This article states that we would be healthier if we didnt cook our food as our ancestors have conditioned us to do. It says that by cooking food we are destroying the natural enzymes found in it which is leading to diseases in our body.
Does anybody know if there is evidence for or against this?
I believe it is called Macrobiotics (or at least Macrobiotics incorporates this idea) - like any dietary fad, the benefits are likely to be enthusiastically overblown, but there’s probably a grain or two of truth.
Some foods definitely are better cooked though - quite apart from meat which can be dangerous raw, with some things like tomatoes, some of the nutrients are more readily available after cooking (lycopene in the case of tomatoes), although other nutrients may be diminished or destroyed, so it’s probably swings and roundabouts.
There was an infomercial a couple years ago for a nutritional supplement containing a variety of enzymes. A “doctor” (he was a chiropractor, the same one who appeared in an infomercial for some calcium supplement) claimed that many diseases, as well as aging, are caused by enzyme deficiency, and his product would rectify the situation. This claim, and probably the claim that cooked food is bad because it destroys the natural enzymes found in it, is false.
All proteins (including enzymes), once ingested, are broken down into their component amino acids by enzymes known as proteases, including trypsin, chymotrypsin and pepsin. These amino acids then travel into the bloodstream via the small intestine and are distributed throughout the body, where they are used to make new proteins. The enzymes you eat are not absorbed into the bloodstream whole.
Some other reasons why the “cooking food destroys enzymes and is therefore bad” theory is wrong:
The enzymes in food aren’t human enzymes, so they’re useless to humans. It’s far more efficient to break them down and make new, human enzymes out of the raw materials.
Not only are they useless, some of the alien enzymes may actually be dangerous. They may be pathogenic (e.g. some viruses), or they may interfere with human enzymes.
The human body has a complex mechanism for maintaining the appropriate levels of all enzymes. Enzymes are constantly being produced and destroyed; the balance is maintained very well unless there’s a genetic disease present.
Very few Americans or people from other cultures where large amounts of meat are eaten would be deficient in the raw materials for making their own enzymes. A balanced vegetarian diet is also sufficient.
Cooking food doesn’t destroy enzymes (unless you burn it). It denatures them – causes them to change their shape. This makes them inactive (see 1 and 2), but the amino acids remain intact. It makes no difference to your body whether the proteins in food are denatured or not – they’re all going to be broken down anyway.
Cooking food denatures many proteins. So does immersing them in warm, concentrated hydrochloric acid for an hour or two. Which is what the stomach does.
Anyway, the advantages of cooking certain foods are numerous. A few nutrients are in fact destroyed by cooking, as Mangetout mentions, but these are vitamins and other micronutrients. It’s my opinion that health-food advocates vastly overplay the importance of vitamins in the diet; most people probably get enough even if they occasionally lose some potential vitamin A by boiling carrots.
There are some examples where cooking food is legitimately dangerous. Overcooking meats, for example, forms carcinogens (PAHs, I think). There was also the recent study that suggested that starchy, fried foods (e.g. chips in both the UK and US senses) contain acrylamide, a potential carcinogen.
There may be more nutrients in uncooked plant matter, but it is also FAR LESS AVAILABLE to people for digestion. Cooking breaks down the indigestible cellulose far better than does chewing. If the cellulose is not broken (and all plant cells are essentially coated in cellulose), the nutrients are unavailable. We have no enzymes to break down cellulose.
And our pathetic teeth and jaw muscles show that we have been cutting up and cooking our food as long as the species has been in existence. We would have great difficulty eating enough to stay alive otherwise and would spend the entire day chewing.
The thing this program talked about(and it’s in the transcript) is that 3 major foods, wheat, soy beans, and maize, are actually far more nutrious after they’ve been processed than just eating raw.