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Can someone in the know please express their opinion on the raw food lifestyle? If you're going to dismiss it as ridiculous I'd like you to back up your claims

Can someone in the know please express their opinion on the raw food lifestyle? If you're going to dismiss it as ridiculous I'd like you to back up your claims with at the very least strong personal anecdotal evidence, e.g., "I feel extremely happy and energetic, yet I eat tons of meat and cheese." I'm reading a book that suggests that cooking food results in the denaturing of proteins, digestive enzymes, and other nutrients, and that makes a lot of sense to me. My primary goal is to improve energy levels.

fleitz 17y ago
Cooking food increases bio-availability of nutrients while decreasing the amount of nutrients present in food. Cooking food is believed to be one of the important factors that led to increased brain size in sapiens as it increased bio-availability of nutrients. Whether that increase is still relevant given the total availability food in modern society is debatable. These are general statements, in specific foods it may be preferable not to cook them. Certain foods such as chicken & pork should probably always be cooked. The basic premise is this, if you are going to eat 1 carrot you will get more nutrients from it being cooked. The real question is whether it is better to eat 1 cooked carrot or two uncooked carrots. Our ancestors didn't have the luxury of having two carrots available so cooking was much preferable.
e1ven 17y ago
I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months by following a very low-carb diet (Under 20G / day), and I've never felt more energetic. I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages. Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon, but the low-carb diet, while very much not a raw-food lifestyle, is working well for me.
- illumin8 17y ago
  What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch leaves you dragging because you're eating bad carbs which are quickly metabolized into sugar in your blood, causing an insulin reaction and subsequent crash shortly later.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    I did a similar diet for a couple of years once. Lost lots of weight, about 40 pounds, had absolutely bottomless pools of energy I could never seem to exhaust no matter how much I exercised, recovered from sporting injuries alarmingly fast, almost never bruised at all, and grew hair and nails at ridiculous rates, like having to cut my nails 2 or 3 times a week on occasion and my cholesterol was absolutely fine. I ended up quitting because: 1) It gets expensive. 2) It got boring, all the stuff I wanted to eat was not on the diet. I think much of the weight loss was from not wanting to eat another bunless burger. 3) I actually felt gross all the time, like oils were just oozing from my pores.
  - maxharris 17y ago
    The key step in cholesterol synthesis is the formation of mevalonate from beta-hydroxy-beta-methylglutaryl-CoA (HMG-CoA), which is catalyzed by HMG-CoA reductase. You can be certain that that HMG-CoA reductase is really, really important in cholesterol biosynthesis because statins work by blocking this enzyme. HMG-CoA reductase activity is induced by insulin, and reduced by glucagon. To really control cholesterol, it's more important to cut carbs, not dietary sources of cholesterol (which fall anyway when appetite control is restored as leptin receptors in the hypothalamus regain function.)
  - e1ven 17y ago
    I had my cholesterol checked a few weeks ago as part of my annual physical. The Dr said it's in line with a normal 28 year old; Sorry, don't remember the numbers, it's never been very important to me. I am curious- Where would you buy a meal with Steel cut oats near your office? As nice as it would be to bring things with me everyday to work, I really prefer getting out of the office for a while to clear my head, and re-focus on the tasks left to be done. I can get a steak anywhere, but I'd have a hard time finding a more balanced lunch.
    - illumin8 17y ago
      Yeah, you're right, you pretty much have to cook your own food if you want to eat the good grains. Steel cut oats are not so bad; just soak them the night before in a pot of boiling water, cook for 10 minutes in the morning, add some cinnamon and chopped apples and you've got a great healthy breakfast. Beans and other good carbs are also difficult to cook on your own, but you can get canned ones.
maxharris 17y ago
