Thoughts on Raw Food

I never tried a 100% raw food diet before. At some points in my diet I may eat about 30% of calories from raw stuff but not very often.

There are some pretty extraordinary claims about the magic of raw food diets to prevent disease or even cure. I’m pretty skeptical about these claims but still there may be a grain of truth in all this.

Even though I’m a always cook your food kind of guy I’m down for experiments on myself every now and again. I’m not going to go on a 100 % raw food diet but I am going to try and get more of my calories from raw fruits and vegetables, and maybe eggs depending on the quality of them. From some studies I read, only about 1 in every 30,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella so I’m not too worried. Plus, I’m not infirmed or a young child so salmonella probably wouldn’t kill me anyway.

Cooking food has a long history in the human timeline. There is evidence that humans have been cooking since pre-history. Some scientists make the claim that this, along with the consumption of meat, is what allowed us to get enough calories to support this big brain of ours. It’s a plausible theory. Cooking does make the proteins in meat more digestible and it breaks down the cellulose that encases much of the nutrients in vegetables. Our stomachs don’t deal with cellulose well so cooking makes more calories available in that carrot or piece of celery. Another benefit of cooking is that it kills any harmful bacteria that may inhabit food.

The reasons to cook food make sense but I can’t help but wonder what is lost when we cook. There must be some nutrients that are lost because they can’t stand the high temperature of cooking. If you look at anecdotal reports of people achieving great health after switching to a raw food diet you can’t help but wonder if there is some truth to their claims.

I’m not going to go crazy here. I won’t eat raw meat or anything like that but I’m going to see if there are any noticeable effects from eating more raw foods. These n=1 experiments aren’t very scientific, I know, but they do tell me something about how my body responds to food. I may fool myself sometimes but I do discover things by experimenting with my self.