 Humans can be so weird. We're never content navigating a middle path. It seems we prefer the extremes, the bold positions, the fundamentalist position. In our politics, in our religion, even in our diet, there are those out there who claim to have the one true cure, the one true path, and it's always an extreme position. In this vein, I present the raw food movement. So what is raw foodism? It's a growing movement that opposes the cooking of food. They eat it raw, unfrozen, and largely unprocessed. Like any of these movements, it has subgroups. Fruittarians eat fruit. Paleo dieters eat raw meat, like their distant ancestors. And juicers, which sounds like a 50s biker gang, are people who get most of their nutrition from juices. You can fill up a kitchen counter with the tools that some of them use to not cook their food. Dehydrators, fermentation rigs, and juice blenders. There are shelves of books at your local bookstore, and thousands of commercial websites and recipe databases. It's a going enterprise. What's so bad about cooked food? Because one popular website warns us, cooking renders food toxic, and follows that shocking revelation with an exclamation point. Oh no, you think, but I've been eating cooked food all my life. How long do I have to live, doctor? Not long, they assure us. What evidence is there that dead food causes, and I quote, dull, diseased, and sooner dead people? Um, well, not much. But before I get into that, I want to focus on actual facts. Many of us eat far, far too much meat, and not nearly enough vegetables and fruit. The traditional American diet is especially bad, dependent as it is on high fat, high salt, high sugar. There is no doubt that diet has a profound impact on cancer risk, heart disease, diabetes, general health, and fitness, and the health of our children. This is not a secret. It is not being suppressed. People, myself included, just make really bad choices, in spite of all the encouragement and info from the medical community. When was the last time your doctor told you to eat more red meat, or less vegetable? This does not, however, require that we respond with extremism. It's possible to eat a hamburger every once in a while, and not drop dead at 40. We don't have to be vegans to be healthy, and we don't have to eat raw food to feel good or live longer. This is my primary point. I don't care so much what you do, as why you do it. If you decide to become a vegan for reasons of ethics, then go to it. Just give your kids a chance at healthy nutrition, and I have no quarrel with you. If you talk to your doctor about eating nothing but red foods, or things that start with the letter S, fine with me. I'm all for freedom of lifestyle, so long as the innocent aren't harmed. But if the scare tactics, faulty logic, or pseudoscience garbage, makes you do stupid things with your nutrition or health, don't expect not to be called on it. Raw foodism takes a good idea. High nutrient content, low calorie content foods, and can take it to ridiculous extremes, using some glaringly bad logic. It can also cause some serious health problems. Let's examine the flaws in their logic first. Claim 1. Nutrients are destroyed by cooking. This is a partial truth. Some nutrients are lost during cooking, but some are actually increased. A raw food diet, which is usually defined in the literature as 75% or more foods that are not cooked above 102 degrees Fahrenheit, is typically deficient in calcium, vitamin D, some types of vitamin B, iron, zinc, protein, and calories. There are two reasons for this. One, these low density foods require a larger amount be consumed for the same nutrition. Remember that cooking often removes water and bulk. As an example, here are the nutrient contents of a cup of spinach with and without cooking. Note that the serving weights are very different for a cup. On a cup to cup volume comparison, cooked spinach is more anti-inflammatory, has 6 times the amount of usable vitamin A, double the amount of vitamin C, and 8 times the amount of calcium. If we go per unit weight in the comparison, the differences largely disappear. It's primarily the bulk that makes the difference. This is great for weight reduction, not so great for people already underweight, and especially children or nursing mothers. Two, some nutrients are not available to be absorbed in raw foods. Cooking either releases them or destroys what are called anti-nutrient factors. Let's look at the nutrition data for 100 grams of broccoli, cooked versus raw, weight to weight. Note that cooked broccoli is a better source of protein, is more anti-inflammatory, and has higher nutrient availability. We also see the same thing in cooked spinach. In the case of spinach, oxalates in the leaf prevent us from utilizing the abundant calcium and iron unless it's eaten along with extra vitamin C in our meal. The iron obtained from meat is much more bioavailable, but I personally don't recommend eating it raw for health reasons. You can get a normal amount of nutrients with raw food, but not without some careful planning and monitoring. One assertion that I can say is factually false is that fiber is lost during cooking. One silly statement I found was that all cellulose was converted to simple sugars in boiling water. Try taking a twig off a tree and dump it in boiling water. Does it dissolve instantly? In fact, studies show that blanching or boiling has the effect of solubilizing some fiber, making it the highly desirable soluble fiber that has been demonstrated to lower total cholesterol and regulate blood sugar and diabetics. Claim two, food contains vital enzymes that benefit our health. Here's where the woo really gets started. Yes, raw foods do contain enzymes, but we place them in our mouths where they get ground up and mixed with enzymes to begin breaking down all the proteins. Then they pass to the stomach where they're mixed with enzymes and acid, which effectively kills what's left of the protein enzymes. I'm sure some very rare few survived to make it into the intestines, but so what? They aren't going to be a factor in nutrition at this point. The website I'm using here argues that enzymes are simply inactivated by the stomach contents, but they reactivate in the more alkaline intestine. Their source for this claim is Victoris Kulvinskas, one of the world's foremost and most experienced active researchers into enzyme nutrition. Yeah, unfortunately, Victoris has a master's degree in pure mathematics and has never published a single paper. The only thing he's foremost in is bad advice. He advocates all manner of New Age craziness, erodology, palmistry, and numerology. His worst idea, however, and this is saying a lot, is advocating blue-green algae consumption. The possible side