The Health Benefits of Eating Raw Foods

There are many benefits of eating raw foods instead of eating cooked foods. First the worst foods to eat are processed foods that are made by man. They are all cooked, not raw. They are designed to make you eat as much food as possible since that means more money for them. Also they are designed to make you fat since fat people eat more than thin people. Unprocessed foods are made by God or nature.

One example of this is salt. Salt is not a food but it is a chemical. It is not in any unprocessed food even in seaweed. Almost all foods have sodium in it that is a mineral but salt is not sodium. Salt is a chemical known as sodium chloride. Salt causes people to eat more food and drink more liquid.

Whenever someone says that someone needs to eat raw food, remember that all the other animals out there do not eat any cooked food. They eat all of their food raw. There was a test done with cats called Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition. They gave thousands of cats raw food and thousands of cats cooked foods. The results were that the cats eating raw foods were healthier than the cats eating cooked foods. The cats eating cooked foods had many of the degenerative problems that humans have when the cats got old.

Then when it came to the second generation of cats, the ones eating raw foods had no problems. But the ones eating only cooked foods were having these degenerative problems only half way through their life. The third generation of cats were having these health problems early in their life. Some of them were blind or weak. Some of these cats could not have children. The cats in the third generation could only live for 6 months.

Not only are some vitamins destroyed by cooking but cooking kills all of the enzymes in the food so cooked food has no enzymes in them. These enzymes are very beneficial for health and help people to digest and assimilate the nutrients in the food. A biochemist and nutrition researcher wrote a book just about how important enzymes are. It is called Enzyme Nutrition by Edward Howell. It says:

"Enzyme Nutrition presents the most vital nutritional discovery since that of vitamins and minerals—food enzymes. Our digestive organs produce some enzymes internally, however food enzymes are necessary for optimal health and must come from uncooked foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables, raw sprouted grains, unpasteurized dairy products, and food enzyme supplements."

Now sometimes they say that a study shows that people can assimilate certain nutrients better when they are cooked instead of raw. The most famous of these is the one with lycopene, a phytochemical that is in tomatoes. Maybe this study was done by a company selling tomato sauce. Watermelon was found by the U.S.D.A. (United States Department of Agriculture) to contain more lycopene than tomatoes.

Since people eat watermelon raw they decided to test the bioavailability of cooked lycopene versus raw lycopene. They thought that it would be less bioavailable but they wanted to measure by how much. To their surprise, the USDA found that the raw lycopene was just as bioavailable as the cooked lycopene. So if that famous study was wrong, you have to wonder about other studies done. Remember that gorillas share 98% of the same DNA that we have and they eat all of their food raw.

I know one young woman that was very depressed and she got rid of the depression by switching to a raw food diet. One 13 year old girl had terminal brain cancer and she cured it with a raw food diet. Many raw food diets are not all raw. One group only eats 85% raw foods followed by eating 15% healthy cooked food at the end of the day as a reward. They have all sorts of testimonials of people curing cancer, depression and anxiety. They found that 85% raw has all the benefits of eating 100% raw.