I've been eating mostly raw food for about a year, and I love it. My diet so far has consisted of blue-rare steak (all you need to do to be safe is to sear the edges and sides to kill E. coli that has gotten onto the meat during butchering. I learned this in my microbiology class!) [You have to watch out about things like steak sauce - read the labels, and you'll find out that almost all of them have sugar in them. So I never use steak sauce, ketchup, or any of that shit - just salt+pepper.] Salads are great, as long as you make your own dressing (so that you can keep it low-sugar.) Just a little salt, vinegar, and a nice lettuce mix, and just a little feta cheese... Berries can be great if you need something sweet; they have enough fiber to keep you from getting an insulin spike if you're on my diet. [Be careful to not do this too much - they're expensive, and you can overdo it by gorging on several boxes every day! Many of your needs for vitamins are met with meat and leafy greens.] At any rate, what I've described is probably called a paleo diet (maybe?) Meat is such an essential part of my life! I'm pretty healthy, and I've lost a lot of fat eating this way. (I used to be 215 lbs, now I'm at 171; I'm 6'1".) One more thing - I used to drink sugary soda and fruit juices - these are both terrible things to put into your body. Cut that out alone, and you'll be doing yourself a huge favor.
- illumin8 17y ago
  Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning). As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what your stomach does anyway.
  - maxharris 17y ago
    How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)? I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats). But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the surfaces of the steak (which can get there from fecal contamination during butchering), and doing more than that is a waste. The outsides of the steaks I make are crispy, but about .5 cm below the surface, it's nice and red. (I don't eat cuts with huge veins and the like inside them.)
zasz 17y ago
Your book sounds like BS to me. Yes, cooking does denature proteins. Think of an egg before and after you boil it. On the other hand, it seems unlikely to me that the hydrochloric acid in your stomach doesn't also denature the hell out of proteins. In fact, your body probably has to denature proteins to get at the amino acids in them so it can build the precise proteins it needs.
- carbocation 17y ago
  This is correct. With perhaps a few exceptions, your body is not in the business of absorbing whole proteins. Trypsin is one of the enzymes used to reduce peptides (protein fragments) into even smaller blocks (often down to amino acids). So yeah, whether or not that protein is denatured before your duodenum, it sure as hell will be afterwards. At least, so one hopes.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
yummyfajitas 17y ago
I don't have any opinion on raw foods, apart from the fact that any diet which excludes french fries is not a diet for me. However, I'd suggest that the book you are reading is probably junk science. A protein is a long chain of amino acids folded into a certain structure. Denaturation is the process of unfolding it, and will be performed by stomach acid if not by heat. A protein is digested by separating it into it's component amino acids. Denaturation is a necessary step in this process.
tokenadult 17y ago
It's important to point out that a paleo diet is not a raw diet, in view of some of the other comments your question has received. Cooking goes far back in the hominin ancestral line, well before the speciation of modern humans (Homo sapiens). http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html "There are two really fascinating things about human evolution that we have yet to really fully come to grips with. One is the evolution of cooking. Whenever cooking happened, it must have had absolutely monstrous effects on us, because cooking enormously increases the quality of the food we eat, and it enormously increases the range of food items that we can eat. We all know that food quality and food abundance are key variables in understanding animal ecology. But the amazing thing is that although at the moment there is no conventional wisdom that says when cooking evolved, social anthropology and all sorts of conventional wisdom say that humans are the animals that cook. We distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world because they eat raw stuff and we eat cooked stuff. The best anthropology can do at the moment is to say that maybe sometime around 250 or 300 thousand years ago cooking really got going, because there's archeological evidence of earth ovens. "This is fine, but long before earth ovens came along we must have learned to cook. And you would think that cooking would be associated with things like evidence in your body of the food being easier to digest, such as smaller teeth, or maybe a reduction in the size of the rib cage as the size of the stomach gets smaller, or maybe the jaw getting smaller. And there's only one time in human evolution that all that happens; that is, 1.9 million years ago with the evolution of the genus Homo. It's there we must look for evidence that cooking was adopted." All of our ancestors in paleolithic times cooked. Human beings are adapted to eat cooked food.