effects are permanent paralysis and death. Blue-green algae is associated with a variety of toxins and is never a good idea as a snack. Why would we even want enzymes in our food? Because they aid in digestion. I can't find a single example of this in the science literature. They don't cite any evidence for their claim. It goes against what we know about human digestion. But wait, there's another element here. It appears that raw foods still contain life force. Okay, so my apple is still alive while I eat it. Not sure I'm comfortable with that. And it's clearly supernatural vitalism, not based in evidence. Claim three, foods become toxic when cooked. Again, this is trivially true, but false in the fundamentals. Cooking foods, especially to very high temperatures, can produce toxins and carcinogens. But it's the way they're cooked that makes the difference. Smart choices in how you cook food can minimize or reduce any attributable risk. Before I tackle food toxicity, in doing some background checks on references from websites, I discovered some really questionable information sources. Here's a quote attributed to Dr. Virginia Vertrano. Irritation for putting extremely hot foods into the stomach, comma, can cause cancer. Dr. Vertrano also writes that, heating any food, comma, destroys much of its vitamin, mineral and protein content and poisonous inorganic acids are formed. The all uncooked diet is most healthful. So I looked for Dr. Virginia Vertrano. Several hits, all list her as having a DSC, that's a doctorate of science, in natural hygiene from the City University of LA. This appears to be an unaccredited diploma mill, and they don't seem to currently offer any DSC degrees, nor any degree in natural hygiene. She also lists DC, which I'm going to assume is a doctor of chiropractic, and little H, big M, big D, which I can only assume she made up on the spot, because there's not a single reference to that degree. She works as a telephone consultant, and I quote, I can teach you how to supply the correct conditions so that your body heals spontaneously, almost like magic. She charges $200 per hour for this service. How she's not in jail, I don't know. She always investigates claims like this with a skeptical mindset so you don't get burned. There's also a reference to Francis Pottinger Jr. and his cat experiments. He fed half of them cooked meat and half raw meat, and the cooked meat group became sick over time. The raw meat population also received raw milk, which I'll come to in a later video. The raw food website uses this as evidence that all cooked foods are toxic. The actual reason for the difference was that cooked meat was depleted for taurine. Taurine is an amino acid essential to cats, but not so essential in humans. The diet being given didn't contain enough taurine, and the cats were getting sick as a result. It wasn't enzymes, it wasn't the raw milk or meat's life force. It was just unbalanced nutrition, not unlike what one gets when eating an all raw diet. A red bowl a month would have solved the problem. According to these websites, food becomes a deadly poison the moment it goes above 107 Fahrenheit. No paper I've ever seen, no textbook, has ever produced a study that supports these assertions. And their only reference are these questionable inner circle individuals. What was most amazing to me is they didn't talk about the very real, actual risk of heterocyclic amines, benzopyrines, and nitrites, all found in delicious, delicious bacon, cooked up golden and crispy. Any grilled meat is going to have a bit of carcinogen, and will increase your risk of stomach cancer. You can reduce the amount of some of these by up to 90% by marinating with a little olive oil and lemon juice, or red wine, or just don't grill if it's a concern for you. Claim four. We evolved to eat raw foods. This is bad logic, and essentially false. It is true that all animals, which includes our shared primate ancestors, are unable to cook their food and have adapted to a raw diet. But there have been a few changes to human physiology since we shared that ancestor. The earliest evidence of cooked food dates back to 2 million years ago, although it wasn't really harnessed for cooking until about 400,000 years ago. But that's a mighty long time in human history. Lucy, the most famous Australopithecine, shows the sign of eating raw foods. Her teeth were much larger, her skull was flattened to give more room for muscle attachment, and her jaw was much larger. It would not be until Homo erectus that we would start to see physical changes, like decreased teeth size rounder skulls to hold our larger brains rather than flatter skulls to serve as anchor points for jaw muscles needed for grinding. Homo erectus, who left behind fire blackened rocks from their cooking, also showed a decrease in sexual dimorphism, which suggests that they had begun male-female pairing, rather than harem-type polygamy. Probably as a result of a much expanded food repertoire, most probably roots or seeds that are toxic without cooking. Cooking changed the way our groups worked. Males, rather than competing for dominance of the harem, would have begun to cooperate to ensure the safety of their own families. Populations would have expanded, which was the first step to the tribal group's organization that eventually led to civilization. Meat cooking likely came after root cooking, but there are many sources of protein that are inedible without heat denaturing. The science strongly supports the fact that not only have we evolved to eat cooked foods from before Homo sapiens was a species, but the modern appearance and behavior of humans was strongly influenced by our ability to harness the inedible and increase nutritive value of our food by cooking. I'm going to split this video up and discuss the possible dangers of raw food in another section. In this part, I hope I managed to convey the bad logic behind the extremes of raw foodism. It's hard to gripe about a diet that contains the things that are most missing from the American and some European diets. Fresh fruits and vegetables. I hope you take away from this video my central point, which I will reiterate again. It's not what you do so much as why you do it. Personally, I find these arguments all the more disappointing because they miss the real reason to eat more fruits and vegetables. They're just better for you, and they correct and imbalance in many of our diets. We don't need magical thinking, vitalism, or scare tactics to come to that conclusion. We don't have to imbalance our diets in the other direction either. It's perfectly possible to eat well, live well, and be well without any kind of ism or movement. It's just not as exciting. See you in part two, and thanks for watching.