Anyone hear Science Friday last week? Raw foods vs. Cooked

I was just wondering if anyone else listened to science friday last week.

Basically, the argument was that we developed into humans because we began to cook our foods, which let us develop a shorter intestinal track and spend less energy digesting food.  They went on to explain findings that went, say, and egg is cooked, we digested about 95% of it, but when it was raw, we only digested about 65% of it... strange.  And that basically we get fewer calories from foods that are harder to digest, because we spend a lot more energy to digest them...

Another experiment that was done was with air-puffed food pellets.  Two groups of rats were given the exact same weight of food, same composition, only one set of pellets were puffed with air, making them easier to digest.  They measured everything, including the rats' movement, and found that the rats with the easier to digest food grew 30% more and had a higher fat ratio...

Now, I'm not going to go eat all my food completely raw and unprocessed, but it does put some interesting perspective on things...

This idea has been around for awhile. If you are interested in it check out raw vegan diet, or macrobiotic diet. Check out the hippocrates health institute as well. Its absolutely true that cooking does destroy some nutrients, that's why its great to eat a salad or raw vegetable juice everyday.

No, it's absolutely true that parasites, (hookworm infestations and the like) plus things like salmonella are on the rise due to this tendency for people to get crazy notions like eating stuff raw is good for you.

 You don't absorb the nutrients properly when you eat uncooked food; the earliest identifiable human cooking gear are between 125,000 to 250,000 years old, older than cro-magnon man.

For humans, raw food is unnatural.

Well, I wasn't really saying that I wanted to go and eat all raw food.  I will eat my meat cooked, thank-you-very-much.  And its certainly not natural.  But I thought that the actual studies between processed and unprocessed food were interesting, and I'm sorry, but it gives the story a massive amount of accredition when it winds up on NPR.

Oh, wasn't thinking about you, was thinking of the recommendation for going raw (vegan or macrobiotic) - yep, there's a definite difference in how the human GI tract handles raw and uncooked food.

 In particular malabsorbtion increases dramatically as the egg example shows; eating raw eggs looks cool in movies but since you only derive about half the protein from it you'd be better off scrambling it - and much less likely to catch salmonella.

 Some foods don't require cooking to digest properly - various nuts, seeds and tubers come to mind. But nutrient absorbtion is still better; some nutrients your body can't even get at without cooking.

 One of the really beneficial plant nutrients in the tomato, lycopene is four times more bio-available in the cooked vs. raw state, leading to the interesting conclusion that ketchup is better for you than raw tomato :-P

 It's something to factor into your thinking of course. Everything is - you never know when a couple geeky little factoids from disparate sources will make something click for you ;)

Articles like this one pointing out that boiling carrots makes the anti-cancer compound 'falcarinol' more easily accessible to the body... offer a flip-side to the benefits of raw foods.   So the message is surely to eat some raw together with some cooked foods to get all the different benefits available.  

I eat all my veggies raw. Not because of some crazy fad though, I've eaten them raw since I was very small when my mum could only get me to eat raw veg.....wouldn't touch them cooked. I don't know why but I can't stand them even lightly steamed. If they're not totally raw then I won't touch them. I am pretty strange when it comes to food though....

gi-jane- that article is interesting, but the argument isn't just to cook your carrots, its about the surface area of the carrot in the water.  They are saying to cook your carrots whole, because then that nutrient doesn't leak out.  They don't actually say anything about cooking vs. raw.

I mean, honestly, this isn't going to affect my eating habits I don't think.  I mean, I enjoy things with fiber more than things without, and I'll continue to eat the cheapest, most available fruits/veggies/produce in my kitchen, whether they are raw or not, because when it comes down to it, just eating fruit/veggies is better than potato chips or popcorn, etc.