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We are the only species that cook our food. Does that help us or hurt us?

I’ve been pondering raw food quite a lot lately, as I watch the adult bald eagles rip apart fresh kills to feed their chicks at the eagle-nest cam I've been glued to over the past month.

Apart from humans, all  other species eat their food raw, whether it be meat or vegetation. So how did it come to be that as humans we cook the bulk of our food?

I read a very interesting article called “What’s cooking? The evolutionary role of cookery”, in the Economist a a while back, where the researcher Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, suggests that learning to cook our food as a species was responsible for our evolutionary advancement.

We’ve been in control of fire for somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 years, and fire for cooking came into widespread use about 125,000 years ago. Cooking is universal in human populations – all societies cook.

Cooking our food changes it in two very important ways – it breaks down the food making it softer and easier to digest thereby reducing the energy (calories) used to assimilate it while at the same time increasing dramatically the amount of food digested, AND it kills off any harmful bacteria that may threaten our immune system.

And Dr. Wrangham believes that from an evolutionary standpoint, cooking made it possible for us to digest and assimilate more nutrition, which in turn allowed our species to thrive with a shorter intestine and made it possible to develop a larger brain.

Cooking therefore may have played an integral role in making us who we are today, but cooking also damages our food in some ways too. Heat not only kills unsafe bacteria, (which is one of the reasons touted for the pasteurization of so many of our foods), but it also destroys the good bacteria important to our gut and immune system function, as well as the enzymes, vitamins and polyunsaturated fatty acids needed to nourish us and keep us healthy.

And when starches and proteins are heated, a maillard reaction occurs causing
glycation, where cooked sugar molecules haphazardly combine with protein molecules, creating AGES (Advanced Glycation End Products) as well as potential carcinogens such as acrylamide, which have been found in foods like french fries or potato chips.

Previously we did not think that these reactions were harmful to our health, but now we know that they do play a role in inflammatory diseases such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

There is no question that enzyme-rich, raw food packs a nutritional punch that cooked food cannot match, but there is also no question that some foods need to be cooked through to prevent any chance of food-borne illness, such as pork, chicken or ground beef.

Some vegetables are actually more nourishing if lightly cooked too, as the heat will break down the nutrient inhibitors in them, making the nutrients more available to the gut for absorption.

These include cruciferous veggies like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage which contain goitrogens (which inhibit thyroid hormone) and are neutralized with light cooking, as well as some leafy greens, like spinach, kale, chard and collard greens which contain oxalic acid which reduce the absorption of calcium and can irritate the intestines. So steaming these veggies lightly without overcooking is the way to go.

Probably ideally, between 40 to 60% of our diet should be made up of uncooked food, and the rest can be cooked. Getting this much uncooked food into the diet can be challenging, so a good place to start is to try and include something raw at each meal.

Juicing is an easy way to increase raw veggie consumption, and will dramatically increase nutrition. Dr. Mercola suggests tomatoes, cucumbers, fennel, and celery as a good beginning juice, and one can play with a garlic clove or two, ginger-root, some quality sea salt, and cayenne pepper to tweak the flavour.

One can add a free-range raw egg, possibly some organic flax and coconut oil for some quality protein and fat, and then drink it right away before the nutritional content degrades. I have also tried adding tumeric root to the juice, which if you can tolerate the bitter flavour, adds a lot of health benefits.

Most raw-foodists are vegan, but I personally don't think most people can be optimally healthy on a vegan diet. And although not at all necessary, if you really want to go hard core and eat only raw food, it is possible to do so and eat animal foods as well.

The cookbook Nourishing Traditions provides recipes for preparing raw meat safely, and if one can tolerate and access raw, pasture-fed dairy, that can be another source of raw food in your diet.

Fermented raw milk products like yogurt or kefir are extremely nourishing, as are other fermented raw foods, like cabbage in the form of sauerkraut or kimchi. You may notice that if you add more raw food to your diet, you will feel less hungry due to the nutritionally dense content of the food, which makes it easier to eat less food.

Eating more raw food also supplies our digestive tracts with more enzymes to help us digest the food, sparing our own enzymes from being used up in the process.

I have written extensively about the need to decrease omega 6 consumption due to the fact that we get too much of it in our diet compared to omega 3s. The ideal ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 should be 4 to 1, and our current diet tends give us a ratio of 20 to 1 which is very inflammatory to the body.

BUT omega 6 fatty acids are an essential fat that we must get from the diet, and pretty much all the omega 6 foods we eat are cooked and therefore damaged (plant oils, grains, eggs, meat). These heat-damaged fats unleash free-radicals into the body, and are highly inflammatory.

So the question becomes "Are we getting enough UNDAMAGED (raw) omega 6 to be healthy?" Including some raw nuts and seeds that have been soaked and dried, or perhaps sprouting some chick peas, mung beans or other legumes and eating them raw will provide the undamaged omega 6 fatty acids our bodies need.

Related Tips:
Pasteurized almonds labelled as raw
Pasteurized almonds update
Bacteria, our immune system and food-borne illness
Nutrient dense foods
Maintain bone mass by preparing grains, nuts and seeds properly
Essential fats: Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio
Vegetable oils: friend or foe?

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