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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:
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Essential fats: Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio
Vegetable oils: friend or foe?

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Does anyone else find the media frenzy over swine flu a bit over the top? Other than in Mexico, at least so far, people seem to be recovering just fine.

No disrespect to those who have a family member that died from the swine flu, nor to those that went through the illness and recovered. That flu does not sound like fun. Maybe this is only happening in my part of the world, but what I’m finding a bit nuts is the amount of attention the media is giving to this. In my opinion, such coverage is scaring people unnecessarily. When one is bombarded with hourly news reports on the number of cases diagnosed, and the major newscasts of the day making the "pandemic" the top story day after day, and dedicating a fair amount of time to it, people think that if they get a sniffle that they are going to die of the swine flu. Many are wanting to get their hands on the drug “Tamiflu” just in case. (The makers of Tamiflu are rubbing their hands in glee as fear of flu sells drugs!) But if antiviral drugs are used as prevention rather than treatment, the viruses become more resistant to them, so that when we actually do need the drugs they do not work as well.

The fact is that other than in Mexico, this flu does not appear to be deadly, and the numbers that are getting sick in the scheme of things does not appear to be very high, or at least not yet. To be throwing around words like “pandemic” seems over the top for what appears to be happening, at least to my uneducated thinking.

Each year, far more people get sick with the seasonal flu, but we don’t see school closures, or healthy kids being told to stay home from school for a week in case they might be contagious, as happened in Montreal this week. Each year, it is a different strain of seasonal flu that hits us, and on average about 30,000 to 36,000 Americans and 700 to 2500 Canadians die from seasonal flu each year. Will that many actually die from swine flu this year?? Imagine if the seasonal flu were covered in the media each year in the manner that swine flu is now being covered. We’d be afraid to live our lives!

I’m not saying that we should not be informed – just that so much coverage makes people scared. People need information on what they can do to stay healthy, but that info needs to be delivered in a factual way without the hype about the spread of a pandemic. When people hear the word “pandemic”, they think “deadly illness”, and apart from in Mexico, this flu thus far has NOT been deadly.

The bottom line is we need to make ourselves less susceptible to getting sick by building up our immune system through adequate sleep, good quality food, some fermented and raw food to build up our good bacteria in our gut, enough exercise etc. We should wash our hands frequently.

And in order to minimize the spread of germs, if we feel sick, we should stay home. And of course, avoid touching our eyes, nose, and mouth. We should cough or sneeze into our sleeve rather than into our hands. Germs on our hands get spread to door knobs, phones etc. where others get infected. Tissue or handkerchiefs need to be used with care so as not to get germs onto the hands. Here is a fun educational video that gets the point across Enjoy! Cough or sneeze into your sleeve.

Please do keep the comments coming on my blog. If you want to search for other posts by title or by topic, go to www.wellnesstips.ca.

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