There has been many debates on whether raw food is better than cooked food. Lets start with the first question: which type of food digests faster?





Enzymes found in raw food are destroyed by high tmeperatures. When raw foods are exposed to temperatures above 118 degrees, they start to break down and end up getting destroyed. Enzymes help us digest our food and they are made of proteins. When heated, the structure of the enzyme changes and distorts.

Once enzymes are exposed to heat, they are no longer able to act out the function for which they were designed. Cooked foods are linked to chronic illness, because their enzyme content is damaged and that requires us to make our own enzymes to process the food. The digestion of cooked food uses precious metabolic enzymes in order to help digest your food. Digestion of cooked food uses much more energy than the digestion of raw food. Overall, raw food is so much more easily digested that it passes through the digestive tract in half or one third the time
it takes for cooked food.

Eating enzyme-dead foods (aka food that are cooked over 118 degrees celsius), places a burden on your pancreas and other organs and overworks them, and ends up exhausting them. Many people gradually impair their pancreas and progressively lose the ability to digest their food after a lifetime of ingesting processed foods.

Is that enough for you to change your diet into one that is filled with raw food? No? Then let my last explanation to the final question sway you into submission.

The second question is: So is cooked food better than raw food?

In 1930, a research was conducted under the direction of Dr. Paul Kouchakoff at the Institute of Clinical Chemistry in Lausanne, Switzerland. The effect of food (cooked and processed versus raw and natural) on the immune system was tested and documented.

Dr. Kouchakoff's discovery concerned the leukocytes, the white blood cells.

It was found that after a person eats cooked food, his/her blood responds immediately by increasing the number of white blood cells. This is a well-known phenomena called 'digestive leukocytosis', in which there is a rise in the number of leukocytes - white blood cells - after eating.

Since digestive leukocytosis was always observed after a meal, it was considered to be a normal physiological response to eating. No one knew why the number of white cells rises after eating, since this appeared to be a stress response, as if the body was somehow reacting to something harmful such as infection, exposure to toxic chemicals or trauma.




Disturbing, isn't it? Now, lets continue.

In 1930, the Swiss researchers at the institute of Chemical Chemistry made a remarkable discovery. They found that eating raw, unaltered food did not cause a reaction in the blood. In addition, they found that if a food had been heated beyond a certain temperature (unique to each food), or if the food was processed (refined, chemicals added, etc.), this always caused a rise in the number of white cells in the blood.

Ah, now link this back to previous bold and red words: "as if the body was somehow reacting to something harmful such as infection, exposure to toxic chemicals or trauma. "

The researchers then renamed this reaction 'pathological leukocytosis', since the body was reacting to highly altered food. They tested many different types of foods and found that if the foods were not refined or overheated, they caused no reaction. The body saw them as 'friendly foods'. However, these same foods, if heated at too high a temperature, caused a negative reaction in the blood, a reaction found only when the body is invaded by a dangerous pathogen or trauma.

Ah hah! There it is! The above bold words explained it all! Cooked food is not good for the body!



The worst offenders of all, whether heated or not, were processed foods which had been refined (such as white flour and white rice), or pasteurized (a process in which milk is flash-heated to high temperatures to kill bacteria), or homogenized (also seen in milk where the fat in milk is subjected to artificial suspension), or preserved (chemicals are added to food to delay spoilage or to enhance texture or taste).

Well, if we want to eat cooked food then the best ways are to lightly steam, stew, or use a slow crock cooker.

Ah, now we are all a little more wiser, aren't we? So raw food, i salute you!

(By the way, for the explanations are taken from this website: http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/enzymes.htm Of course, i edited some of them.)