Three Reasons To Always Cook Your Food

There really is no need to punish yourself with raw foods

Image

A raw food diet sounds like the perfect antidote to these polluted, toxic times: clean and detoxifying, even a touch spiritual. You can atone for past dietary transgressions with uncooked vegetables.

There’s more than a whiff of the puritanicals at work here, but little evidence to substantiate the many health claims made in favour of this departure from the usual human diet. That’s probably because a raw food diet is both unnatural and unhealthy. Here are three reasons why you should carry on cooking.

Reason one: You don’t have the guts

Humans do not have the right digestive systems to metabolise raw plants. Grazing herbivores, on the other hand, are perfectly adapted to raw food. Their diet provides all the nutrition they need. Even so, these animals must eat almost all day long — that is, graze — to ensure they obtain all that nutrition. It’s quite hard work.

There are two types of herbivore, and both types have evolved complex digestive systems to manage the large amount of plant matter they consume every day.

The first type of herbivore is the ruminant, an animal that has a complex, four-chambered stomach to facilitate the…