Raw...Cooked And Bioavailability

[WhiteCrow]

There is a lot of debate going on here about cooking destroying food, making it less nutritious. But there are numerous studies that indicate that cooking increases the availability of certain nutritients! Examples:

- Lycope (Antioxidant). Cooked tomatoes give the body six times the amount of lycopene than raw tomatoes.

- Betacarotene, same thing. Carrots anyone?

- Egg protein. Raw eggs (yuck) have 50% of their protein available. Cooked, 95%!

- Spinach. Cooking it makes the carotenoids more bioavailable, but it degrades Vitamin C and folate, so eating a combo of cooked and raw seems to be the best bet.

And there are a lot more. To me this seems that all raw or all cooked should actually go hand in hand. Study which foods are best cooked, and which are best raw and then combine them to maximize nutritional benefits.

Good luck!

[funchy]

Originally Posted by WhiteCrow

There is a lot of debate going on here about cooking destroying food, making it less nutritious. But there are numerous studies that indicate that cooking increases the availability of certain nutritients!

please cite these studies. thank you.

[dice]

Swweeet. I am eating about 80-90% raw, and these foods are currently making up the other 10-20%.

Eggs are fabulous, I cook my tomatoes with beans and oil, and I eat cooked spinach mixed in with my eggs. I've decided that eggs would be much better than whey protein shakes. Much less processed, cheap, keeps my family from believing I've gone ape-wad.

While most days I like to be as raw as possible, I think 100% raw is a little too extremist and unnatural - as well as rather unrealistic.

Cooked food shows up on my skin though. Sad Face gets a little bumpy. Will do more Bikram.

[dice]

Originally Posted by funchy

please cite these studies. thank you.

It's almost common knowledge that cooking carrots/tomatoes with a bit of oil increases the nutrients you get from them. I hear it literally everywhere from everyone and I read about it all the time.

Not sure about the eggs...

[RRR]

The beta carotene in carrots is a fat soluble (thus cooking in oil or eating with some fats is preferred). One important aspect about carrots vs. Vitamin A/Beta Carotene supplements I've heard of is that the balance of micronutrients found in carrots greatly increase the absorption of beta carotene. I would be curious if the heating process destroys the micronutrients that increase this absorption.

[jcasper]

Applying heat to foods provides no nutritional benefit to the food and is detrimental to the person ingesting the cooked food. There are reported instances where, by heating food, certain nutrients are more easily released, like lycopene from tomatoes. However, this ignores that hundreds of other nutrients in that heated tomato that were damaged or destroyed; and also assumes that more of a specific nutrient is better, instead of trusting that the body has learned to extract just the right amount that it needs for optimal health. Many nutrients are deadly toxic if we overdose on them, more is definitely not always better. Many foods that are cooked would otherwise be unappetizing or inedible to humans, such as meats and grains, thus bypassing sensory safeguards that would normally protect the body from ingestion of unnatural and unhealthy substances. Studies have shown that the immune system often reacts to the introduction of cooked food into the bloodstream the same way it does to foreign pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Cooking food denatures the proteins, carcinogizes the fats, and caramelizes the carbohydrates; most other nutrients are damaged, deranged or destroyed by the heating process, leaving mostly empty calories. The regular consumption of cooked foods results in the detrimental enlargement of the pancreas.

[WhiteCrow]

Originally Posted by jcasper

Applying heat to foods provides no nutritional benefit to the food and is detrimental to the person ingesting the cooked food. There are reported instances where, by heating food, certain nutrients are more easily released, like lycopene from tomatoes. However, this ignores that hundreds of other nutrients in that heated tomato that were damaged or destroyed; and also assumes that more of a specific nutrient is better, instead of trusting that the body has learned to extract just the right amount that it needs for optimal health. Many nutrients are deadly toxic if we overdose on them, more is definitely not always better. Many foods that are cooked would otherwise be unappetizing or inedible to humans, such as meats and grains, thus bypassing sensory safeguards that would normally protect the body from ingestion of unnatural and unhealthy substances. Studies have shown that the immune system often reacts to the introduction of cooked food into the bloodstream the same way it does to foreign pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Cooking food denatures the proteins, carcinogizes the fats, and caramelizes the carbohydrates; most other nutrients are damaged, deranged or destroyed by the heating process, leaving mostly empty calories. The regular consumption of cooked foods results in the detrimental enlargement of the pancreas.

I see where you're coming from. You are making just one wrong assumption:

Food nowadays, be it organic or even self grown, just has not the nutritional value it once had. And yes overdose of certain nutritions can be toxic. But you are missing my point.

Let's say you want an easy meal containing lots of lycopene and potassium.

You could either eat 10 raw tomatoes, and have a lot of both, or you can cook 1 tomato (and lose the potassium but increase the lycopene) and eat one raw banana (which contains also potassium).

See? 100% raw makes you eat 10 freaking pieces, while a combi of raw and cooked makes you eat 2 pieces.

And yeah oils should not be heated indeed, I'l give you that. But cooking denatures protein? What does that even mean? In many instances, cooking enhances the bioavailability of protein (eggs for example)

Point being, one should carefully study what foods be eaten raw, and what foods be eaten cooked or steamed. They should make a database of that.

