs, for example, makes the protein in them more digestible; it also helps make the vitamin biotin in them more available for the body to use. On the other hand, it reduces their vitamin A and anti-oxidant content. Again, cooking them at lower temperatures, and for shorter periods, retains more of their goodness.

What about meat? Gentle and slow cooking has been shown to preserve nutrients and create fewer carcinogens than frying or grilling, for example. Cooking is a series of trade-offs, it seems, and most of us are probably best off eating a widely varied combination of both cooked and raw foods. Enjoy your salmon sushi-style one day, and poach it whole the next; sprinkle spring onions into your summer salad, and make a hearty French onion soup for a chilly evening. Above all, eat what you love, and love what you eat.