fleitz 17y ago

Cooking food increases bio-availability of nutrients while decreasing the amount of nutrients present in food. Cooking food is believed to be one of the important factors that led to increased brain size in sapiens as it increased bio-availability of nutrients. Whether that increase is still relevant given the total availability food in modern society is debatable. These are general statements, in specific foods it may be preferable not to cook them. Certain foods such as chicken & pork should probably always be cooked. The basic premise is this, if you are going to eat 1 carrot you will get more nutrients from it being cooked. The real question is whether it is better to eat 1 cooked carrot or two uncooked carrots. Our ancestors didn't have the luxury of having two carrots available so cooking was much preferable.

e1ven 17y ago

I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months by following a very low-carb diet (Under 20G / day), and I've never felt more energetic. I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages. Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon, but the low-carb diet, while very much not a raw-food lifestyle, is working well for me.

illumin8 17y ago
What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch leaves you dragging because you're eating bad carbs which are quickly metabolized into sugar in your blood, causing an insulin reaction and subsequent crash shortly later.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I did a similar diet for a couple of years once. Lost lots of weight, about 40 pounds, had absolutely bottomless pools of energy I could never seem to exhaust no matter how much I exercised, recovered from sporting injuries alarmingly fast, almost never bruised at all, and grew hair and nails at ridiculous rates, like having to cut my nails 2 or 3 times a week on occasion and my cholesterol was absolutely fine. I ended up quitting because: 1) It gets expensive. 2) It got boring, all the stuff I wanted to eat was not on the diet. I think much of the weight loss was from not wanting to eat another bunless burger. 3) I actually felt gross all the time, like oils were just oozing from my pores.
- maxharris 17y ago
  The key step in cholesterol synthesis is the formation of mevalonate from beta-hydroxy-beta-methylglutaryl-CoA (HMG-CoA), which is catalyzed by HMG-CoA reductase. You can be certain that that HMG-CoA reductase is really, really important in cholesterol biosynthesis because statins work by blocking this enzyme. HMG-CoA reductase activity is induced by insulin, and reduced by glucagon. To really control cholesterol, it's more important to cut carbs, not dietary sources of cholesterol (which fall anyway when appetite control is restored as leptin receptors in the hypothalamus regain function.)
- e1ven 17y ago
  I had my cholesterol checked a few weeks ago as part of my annual physical. The Dr said it's in line with a normal 28 year old; Sorry, don't remember the numbers, it's never been very important to me. I am curious- Where would you buy a meal with Steel cut oats near your office? As nice as it would be to bring things with me everyday to work, I really prefer getting out of the office for a while to clear my head, and re-focus on the tasks left to be done. I can get a steak anywhere, but I'd have a hard time finding a more balanced lunch.
  - illumin8 17y ago
    Yeah, you're right, you pretty much have to cook your own food if you want to eat the good grains. Steel cut oats are not so bad; just soak them the night before in a pot of boiling water, cook for 10 minutes in the morning, add some cinnamon and chopped apples and you've got a great healthy breakfast. Beans and other good carbs are also difficult to cook on your own, but you can get canned ones.

maxharris 17y ago

I've been eating mostly raw food for about a year, and I love it. My diet so far has consisted of blue-rare steak (all you need to do to be safe is to sear the edges and sides to kill E. coli that has gotten onto the meat during butchering. I learned this in my microbiology class!) [You have to watch out about things like steak sauce - read the labels, and you'll find out that almost all of them have sugar in them. So I never use steak sauce, ketchup, or any of that shit - just salt+pepper.] Salads are great, as long as you make your own dressing (so that you can keep it low-sugar.) Just a little salt, vinegar, and a nice lettuce mix, and just a little feta cheese... Berries can be great if you need something sweet; they have enough fiber to keep you from getting an insulin spike if you're on my diet. [Be careful to not do this too much - they're expensive, and you can overdo it by gorging on several boxes every day! Many of your needs for vitamins are met with meat and leafy greens.] At any rate, what I've described is probably called a paleo diet (maybe?) Meat is such an essential part of my life! I'm pretty healthy, and I've lost a lot of fat eating this way. (I used to be 215 lbs, now I'm at 171; I'm 6'1".) One more thing - I used to drink sugary soda and fruit juices - these are both terrible things to put into your body. Cut that out alone, and you'll be doing yourself a huge favor.

