Cooked food causes adverse bodily reaction?

So, I just watched the documentary "Food Matters" and it was stated (based upon experimentation) that cooked food is seen by the body to be toxic and that the body deploys a white cell reaction. It was further found that if at least 51% of a meal was 'raw', that the body would not have this negative reaction to food and thus would not strain our already overworked immune systems. It has to do with the foods enzymes being destroyed during the cooking process. My questions are: is this accurate? should we be eating more raw foods? and if so, we should really change how we do business in the kitchen. It seems like most of the recipes on this site at least use healthy ingredients, but if cooking turns them into toxins we're not doing much good. Your thoughts Mark??

Adam

Follow their references. If that takes you nowhere (it will) then ignore it. Otherwise go raw food vegan

you should look up daniel vitalis. he is a former raw vegan with a lot to say about this. his main points are that cooking increases the nutritional density of many food by making it physically smaller and easier to digest (like breaking down the cellulose in veggies) , and that humans are the only animal that has evolved WITH fire, and it makes us and our diets unique.

The ability to cook food, along with the ability to eat meat, was a major step in our evolution. Cooking certain foods makes some nutrients much more available and makes many plant foods easier to digest. I don't buy the raw food argument (although yes, some foods are better eaten raw if one wants to get particular nutrients out of them that are broken down in cooking).

So eat rare steaks...

[QUOTE=Alex Good;404854]So eat rare steaks...[/QUOTE]

+ 1. Meat should be more than 51% of your diet anyway (in terms of calories). So then you can cook your veggies and not worry.

Just examine their reasoning. They say that 51% of the meal needs to be raw. 51% as in more than half. I'm sorry, evolution may be pretty freaking amazing but that is just an arbitrary number that these guys made up, thus demonstrating that they didn't actually do a real experiemt. There is no mechanism for measuring the ratio of cooked/raw food and determining "aha! 51%, now we don't need to attack this meal!". Furthermore what makes them draw the conclusions that "oh our immune system is just so stressed, oh this is just so toxic", as has been explained earlier in the thread, humans evolved with fire, and thus we have adaptations. Why isn't this an easy to employ mechanism that makes cooked food benign? Who says that any immune reaction is just so very harmful, how did they qualify that? I couldn't find one scientific reference on their site. Indeed, do they have references? To my knowledge the only detriment to cooking is if food is cooked excessively enough to produce large amounts of carcinogens. We could take the same shaky and unsupported reasoning to state that raw vegetables kill you dead because they contain toxins that get destroyed when they are cooked. Dose makes the poison, though.

Good skepticism. These guys are in the land of make-shit-up-that-you-like-the-sound-of.

food is the basis of life. of course, it is important for us to pay much information to food consumption.

If I were to cook a steak rare then the vast majority of the steak would be raw... I just don't get the raw food crowd, I thought regular vegans were nuts but they are just out there... I picked up a raw food lifetsyle book and checked it out the other day and the whole thing was completely devoid of any scientific information, just a bunch of crap about how our bodies are made of energy and light and we need the "vibe" of raw foods to sustain us...

Humans were cooking food before we were Homo Sapiens...it's not like cooking is a novel thing

[QUOTE=jspradley;435233]If I were to cook a steak rare then the vast majority of the steak would be raw... I just don't get the raw food crowd, I thought regular vegans were nuts but they are just out there... I picked up a raw food lifetsyle book and checked it out the other day and the whole thing was completely devoid of any scientific information, just a bunch of crap about how our bodies are made of energy and light and we need the "vibe" of raw foods to sustain us...

Humans were cooking food before we were Homo Sapiens...it's not like cooking is a novel thing[/QUOTE]

An acquaintance from college seems to be somewhat of a raw vegan, we had some friendly back and forth and at least he's NOT an animal lover and isn't against eating meat. He does seem to think raw foods are nutritionally superior so we were talking about that. He consumes raw dairy (and gave me some sources to get some for myself) and also eggs. He hasn't yet told me if he eats sushi or any raw meats but it seems to me that as long as he includesg eggs and dairy then his diet can't be too bad.

We mostly agreed about avoiding processed foods and man-made sugars, but he hasn't yet replied on whether he thinks serious fruit consumption is safe. I told him i was weary of all that fructose, but I'm waiting for his reponse.

He hasn't pulled any "light" stuff, but he does say dead/living foods a lot which is pretty annoying.