Does moving to a raw foods diet mean never
eating hot food again? No, it doesn’t. Sometimes you want something hot. Hot
food has always signified comfort for many of us. And on a cold, rainy day,
carrot sticks or wheatgrass juice probably won’t cut it for most of us.
Most raw food, like our bodies, is very
perishable. When raw foods are exposed to temperatures above 118 degrees, they
start to rapidly break down, just as our bodies would if we had a fever that
high. One of the constituents of foods which can break down are enzymes.
Enzymes help us digest our food. Enzymes are proteins though, and they have a
very specific 3-dimensional structure in space. Once they are heated much above
118 degrees, this structure can change.
Once enzymes are exposed to heat, they are
no longer able to provide the function for which they were designed. Cooked
foods contribute to chronic illness, because their enzyme content is damaged
and thus requires us to make our own enzymes to process the food. The digestion
of cooked food uses valuable metabolic enzymes in order to help digest your
food.
Digestion of cooked food demands much more energy than the digestion of
raw food. In general, raw food is so much more easily digested that it passes through
the digestive tract in 1/2 to 1/3 of the time it takes for cooked food.
Eating enzyme-dead foods places a burden on
your pancreas and other organs and overworks them, which eventually exhausts
these organs. Many people gradually impair their pancreas and progressively
lose the ability to digest their food after a lifetime of ingesting processed
foods.
But you certainly can steam and blanch
foods if you want your food at least warm. Use a food thermometer and cook them
no higher than 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Up to this temperature, you won’t be
doing too much damage to the enzymes in food.