illumin8 17y ago
Interesting. Paleo diet has the right foods in it, but I suspect you're not gaining anything by not cooking your meats (except possible food poisoning). As others have said, cooking just denatures proteins, which is similar to what your stomach does anyway.
- maxharris 17y ago
  How am I at risk of food poisoning if I eat blue-rare steak (which is beef)? I agree that cooking hamburger all the way through is necessary (because the outside gets in when it's ground up), and that doing this doesn't work for chicken and pork (you need to cook those meats). But I still don't understand why you think my microbiology professor is wrong. She says that all you need to do is to kill the E. coli on the surfaces of the steak (which can get there from fecal contamination during butchering), and doing more than that is a waste. The outsides of the steaks I make are crispy, but about .5 cm below the surface, it's nice and red. (I don't eat cuts with huge veins and the like inside them.)

zasz 17y ago

Your book sounds like BS to me. Yes, cooking does denature proteins. Think of an egg before and after you boil it. On the other hand, it seems unlikely to me that the hydrochloric acid in your stomach doesn't also denature the hell out of proteins. In fact, your body probably has to denature proteins to get at the amino acids in them so it can build the precise proteins it needs.

carbocation 17y ago
This is correct. With perhaps a few exceptions, your body is not in the business of absorbing whole proteins. Trypsin is one of the enzymes used to reduce peptides (protein fragments) into even smaller blocks (often down to amino acids). So yeah, whether or not that protein is denatured before your duodenum, it sure as hell will be afterwards. At least, so one hopes.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

yummyfajitas 17y ago

I don't have any opinion on raw foods, apart from the fact that any diet which excludes french fries is not a diet for me. However, I'd suggest that the book you are reading is probably junk science. A protein is a long chain of amino acids folded into a certain structure. Denaturation is the process of unfolding it, and will be performed by stomach acid if not by heat. A protein is digested by separating it into it's component amino acids. Denaturation is a necessary step in this process.

tokenadult 17y ago

It's important to point out that a paleo diet is not a raw diet, in view of some of the other comments your question has received. Cooking goes far back in the hominin ancestral line, well before the speciation of modern humans (Homo sapiens). http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html "There are two really fascinating things about human evolution that we have yet to really fully come to grips with. One is the evolution of cooking. Whenever cooking happened, it must have had absolutely monstrous effects on us, because cooking enormously increases the quality of the food we eat, and it enormously increases the range of food items that we can eat. We all know that food quality and food abundance are key variables in understanding animal ecology. But the amazing thing is that although at the moment there is no conventional wisdom that says when cooking evolved, social anthropology and all sorts of conventional wisdom say that humans are the animals that cook. We distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world because they eat raw stuff and we eat cooked stuff. The best anthropology can do at the moment is to say that maybe sometime around 250 or 300 thousand years ago cooking really got going, because there's archeological evidence of earth ovens. "This is fine, but long before earth ovens came along we must have learned to cook. And you would think that cooking would be associated with things like evidence in your body of the food being easier to digest, such as smaller teeth, or maybe a reduction in the size of the rib cage as the size of the stomach gets smaller, or maybe the jaw getting smaller. And there's only one time in human evolution that all that happens; that is, 1.9 million years ago with the evolution of the genus Homo. It's there we must look for evidence that cooking was adopted." All of our ancestors in paleolithic times cooked. Human beings are adapted to eat cooked food.