[Defiance]

"And yeah oils should not be heated indeed, I'l give you that. But cooking denatures protein? What does that even mean? In many instances, cooking enhances the bioavailability of protein (eggs for example)"



OK, this is the first time I have EVER heard that cooking enhances the protein of eggs. Everything I have ever read or seen says exactly the opposite, that the heat destroys most of the egg's protein and renders it very difficult for the body to process. Where did this info come from?

[Lauxa]

And what I have always heard is that it's okay to eat egg yolks raw but egg whites should be cooked. Don't ask me why.

[Lisa McGregor]

Digestibility of Cooked and Raw Egg Protein in Humans as Assessed by Stable Isotope Techniques -- Evenepoel et al. 128 (10): 1716 -- Journal of Nutrition

just one of plenty of sources about the digestibility of egg protein.

L

[Aleksander Krstic]

Who the hell cares? Just test it for 30 days and see for yourself if it's good.

[Wehey]

From the limited amount that i have read i have found that its the enzyms that are killed off in the cooking process.
All vegetables contain the necessary enzymes within them that allow the easy digestion and absorption of its nutrients into the body.
Cooking kills these enzymes, making the body have to work harder to extract any goodness out of it.....
Just my 2p worth!!

[kat]

Originally Posted by funchy

please cite these studies. thank you.

I'll quote Is Cooked Food Less Nutritious than Raw Food? What Science Says

"Experimental results show cooked starch to be 2 to 12 times more digestible than raw starch. Kataria and Chauhan [1988] provide a direct comparison of starch digestibility in raw vs. cooked mung beans. Here, starch digestibility was measured in milligrams (mg) of maltose released per gram of food. The data from this study indicate that digestion of mung beans soaked 12 hours yields 25.3 mg maltose/gm, mung beans sprouted 24 hours yield 75.0, mung beans soaked and subjected to ordinary cooking yield 138, while mung beans soaked and pressure-cooked (for 5 minutes) yield 305 [Kataria and Chauhan 1988, Tables 1-3, pp. 54-56]. This is solid evidence that the starch in cooked mung beans is much more readily digested than the starch in soaked or sprouted beans, by a factor ranging from about 1.8 (i.e., 138 ÷ 75.0) to 12 times more efficient (305 ÷ 25.3), depending on differences in methods of preparing raw vs. cooked starch. We thus conclude here that overall, certainly at least in the case of mung beans, cooking greatly improves starch digestibility."

Others in this thread have pointed to the effects of cooking on lycopene availability in tomatoes, among other examples.

In my opinion, for certain classes of foods (such as grains and legumes), cooking is a huge advantage - for instance, raw red kidney beans are poisonous to humans. Many of these foods are inedible raw, except (in some cases) as sprouts, to the best of my knowledge. In their cooked form, they've formed a large part of the diets of civilizations around the world for thousands of years.

There's a lot to be said for minimal processing, including raw food, but there are exceptions when certain forms of processing, including cooking, yield meaningful nutritional benefits.

[kat]

Originally Posted by Aleksander Krstic

Who the hell cares? Just test it for 30 days and see for yourself if it's good.

30 days is not a lifetime; you can rule out some diets this way, but it's perfectly possible to be healthy for 30 days on a diet which is not viable long-term.

A 30-day trial of whether or not one needs a source of vitamin b-12, for instance, is absolutely useless unless you're already seriously deficient; it takes years for the body's stores to deplete.

Edit: There's a place for 30-day trials; they can be a useful tool. They're not a reason to throw away absolutely everything which has been learned, whether through controlled scientific studies, individual case studies, or the experiences of people and communities who've been trying something for longer. There are reasons to care.

[WhiteCrow]

Originally Posted by Defiance

"And yeah oils should not be heated indeed, I'l give you that. But cooking denatures protein? What does that even mean? In many instances, cooking enhances the bioavailability of protein (eggs for example)"



OK, this is the first time I have EVER heard that cooking enhances the protein of eggs. Everything I have ever read or seen says exactly the opposite, that the heat destroys most of the egg's protein and renders it very difficult for the body to process. Where did this info come from?

I guess you will not read the article that Lisa provided, since it is a bunch of science stuff. I will give you their conclusion:

"............., and that the true ileal digestibility of egg protein is significantly enhanced by heat-pretreatment. A simple 13C-breath test technique furthermore proved to be a suitable alternative for the evaluation of the true ileal digestibility of egg protein. "

The article however was more of a discussion of the different techniques of evaluating digestibility.

But! Cooking just enhances the protein in EGGS, in meat or something it destroys it.

[WhiteCrow]

Originally Posted by Wehey

From the limited amount that i have read i have found that its the enzyms that are killed off in the cooking process.
All vegetables contain the necessary enzymes within them that allow the easy digestion and absorption of its nutrients into the body.
Cooking kills these enzymes, making the body have to work harder to extract any goodness out of it.....
Just my 2p worth!!

You should read some more.....

[WhiteCrow]

Originally Posted by Lauxa

And what I have always heard is that it's okay to eat egg yolks raw but egg whites should be cooked. Don't ask me why.

Please dont eat yolks raw. Salmonella poisoning could happen. And yeah the whites should be cooked, because of increasing the bioavailability of the protein.