Raw Food: Cooked foods on a raw diet
May 13th, 2009 | By Admin | Category: Raw Food Diet TipsDoes moving to a raw foods diet mean never eating hot food again? No, it doesn?t. Sometimes you want something hot. Hot food has always signified comfort for many of us. And on a cold, rainy day, carrot sticks or wheatgrass juice probably won?t cut it for most of us.
Does moving to a raw foods diet mean never eating hot food again? No, it doesn?t. Sometimes you want something hot. Hot food has always signified comfort for many of us. And on a cold, rainy day, carrot sticks or wheatgrass juice probably won?t cut it for most of us.
Most raw food, like our bodies, is very perishable. When raw foods are exposed to temperatures above 118 degrees, they start to rapidly break down, just as our bodies would if we had a fever that high. One of the constituents of foods which can break down are enzymes. Enzymes help us digest our food. Enzymes are proteins though, and they have a very specific 3-dimensional structure in space. Once they are heated much above 118 degrees, this structure can change.
Once enzymes are exposed to heat, they are no longer able to provide the function for which they were designed. Cooked foods contribute to chronic illness, because their enzyme content is damaged and thus requires us to make our own enzymes to process the food. The digestion of cooked food uses valuable metabolic enzymes in order to help digest your food. Digestion of cooked food demands much more energy than the digestion of raw food. In general, raw food is so much more easily digested that it passes through the digestive tract in 1/2 to 1/3 of the time it takes for cooked food.
Eating enzyme-dead foods places a burden on your pancreas and other organs and overworks them, which eventually exhausts these organs. Many people gradually impair their pancreas and progressively lose the ability to digest their food after a lifetime of ingesting processed foods.
But you certainly can steam and blanch foods if you want your food at least warm. Use a food thermometer and cook them no higher than 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Up to this temperature
, you won?t be doing too much damage to the enzymes in food.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I’m a raw food lover and I absolutly believe in the power of raw food energy. Yet, I still don’t get the enzyme thing. I can understand how heat destroys enzymes, I have no problems with that angle. I can understand how heat denatures proteins (enzymes are proteins) and how they then cannot recognise the necessary receptors in the body and hence the correct signalling metabolic pathway is not activated. The problem I do have is how metabolic enzymes are taken from else where in our body to digest food. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Our body makes its own digestive enzymes specific for food breakdown and specific for certain areas of our body eg amalase in the saliva to start the breakdown of carbohydrates. I’d love more info on this – I am a bit of science geek – my PhD was in medical Biochemistry – yet I will admit to have not spent too long looking into this aspect of enzymatic behavioiur of food breakdown and the effect heat plays on this role.
Thanks for shedding any light on this area of raw food for me.
Hi there Claire,
thought I would help you here.
have a look at these two websites that explain in detail what metabolic enzmes work in the body and how heat destroys them
Hope this helps
http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/enzymes.htm
http://www.essortment.com/family/healthtopicsme_supg.htm
cheers
Jane
jcm@rawinspiration.biz