 The benefits of eating raw vegetables are the same for anybody. Fruit and vegetables are the cornerstone of a healthy diet and they will lower the risk of many chronic diseases including cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Raw foods are foods that are uncooked but also it's foods that have been minimally processed. So most foods that are eaten raw are going to be plant based foods. If you looked at a person's normal diet after on raw food it will contain plenty of fruits and vegetables as its basis. Some people may choose to eat some raw meat foods maybe our sushi for example would be eaten but by far plant foods will make up the 90% of the foods that a person has on their plate. Here I'm going to make brautiging. We have some bloomed wild rice which we've soaked overnight in the dehydrator, some sprouted buckwheat which we've soaked and sprouted for 24 hours and then dehydrated for another 48. Now I'm just going to mix those two together and that's going to be our couscous. We have some fresh vegetables, we toss in salt then we place in the dehydrated to dry them off and that will give us this which is a vegetable with a cooked appearance as well as a cooked texture and I'm going to add some sprouted chickpeas and then just some Moroccan sauce. Before humans discovered fire all of our food was eaten raw and one of the reasons why we've probably done so well as a species is that when you start a cooking food we actually increase the amount of foods we could eat and we increase the digestibility of food allowing us to grow bigger and stronger and dominate the planet. If you only eat raw foods you limit the amount of nutrients that you eat. There is a risk of deficiencies if you become too focused on particular foods and importantly if you only eat raw foods you exclude some really beneficial foods that are good for our health. Legumes for example they are strongly linked with a reduction of many chronic diseases but if you eat raw foods you won't be eating beans or lentils or peas. When you eat food you do destroy some of the proteins and enzymes in them but so too when you eat the foods that's what your stomach acid does as well. Cooking food can make food healthier. Number one and most importantly when you cook food you kill off a lot of microbes that can give you food poisoning and number two when you cook food you can actually increase the absorption of certain nutrients so it's not all bad news. Cooking food is a safe way to treat food it can actually improve nutrition in certain cases. The raw food diet message actually has many positives in it. If it's encouraging someone to eat more raw natural-based plant foods that's going to be good for their diet but our biggest health problem in a country like Australia is we don't need enough fruit and vegetables to start with. Whether they're cooked or raw is probably a moot point.